Attitudes to risk and attitudes to uncertainty: experimental evidence

In a series of experiments the interactions among individual attitudes towards risk and uncertainty, the sign of the outcome domain, and the way uncertainty is represented are tested. This is done in a unified framework, eliciting individual values by means of a second price auction. Results confirm the presence of the well-known fourfold pattern of risk attitude (risk aversion for gains and risk seeking for losses at high probability, and risk seeking for gains and risk aversion for losses at low probability) and show that this pattern can also be extended to uncertainty. In the valuation of losses the modal pattern is decreasing risk and uncertainty aversion as the probability of loss increases, while increasing risk and uncertainty aversion is observed for gains. Moreover, it is found that the size of reaction to uncertainty does not depend on the outcome domain, and that it persists in the face of an incentive-compatible mechanism to elicit preferences.     

互动式教学法在服装工艺教学中的应用

互动式教学,是指在课堂学习过程中不再像传统讲授方式一样以教师为中心,在互动式课堂,学生是中心。采用互动式教学法的服装工艺学,及时更新了学生的学习观念;打破了传统教学方法的枯燥、无趣,激发学生学习兴趣;强调学生的主体性,调动了学生的学习积极性,融＂教、学、做＂为一体,增强了学生的创新意识;集思广益,将教师丰富的经验以及学生对时尚、流行独特的理解结合起来,使之紧密融合,＂手、口、脑＂并用,培养学生的创造力、想象力、表达力。     

The Choice of RMB Exchange Rate and the Internationalization of RMB under the Financial Storm

The financial storm that has spread to the whole world has already influenced major economies at present. China, which is actively involving itself in the global economy, cannot get rid of its influence. Among the economic departments that are undergoing strong attacks, export industries are the worst influenced. According to the statistics by General Customs Administration, in November 2008,     

The effect of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on child labor and school attendance in the West Bank

In this paper we analyze the impact of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on child labor and school attendance of Palestinian children in the West Bank between the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (September 2000) and the end of 2006. In particular, we investigate the effects, on children' s status, of number of days Israel closed its border with Palestinian Territories. We find that an increase in the number of closure days increases child labor while it (weakly) reduces school attendance in the West Bank. We provide evidence on different mechanisms that possibly account for these results.     

Entrepreneurship and market size. The case of young college graduates in Italy

We analyse empirically the effects of urbanization on Italian college graduates' work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that doubling the province of work's population density reduces the chances of being an entrepreneur by 2–3 percentage points. This result holds after controlling for regional fixed effects and is robust to instrumenting urbanization. Provinces' competition, urban amenities and dis-amenities, cost of labour, earning differentials between employees and self-employed workers, unemployment rates and value added per capita account for more than half of the negative urbanization penalty. Our result cannot be entirely explained by the presence of negative differentials in returns to entrepreneurship between the most and the least densely populated areas. In fact, as long as they succeed in entering the most densely populated markets, young entrepreneurs are able to reap-off the benefits of urbanization externalities: the elasticity of entrepreneurs' net monthly earnings with respect to population density is 0.02–0.03.