Health,Education and Emergence from the Development Trap

Abstract: This paper studies the emergence of developing countries from a development trap. It shows that countries whose dynamics exhibits several growth peaks can be considered as cases of equilibrium jump. Applying this criterion to a sample of 65 countries that were initially very poor in 1950, it identifies 13 such countries, called ‘emerging economies’. Comparing emerging and non‐emerging economies in the 1950s and early 1960s, it shows that economic take‐offs starting in the 1960s can be related to health and education in the early 1950s, while other possible factors, such as savings, openness and democracy are not significant.     

“Work is my passion”: The different affective,behavioural, and cognitive consequences of harmonious and obsessive passion toward work

This study applies the dualistic model of passion (Vallerand et al., 2003) to the work setting and examines the relationships between harmonious passion (characterized by a strong but controllable desire to engage in an activity), obsessive passion (characterized by an internal pressure to carry out an activity), and optimal functioning outcomes at work. Harmonious passion associated positively with: mental health; three elements of flow (i.e., concentration, control, and autotelic experience); vitality, and affective commitment. These relationships were partly mediated by satisfaction of the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In contrast, obsessive passion directly and negatively predicted mental health and weakly but positively predicted autotelic experience. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed. Copyright ©2010 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Functional forms and educational production functions

Different functional forms are proposed and applied in the context of educational production functions. Policy implications of such an approach in terms of school interventions are discussed in the paper.     

Statistical study of foreign exchange rates, empirical evidence of a price change scaling law, and intraday analysis

In this paper we present a statistical analysis of four foreign exchange spot rates against the U.S. Dollar with several million intra-day prices over 3 years. The analysis also includes gold prices and samples of daily foreign exchange prices over 15 years. The mean absolute changes of logarithmic prices are found to follow a scaling law against the time interval on which they are measured. This empirical law holds although the distributions of the price changes strongly differ for different interval sizes.Systematic variations of the volatility are found even during business hours by an intra-day analysis of price changes. Seasonal heteroskedasticity is observed with a period of one day as well as one week as the result of an analogous intra-week analysis; taking this into account is necessary for any future study of intra-day price change distributions and their generating process. The same type of analysis is also made for the bid-ask spreads.