Recovering Sociology from the Trash Heap: Of Waste Politics and the Spatialization of Local Representation in Lagos

This article excavates the debate that unfolded during the 1980s between Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu to shed light on the theoretical divide that still cuts across the field of urban studies today. Looking at contemporary Rancièrian scholarship through a Bourdieusian lens, it points to their main theoretical shortcomings and reasserts the value of relational, field‐based and empirically grounded approaches to urban politics. At the same time, this article engages seriously Rancière's critique of Bourdieu's failure to account for space in order to question the territoriality inherent to the notion of field. We put this theoretical discussion to the test of Lagos's garbage. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Lagos from 2015 to 2016, we propose analyzing the process of spatialization of the field of local representation by looking at the ways solid waste—here conceived as a political opportunity—is mobilized by different actors. We argue that the deployment of a waste infrastructure in Lagos is congruent with a relative disinvestment in practices of territorial control that reshapes the structure of local representation, reconfiguring the ‘stage’ on which politics is played out in the Nigerian metropolis.     

HOW DO RATING AGENCIES’ DECISIONS IMPACT STOCK MARKETS? A META‐ANALYSIS

The purpose of this study is to examine how credit rating agencies’ decisions impact the stock market using a systematic and quantitative review of existing empirical studies. Specifically, we employ a meta‐regression analysis (MRA) to investigate the extent and nature of the effect of rating agencies’ decisions on the stock market. We survey 62 studies published between 1978 and 2015. Our first finding is that the cumulative average abnormal returns calculated from this empirical literature are affected by publication bias. After controlling for publication bias, the main findings of our meta‐analysis indicate that negative rating decisions cause statistically significant negative abnormal returns. This evidence suggests an informational effect. Our results also indicate that positive rating decisions do not have a significant effect. Finally, the MRA results reveal the importance of several factors related to primary study design, as well as to the nature of the data.     

Incomplete regulation, market competition and collusion

Regulators often do not regulate all firms competing in a given sector. Due to product substitutability, unregulated competitors have incentives to bribe regulated firms to have them overstate their costs and produce less, thereby softening competition. The best collusion-proof contract entails distortions both for inefficient and efficient regulated firms (distortion ‘at the top’). But a contract inducing active collusion may do better by allowing the regulator to ‘team up’ with the regulated firm to indirectly tax its competitor. The best such contract is characterized. It is such that the unregulated firm pays the regulated one to have it truthfully reveals its inefficiency. We finally compare those contracts.     

Business incomes in rural Nicaragua: the role of household resources,location, experience and trust

This paper analyses the determinants of business income for rural households in Nicaragua. A sample of 1030 households was studied in order to assess the importance of material and behavioural factors that influence income from business activity. The households are involved in manufacturing, trade, services or have a mixture of businesses. They generally have a low income and asset value. Households supplement their income from wages and agricultural activities. To estimate non-farm business income per employed person we analyse the impact of resources, location, entrepreneurial experience and trust. Our results show that household resources and entrepreneurial experience are significant determinants for business income in all sectors. Trust is also important, particularly generalized trust. The contribution of other forms of trust, such as institutional trust, depends on the sector in which households participate.     

Reasoning under uncertainty and multi-criteria decision making in data privacy

By means of an integration of decision theory and probabilistic models, we explore and develop methods for improving data privacy. Our work encompasses disclosure control tools in statistical databases and privacy requirements prioritization; in particular we propose a Bayesian approach for the on-line auditing in Statistical Databases and Pairwise Comparison Matrices for privacy requirements prioritization. The first approach is illustrated by means of examples in the context of statistical analysis on the census and medical data, where no salary (resp. no medical information), that could be related to a specific employee (resp. patient), must be released; the second approach is illustrated by means of examples, such as an e-voting system and an e-banking service that have to satisfy privacy requirements in addition to functional and security ones. Several fields in the social sciences, economics and engineering will benefit from the advances in this research area: e-voting, e-government, e-commerce, e-banking, e-health, cloud computing and risk management are a few examples of applications for the findings of this research.     

The dimensional assessment of personality in drug addicts: a mixed-effects Rasch model approach

Drug abuse results from a series of different factors, such as social and family issues. Subjects more vulnerable to develop an addiction are, for instance, people living in high-stress environments who may resort to addiction in order to cope with their circumstances, such as demanding jobs, family crisis or other situations or people living in low-income households where violence occurs, who may be triggered into addiction as a way to escape negative emotions or ignore any underlying problems or issues. Psychometric research in the field of drug dependence has focused on identifying certain personality characteristics. It is now generally agreed that personality may influence, precipitate or perpetuate substance abuse. The aim of this paper is to perform a dimensional assessment of personality in a sample of drug addicts. To better understand the complexity of addictive behaviours of substance-using individuals, the Cloninger’s temperament and character inventory test is employed while the item response data analysis is performed by mixed-effects Rasch models. These models combine the advantages both of Rasch measurement framework for latent variables and of models with hierarchical data. To evaluate the differences in dimensions of temperament and character inventory test in subjects with drug addiction, we fit and compare a sequence of mixed-effects Rasch models. Results from models fitting are compared and discussed for a data set of 84 participants.     

公司治理对上市公司审计师变更影响的实证分析

对审计师变更原因以及公司治理对审计师变更影响的国内外研究文献进行了梳理。以我国沪深A股上市公司为研究样本,综合运用统计检验和Logistic分析方法,实证检验了公司治理评价体系的6个维度、15个指标对上市公司审计师变更的影响。结果表明:公司治理对审计师变更的影响显著;其中,第一大股东持股比例、独立董事比例、董事会会议次数与审计师变更显著负相关,是否发生诉讼仲裁事项、信息披露是否充分与审计师变更显著正相关。     

The Gender Contract under Neoliberalism: Palestinian-Israeli Women's Labor Force Participation

This paper interprets the pressure to raise Palestinian-Israeli women’s labor force participation within the unfolding neoliberal project in Israel, arguing that women’s stalled workforce integration reflects embedded economic rationality. Poor infrastructure and discriminatory policies, combined with Israel’s rapid economic privatization, set contradictory expectations for Palestinian-Israeli women: their opportunity-cost calculations include entitlements to economic protection alongside obligations to provide expenditure-saving domestic labor. Yet growing pressure and desire to join the paid workforce suggest that the gender contract may be changing. This cultural schema, which links women’s economic strategizing to their sense of feminine propriety, is transforming as part of a broader transition to a market-led gender regime, with the paradoxical effect of encouraging women’s employment while simultaneously impoverishing them. By dwelling on the dialectics of culture and the structure of work opportunities, and women’s agency, this paper aims to resolves an impasse in the current debate on women’s low workforce participation.     

Carbon efficiency of US colleges and universities: a nonparametric assessment

Under the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), institutes of higher education have pledged to pursue a goal of carbon neutrality. We utilize emissions reported under the ACUPCC agreement and a nonparametric data envelopment analysis approach in order to evaluate the relative performance of signatories to the agreement in terms of producing teaching and research with the least greenhouse gas emissions. We find that while many signatory institutions are now producing their desirable outputs relatively efficiently in terms of carbon emissions, there still exists considerable variation in efficiency and potential for improvement. Results of a second stage efficiency change analysis shows evidence of both movement towards the efficiency frontier since signing, and some movement of the frontier itself, though this evidence comes primarily from teaching-focused institutions.     

Did Hayek have a monetary theory of business cycles?

Joseph Schumpeter, a careful reader of Hayek, categorized Hayek??s theory of economic cycles as non-monetary. Almost every other source, including Hayek himself, categorized the theory as monetary. The issue turns on the concept of causality being used. The question of what causality concept to apply to complex phenomena has substantive implications for economic theory. A simple concept of causality, appropriate to the study of some physical phenomena, will mislead when applied to complex phenomena. We provide examples of errors in analysis that follow from the wrong choice of a causal paradigm.