Legal Technologies of Primitive Accumulation: Judicial Robbery and Dispossession‐by‐Restitution in Warsaw

Among the ‘extra‐economic means’ that facilitate primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, the law plays a prominent role. But works on neoliberal urban restructuring rarely engage with concrete legal technologies. Analysing judicial property restitution (‘reprivatization’) in Warsaw, this article grasps the machine of accumulation by dispossession at a moment of faltering and exposes the distinctive legal technologies behind its troubleshooting. It makes three contributions to critical urban studies. First, it demonstrates how judicial systems can steal political conflicts that obstruct the cycle of accumulation by dispossession. It thus introduces the notion of ‘judicial robbery’, a non‐legislated expropriation of common property through judicial engineering that simultaneously deprives the public of political agency. Second, it shows that seemingly neutral legal technicalities, usually sheltered from political debate, can become a key locus of urban politics. Third, it examines the agency, scope and spatial patterns of ‘dispossession by restitution’, the term I use for a locally specific form of accumulation by dispossession in Warsaw. Lastly, I raise the question of political struggle against primitive accumulation. Is the judicial robbery reversible? If we can reclaim property, can we also reclaim political conflicts that have been stolen by the law?     

Doing well by doing right: a fundraiser's guide to ethical decision‐making

• The level of trust a prospective donor has in a charity will, in part, determine whether the individual chooses to support the charity as well as the amount of that support. A key factor involved in trust is an organization's ethical standards. Donors prefer to make donations to organizations that maintain the highest principles. If an organization can consistently make the best possible, most ethical decisions, it will be recognized as being an ethical institution, which in turn will enhance the trust it engenders, and, therefore, the support it can attract. A number of ethical decision‐making models exist. Adopting a decision‐making model will ensure that a methodical approach is used and that the incidents of rash decision‐making will be reduced. Using an ethical decision‐making model will help individuals arrive consistently at the best solutions to ethical dilemmas, defend those decisions, enhance public trust, secure more donors, and raise more money. The value of sound decision‐making and effective ethical decision‐making models are reviewed in this paper.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Blocking Lemma for a many-to-one matching model

The Blocking Lemma identifies a particular blocking pair for each non-stable and individually rational matching that is preferred by some agents of one side of the market to their optimal stable matching. Its interest lies in the fact that it has been an instrumental result to prove key results on matching. For instance, the fact that in the college admissions problem the workers-optimal stable mechanism is group strategy-proof for the workers and the strong stability theorem in the marriage model follow directly from the Blocking Lemma. However, it is known that the Blocking Lemma and its consequences do not hold in the general many-to-one matching model in which firms have substitutable preference relations. We show that the Blocking Lemma holds for the many-to-one matching model in which firms’ preference relations are, in addition to substitutable, quota q-separable. We also show that the Blocking Lemma holds on a subset of substitutable preference profiles if and only if the workers-optimal stable mechanism is group strategy-proof for the workers on this subset of profiles.     

Varying biases in matching estimates: Evidence from two randomised job search training experiments

We compare various matching estimators with the results from two randomised field experiments that evaluate the employment effects of job search training programmes. We find that commonly used non-experimental matching estimators tend to overestimate the programme effects, especially in the first experiment in which participation in the programme is voluntary. In the second experiment, where caseworkers assign unemployed persons to the training programme, the matching methods produce estimates that are close to the experimental results.     

Place-to-place migration in Israel: estimates of a logistic model

"A multinomial logit model focusing on economic and other locational factors is formulated and applied to data on place-to-place migration in Israel. Results indicate the effects of expected industrial wage differentials, in accordance with the hypothesis of Harris and Todaro (1970), and of disparities in the structure of industrial employment, suggesting that perceived risk as well as expected return enter into the decision to migrate, as Stark and Levhari (1982) have argued. Other effects include those associated with regional differentials in amenities and agglomeration associated with urbanization, population mobility by age group, center-periphery migration trends, border security hazards, and the like. Implications of the analysis for the Israeli policy of population dispersion are discussed."     

Full-information estimates of a nonlinear macroeconometric model

Results of estimating a large-scale, nonlinear macroeconometric model by full-information maximum-likelihood, nonlinear three-stage least squares, and nonlinear two-stage least squares are reported in this paper. The computation of the estimates is first discussed, and then the differences among the estimates are examined.     

A new non‐randomized response model: The parallel model

Despite certain advances for non‐randomized response (NRR) techniques in the past 6 years, the existing non‐randomized crosswise and triangular models have several limitations in practice. In this paper, I propose a new NRR model, called the parallel model with a wider application range. Asymptotical properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (and its modified version) for the proportion of interest are explored. Theoretical comparisons with the crosswise and triangular models show that the parallel model is always more efficient than the two existing NRR models for most of the possible parameter ranges. Bayesian methods for analyzing survey data from the parallel model are developed. A case study on college students' premarital sexual behavior at Wuhan and a case study on plagiarism at the University of Hong Kong are conducted and are used to illustrate the proposed methods. © 2014 The Authors. Statistica Neerlandica © 2014 VVS.     

Explaining cross-racial differences in teenage labor force participation: Results from a two-sided matching model

White teenagers are substantially more likely to search for employment than black teenagers. This differential occurs despite the fact that, conditional on race, individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to search. While the racial wage gap is small, the unemployment rate for black teenagers is substantially higher than that of white teenagers. We develop a two-sided search model where firms are partially able to search on demographics. Model estimates reveal that firms are more able to target their search on race than on age. Employment and wage outcome differences explain half of the racial gap in labor force participation rates.     

The diversification of charities: from religion‐oriented to for‐profit‐oriented fundraising

• Charities are increasingly relying on more complex and diversified fundraising structures to raise funds and attract benefactors. In adopting a historic perspective, this research identified five emergent fundraising structures, namely religion‐oriented, business‐oriented, marketing‐oriented, consumer‐oriented, and for‐profit‐oriented. The analysis critically evaluates the role that institutions and resources have played in each funding structure and draws conclusions concerning the management of charitable fundraising in a world where charitable fundraising, consumerism, and social media networking are increasingly entwined with the for‐profit motive.

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bayes estimates of distance‐to‐market: transactions costs,cooperatives and milk‐market development in the Ethiopian highlands

Rationalizing non‐participation as a resource deficiency in the household, this paper identifies strategies for milk‐market development in the Ethiopian highlands. The additional amounts of covariates required for positive marketable surplus—‘distances‐to market’—are computed from a model in which production and sales are correlated; sales are left‐censored at some unobserved threshold; production efficiencies are heterogeneous; and the data are in the form of a panel. Incorporating these features into the modeling exercise is important because they are fundamental to the data‐generating environment. There are four reasons. First, because production and sales decisions are enacted within the same household, both decisions are affected by the same exogenous shocks, and production and sales are therefore likely to be correlated. Second, because selling involves time and time is arguably the most important resource available to a subsistence household, the minimum sales amount is not zero but, rather, some unobserved threshold that lies beyond zero. Third, the potential existence of heterogeneous abilities in management, ones that lie latent from the econometrician's perspective, suggest that production efficiencies should be permitted to vary across households. Fourth, we observe a single set of households during multiple visits in a single production year. The results convey clearly that institutional and production innovations alone are insufficient to encourage participation. Market‐precipitating innovation requires complementary inputs, especially improvements in human capital and reductions in risk. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Re-examining 50-year-old OLS estimates of the Klein–Goldberger model

This paper examines the ordinary least squares estimates of the Klein–Goldberger model by Fox ( Journal of Political Economy , 64 , 1956, 128). Because Klein and Goldberger published the data set with the model, it is possible to re-examine Fox's results years later, and investigate the accuracy with which these estimates were calculated. The examination reported in this paper was conducted by making independent estimates using three different modern econometric software packages. This examination reveals that the Fox estimates for a number of the equations of this model are replicable, to the two or three digits reported by Fox. Fox's results for other equations cannot be replicated. Not all the reasons for this lack of replicability can be determined, but in several cases the computational methods used by Fox and his assistants have been found to be faulty by modern computational standards.     

Peer‐group dependence in salary benchmarking: a statistical model

Although salary benchmarking is widely used to help set compensation, there has been a lack of attention to the statistical implications of this practice on compensation patterns of peer institutions. We adapt some empirical tools from spatial econometrics to analyze compensation decisions exhibiting peer‐group dependence, and apply the methods to compensation of administrators in Texas nursing facilities. We find evidence that this leads to dependence of administrators pay on average pay of administrators in ‘peer’ facilities, defined here as those having similar outlays on nursing services. This leads to a situation where changes in facility characteristics, such as the occupancy rate and the revenue received from Medicaid and from private‐pay residents, impact compensation of own‐institution administrators as well as that of administrators from other peer facilities. Our peer‐group model appears applicable to other areas of organizational, regulatory and behavioral research and can easily be implemented using publicly available software. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sensitivity of generalized translog model estimates to alternative Pythagorean means: Evidence from US healthcare

The generalized translog cost (GTLC) methodology is widely used in applied econometric modeling of production. Usually without rationale, the mean expansion point is overwhelmingly the arithmetic. However, the arithmetic mean could yield biased estimates and inferences. Consequently, our core innovation is testing operational inferences from fitting a dual GTLC model to multiple expansion points of data concerning US physical therapy, an increasingly vital industry. Our panel data includes 4,500 bi‐weekly observations across 27 US states. The study clearly demonstrates how the economic contents (e.g., economies of scale and elasticities) of the underlying production technology differ markedly across the three Pythagorean means.     

The two‐sample linear regression model with interval‐censored covariates

There are surveys that gather precise information on an outcome of interest, but measure continuous covariates by a discrete number of intervals, in which case the covariates are interval censored. For applications with a second independent dataset precisely measuring the covariates, but not the outcome, this paper introduces a semiparametrically efficient estimator for the coefficients in a linear regression model. The second sample serves to establish point identification. An empirical application investigating the relationship between income and body mass index illustrates the use of the estimator.     

Moment matching versus Bayesian estimation: Backward-looking behaviour in a New-Keynesian baseline model

The paper considers an elementary New-Keynesian three-equation model and compares its Bayesian estimation based on conventional priors to the results from the method of moments (MM), which seeks to match a finite set of the model-generated second moments of inflation, output and the interest rate to their empirical counterparts. It is found that in the Great Inflation (GI) period—though not quite in the Great Moderation (GM)—the two estimations imply a significantly different covariance structure. Regarding the parameters, special emphasis is placed on the degree of backward-looking behaviour in the Phillips curve. While, in line with much of the literature, it plays a minor role in the Bayesian estimations, MM yields values of the price indexation parameter close to or even at its maximal value of unity. For both GI and GM, these results are worth noticing since in (strong or, respectively, weak) contrast to the Bayesian parameters, the covariance matching thus achieved appears rather satisfactory.