Variability is beneficial in marked stopping problems

We consider a large class of stopping problems and show that the optimal return increases with increases in the variability of one or more of the distributions from which observations are drawn. This class of stopping problems includes many of the common variants of the standard economic search problem as well as many other stopping problems. The key assumption is that the optimal return is convex in each observation.      

牛头宗法融禅学思想探析

牛头宗是早期中国禅宗的重要一支,作为该宗的初祖,法融以般若真空为本的禅学思想,不同于菩提达摩一系以妙有融摄真空的理路,在中国禅宗史上具有独特之处。通过对其传世文献《绝观论》与《心铭》的梳理,明确其禅学思想的核心要旨在于＂道本虚空＂、＂无心合道＂,其＂无心用功＂、＂绝观忘守＂的修习方法,以及＂无情可成佛＂、＂凡圣亦不二＂的佛性思想,无不体现了其对三论宗义学思想的继承和发扬。     

养老保险会计制度应引入“权责发生制“

本文认为"权责发生制"能满足当前养老保险运行的实际情况,将养老保险的债权、债务全额纳入会计核算体系,以使基金的债权得到有效监控,基金运行情况得到如实反映.     

Mortgage lending in Chicago and Los Angeles: A paired testing study of the pre-application process

In 2000, the Urban Institute paired African-American and Hispanic testers with whites and sent the pairs to visit lenders in Chicago and Los Angeles, in order to inquire about information on obtaining a home mortgage. In Chicago, African Americans and Hispanics systematically received less information and assistance than comparable whites; while in Los Angeles, the treatment of minority and white testers did not differ statistically from each other. Multivariate analyses for Chicago indicate that large lenders treat minorities more favorably than smaller lenders and that lenders with substantial numbers of applications from African-Americans treat African-Americans more favorably than lenders with predominantly white application pools.     

Employment relations and labour market indicators in ten industrialized market economies: Comparative statistics

The acceleration of the internationalisation of business and the division of labour has been led by improvements in technologies and communications, decreased barriers to trade, increased competition and the growth of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Employers, government organizations and unions, practitioners and academics are increasingly concerned with locating comparable statistics. This article reviews employment relations and labour market data for ten major industrialized market economies (IMEs) and discusses some of the challenges in the measurement and interpretation of such data. For a fuller discussion of such data, and of the ten IME, see Greg J. Bamber and Russell D. Lansbury (eds) International and Comparative Employment Relations 3rd edn, to be published by Sage, London, and Allen & Unwin, Sydney, in mid-1998.     

New unions in the UK: the vanguard or the rearguard of the union movement?

Between January 1999 and March 2010, 34 trade unions entered the Certification Officer list or schedule in the UK. This article reports on a survey of those unions, discussing the extent to which they represent new forms of unionism and the possible implications for union revitalisation.     

Inside the high-tech black box: A critique of technology entrepreneurship policy

Promoting new technology-based firms is the cornerstone of technology entrepreneurship policies in advanced industrial economies. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence from the UK, this paper provides a critique of these policy frameworks. The aggregate analysis shows that vast majority of these firms are micro firms, a small minority of whom grow rapidly. The paper then highlights the incongruence between the nature of these firms and the public sector technology policies designed to support them. The qualitative data reveals that typically these firms are corporate rather than university spin-offs; most do not undertake large amounts of in-house R&D; most do not have protected IP; and only a small minority are VC-backed. Most derive their main competitive advantages from open innovation sources such as relationships with end-users and customers. The paper offers suggestions for how policy could be recalibrated to better reflect the requirements of local entrepreneurial actors and the types of support required by most high-tech SMEs.     

Private protection and public policing

This paper looks at situations in which public and private protection are complementary, that is, when private protection must be coordinated with public protection to be effective. For example, home alarms deter theft by being connected to a local police station: if the police do not respond to a home alarm, the home alarm on its own is virtually useless in halting a crime in action. We make a distinction between gross and net complementarity and substitution, where the latter takes into account the effect on the crime rate. We show that when public and private protection are complements, the optimal provision of public protection trades off the manipulation effect of encouraging private protection with the compensatory effect of providing protection to households that do not privately invest. We discuss the implications of our results for policy and empirical research in this area.