Working While the World Sleeps: A Consideration of Sleep and Shift Work Design

The evolution of society and economic pressure has provided the impetus for operating on a 24-hr basis in many industries. This has occurred with relatively little attention toward sleep deprivation and related problems facing shift workers and the organizations employing them. This paper first documents the move toward shift work and some sleep problems associated with it. We then describe sleep disorders that impact job performance. Next, we describe alternative schedules and give suggestions for shift work implementation. Finally, we offer some normative advice regarding the treatment of shift employees.     

我国企业所得税改革的国外借鉴

20世纪90年代后期各主要发达国家为刺激经济发展进行了减税改革，其中公司所得税的改革是一个重点。我国企业所得税制存在许多亟待解决的问题，诸如内外资企业所得税制不统一、企业负担过重、税收优惠政策不合理等。借鉴国外税改经验，改革和完善我国企业所得税制。第一，合并内外资企业所得税，建立法人企业所得税制；第二，减轻企业负担，增强其竞争力；第三 ，改革和完善税收优惠政策。     

Considering Aquacultural Externality in Coastal Land Allocation Decisions in India

Commercial aquaculture in India has come under attack for having caused negative agricultural and environmental impacts. This paper formulates an interactive model of non-renewable and renewable resources to characterize land allocations between aquaculture and agriculture in ecologically and economically sustainable fashion. Through an empirical application, various economic and policy circumstances that affect the optimal land allocation mix are evaluated. The aquaculture industry must address two economic effects: off-site negative effects on renewable food and other coastal resources, and on-site self-pollution of shrimp ponds. Current regulatory and land-use policies are inadequate to address these effects.     

On the generalization of Rao,Hartley and Cochran's scheme

Summary The problem considered in this paper is a generalization of the usual Rao, Hartley and Cochran (RHC) scheme. In the usual RHC scheme the population ofN units is randomly divided inton groups wheren is the size of the sample. In this paper we propose to divide the population under consideration into (n+k) random groups wherek is some positive integer. Then a sample ofn groups is selected by using simple random sampling without replacement (SRSWOR). The expressions for the unbiased estimator of population total, its variance and the unbiased estimate of variance have been obtained under the proposed sheme. The condition under which the proposed sheme is more efficient than the usual RHC scheme has also been investigated.     

De Industrieele „Trusts” der Vereenigde Staten van noord-Amerika

November 19015 December     

北极冰川融化影响几何？

北极冰川融化将使跨北极通航成为可能，运输公司可减少40％的航运距离。马六甲海峡也将不再垄断国际通运。国际经济将进一步融合。     

Playing for Your Own Audience: Extremism in Two‐Party Elections

This paper considers a two‐party election with a single‐dimensional policy space. We assume that each voter has a higher probability of observing the position of the party he is affiliated with than the position of the other party, an assumption that is consistent with the National Election Studies (NES) electoral data set. In equilibrium, the two parties locate away from the median, because the voters who dislike a party's platform observe its policy choice with a lower probability, and its own audience like policy choices that cater to its taste. As the asymmetry in voter information or the cost of voting increases, the parties adopt more extreme platforms, while if there are fewer extreme voters the opposite effect occurs. Making voters more symmetrically informed about the two parties' platforms increases the welfare of society, while asymmetric information acquisition by the voters is worse than no information acquisition at all.     

What Prompts the People＇s Bank of China to Change Its Monetary Policy Stance？ Evidence from a Discrete Choice Model

In the present paper, we model the policy stance of the People＇s Bank of China （PBC） as a latent variable, and the discrete changes in the reserve requirement ratio, policy interest rates, and the scale of open market operations are taken as signals of movement of this latent variable. We run a discrete choice regression that relates these observed indicators of policy stance to major trends of macroeconomic and financial developments, which are represented by common factors extracted from a large number of variables. The predicted value of the estimated model can then be interpreted as the implicit policy stance of the PBC. In a second step, we estimate how much of the variation in the PBC＇ s implicit stance can be explained by measures of its policy objectives on inflation, growth and financial stability. We find that deviations of CPI inflation from an implicit target and deviations of broad money growth from the announced targets, but not output gaps, figure significantly in the PBC＇s policy changes.     

On Conditional Density Estimation

With the aim of mitigating the possible problem of negativity in the estimation of the conditional density function, we introduce a so-called re-weighted Nadaraya-Watson (RNW) estimator. The proposed RNW estimator is constructed by a slight modification of the well-known Nadaraya-Watson smoother. With a detailed asymptotic analysis, we demonstrate that the RNW smoother preserves the superior large-sample bias property of the local linear smoother of the conditional density recently proposed in the literature. As a matter of independent statistical interest, the limit distribution of the RNW estimator is also derived.