Social class differences in the apparel purchase behavior of single,professional black women

Single professional black women are becoming a separate and powerful segment in the total apparel market. This study explores whether or not there are significant social class differences in their apparel purchase behavior in regard to social classes. Apparel purchase behavior has been analyzed in terms of three-areas: purchase planning, method of payment and social influence. In most cases, class differences were not found to be statistically significant with the exception of social influence. It was found that social classes respond quite differently to social influences in their clothing selection.     

Using pre-EMU money market rates to assess monetary policy in the euro area

This note addresses the problems arising when using national pre-EMU interest rate data in the estimation of monetary policy reaction functions for the euro area. We provide evidence that failing to adjust for interest rate risk premia leads to an overestimation of the response of monetary policy both to inflationary pressures and to the output gap. A method for adjusting pre-EMU interest rate data for risk premia is proposed.     

Housing and the Tax System: How Large Are the Distortions in the Euro Area?*

This paper presents new evidence on the impact of the preferential treatment of owner‐occupied housing in the euro area. We find that tax benefits to homeowners reduce the user cost of housing capital by almost 40 per cent compared with the efficient level under neutral taxation. On average, the tax subsidy translates into an excess consumption of housing services equivalent to 7.8 per cent of the value of owner‐occupied housing, or about 30 per cent of financial asset holdings in household portfolios. The bulk of the subsidy stems from undertaxation of the return to home equity, while the average contribution of the tax rebate for mortgage interest payments is driven down by relatively low loan‐to‐value ratios in the data. However, at the margin, the tax‐induced incentive to use mortgage debt to finance the purchase of the main residence is sizeable.     

Sex,romance and the carnivalesque between female tourists and Caribbean men

In this paper I examine interviews with female travelers who have been involved with Caribbean males during their holidays in Trinidad and Tobago and suggest that their experiences can best be understood employing the concept of the carnivalesque. Bakhtin (1984 [1968]) has described the carnivalesque as a temporary liberation of the established order, a world ‘upside down’ where bodily excess is celebrated. The concept of the carnivalesque seems useful not only because of the apparent suspension of the traditional order that takes place when white, Western, middle-class women are dating poor, uneducated, black males, but also because it allows to transgress the dichotomy of sex tourism and romance. Furthermore, carnival has been considered as potentially subversive, as it leads to an inversion of hierarchies, but also as conservative, since a temporary transgression is often followed by a return to an order that is thereby strengthened. Indeed, the narratives of some women suggest that their engagements with social and racial ‘Others’ remain temporary with little effect to the racial discourses they draw on, while others appear to transgress social and racial borders more substantially without falling into racial Othering.     

Evaluating guided reflection: a US case study

This study examines the effects of guided reflection on thelearners’ ability to recall, explain and apply newly acquired principles of instructional design and to investigate their attitude toward the reflection. The results of the regression analysis revealed that the guided reflection had no significant impact on the learners’ posttest performance. Despite these results, eighty-three percent of the learners perceived a positive impact from the reflections on their ability to recall, understand and apply the covered principles. Continued research is needed to measure the presence and complexity of reflective thinking on learning principles of instructional design.     

Evidenzbasierte Verbandsarbeit: der erweiterte Ethikkodex des Vereins für Socialpolitik

Wirtschaftsdienst - Der neue Ethikkodex des Vereins für Socialpolitik nimmt Stellung gegen die Diskriminierung von Frauen und Minderheiten, sexuelle und anderweitige Belästigung im...     

Collateral and its substitutes in emerging markets’ lending

Due to opaque information and weak enforcement in emerging loan markets, the need for collateral is high, whereas borrowers lack adequate assets to pledge as collateral. How is this puzzle solved? We find for a representative sample from Northeast Thailand that indeed most loans do not include any tangible assets as collateral. Instead, lenders enforce collateral-free loans through third-party guarantees and relationship lending, but also through modifying loan terms, such as reducing loan size. Guarantees are the relatively most important substitute, they reduce collateral requirements independently of relationship lending and they are more often used by formal financial institutions.     

Catching up? The educational mobility of migrants’ and natives’ children in Europe

Migrants into European countries are often less educated than European natives. We analyse whether migrants’ children are more or less likely than natives’ children to achieve upward educational mobility across generations, and study differences in the factors, which contribute to differences in mobility for the two groups. We find that migrants’ descendants are more often upwardly mobile (and less often downwardly mobile) than their native peers in the majority of countries studied, and show that the main factor contributing to these patterns is the education level of parents. Although a lower parental education means that their children are less likely to access the same amount of human, social and financial capital as children of more highly educated parents, migrants’ descendants over the last two generations were able to make significant progress in reducing education gaps with natives.