Anti-leisure in dystopian fiction: the literature of leisure in the worst of all possible worlds

Literary utopias, i.e. designs for the theoretically perfect society, have been common in Western literature since Plato's The Republic . A variation on this genre which emerged in the nineteenth century is the anti-utopia, or dystopia, in which an author depicts the worst of all possible societies. Dystopias usually exaggerate contemporary social trends and in doing so, offer serious social criticism. This essay examines the treatment of leisure in four widely-read dystopian novels. The leisure described in these novels we call anti-leisure. It is not leisure's opposite, work, but leisure perverted to achieve the perpetuation of tyranny. Such leisure regulates identity, prevents individual thought, impedes self-sufficiency, encourages immoderation, and distracts citizens from social injustice through various compulsory activities. Such novels encourage the re-examination of theories of leisure from a humanistic standpoint.     

Energy Saving and Tourism Sustainability: Solar Control Window Film in Hotel Rooms

This paper investigates solar control film as an energy saver in the fast growing hotel sector in southern China. It investigates claims made for this low-cost retrofitted material in hotel rooms, calibrating reductions in solar gain in summer. It provides reliable and independent data about the performance and economic viability of solar control film in real hotel environments. The study found that, by limiting solar gain, the film helps limit tourism's impact on global warming and climate change. The paper also foreshadows new technical glazing developments.     

Risk aversion, wealth, and the DARA hypothesis: A new test

The Pratt-Arrow hypothesis of decreasing absolute risk aversion (DARA) is widely invoked in economic models of uncertainty but empirical tests, especially those using nonexperimental data, have yielded mixed results. This paper reexamines the DARA hypothesis using an expected utility model of life insurance demand and a 23-year sample of aggregate time series data from the U.S. After controlling for household size, age, income, loss probabilities, premium expenses, and inflation, the effect of wealth on insurance demand is found to be positive and statistically significant in linear and loglinear regressions, explaining more than 93 percent of the variation in coverage. Thus, in contrast to the prevailing theory, this empirical test presents evidence of increasing absolute risk aversion. This research was completed during a sabbatical at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. The financial support of the S. S. Huebner Foundation for Insurance Education is greatly appreciated. The author is also indebted to participants at the Forty-Second International Atlantic Economic Conference in Washington, D.C. for helpful comments. Any errors are the responsibility of the author.     

人力资源与中国长期经济增长

异常丰富的人力资本是中国经济持续增长的最重要的驱动力,这些人力资本大多积累于1949年之前。1978年后中国经济高速增长,人力资本的效应在其开始阶段尤其明显;在这段时间里,贫困的农村乡镇实现了井喷式增长,虽然它们鲜有外部援助,而这被视为消除绝对贫困必不可少的条件。在研究了人力资本在历史和当今的发展后,通过重点关注海外华侨的财富积累、转型经济体的商业形成以及中国内部的区域差异,本文利用跨国、跨区域的比较,突出了中国尤其是沿海地区的人力资本的不同寻常的深度。     

Firm resources,competitive actions and performance: investigating a mediated model with evidence from the in‐vitro diagnostics industry

Building on the resource‐based view (RBV) and competitive dynamics literatures, this paper proposes that considering resources or actions independently offers an incomplete understanding of the drivers of superior performance. Instead, we hypothesize that resources enable competitive actions and that when these actions leverage the firm's resources, superior performance results. We tested these hypotheses with panelized data on the technological resources and competitive actions of firms in the in‐vitro medical diagnostic substance manufacturing industry. The results provide substantial support for our hypotheses, specifically with respect to mediation. Our theory and results underscore how the integration of the competitive dynamics and RBV literatures can significantly improve our understanding of firm performance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Estimation and pricing under long-memory stochastic volatility

We treat the problem of option pricing under a stochastic volatility model that exhibits long-range dependence. We model the price process as a Geometric Brownian Motion with volatility evolving as a fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. We assume that the model has long-memory, thus the memory parameter H in the volatility is greater than 0.5. Although the price process evolves in continuous time, the reality is that observations can only be collected in discrete time. Using historical stock price information we adapt an interacting particle stochastic filtering algorithm to estimate the stochastic volatility empirical distribution. In order to deal with the pricing problem we construct a multinomial recombining tree using sampled values of the volatility from the stochastic volatility empirical measure. Moreover, we describe how to estimate the parameters of our model, including the long-memory parameter of the fractional Brownian motion that drives the volatility process using an implied method. Finally, we compute option prices on the S&P 500 index and we compare our estimated prices with the market option prices.