The emergence of next generation internet users

The Internet is central to the new media, but the Internet is itself a dynamic technology that is constantly evolving as users adopt and reject new features, devices and applications and use them in ways that are often unanticipated. This article is anchored in longitudinal survey data on how Britons use the Internet, which illuminates the emergence of new patterns of accessing the Internet over multiple devices—some of which are portable—in everyday life and work. We call those who adopt this new approach ‘next generation users’. In contrast, first generation users remain anchored to one or more personal computers in the household or workplace for accessing the Internet. The analysis shows how this emerging pattern of access is reshaping the use and impact of the Internet, such as in supporting the production of user generated content. The analysis also shows how next generation access is socially distributed; creating a new digital divide that reinforces socioeconomic inequalities. Future research needs to move beyond the study of access to the Internet to track the diffusion of next generation access and its implications across a wider array of nations.     

Strategic implications of the Soviet‐North Korean alliance

Abstract

Globalization is commonly defined as a strict economic path by most previous works, but it is really a fuzzy concept with unrestrained dimensions. While the ideological location of an incumbent political party is a powerful predictor of its policy position, the role of a political party in the globalization-growth nexus has never been fully empirically investigated. By applying Pedroni's panel cointegration technique instead of a time-series or traditional panel data approach, this paper aims to empirically re-examine the co-movement and the causal relationship among economic growth, the overall globalization index, and its three main dimensions—economic, social, as well as political integrations—by using panel data for 23 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries for 1970 to 2006. Certainly, the political party variable is taken into account as the advanced test is promoted, and we finally discover that all variables move together in the long run. Based on the results of the panel causality test, though the evidence of short-run causality is very weak, it does show long-run unidirectional causality running from the overall index of globalization, economic globalization, and social globalization to growth. Finally, the critical role of the political party is deeply discussed in relation with our results.     

Interest differentials and extreme support for uncovered interest rate parity

This paper addresses two findings from the empirical literature testing uncovered interest parity (UIP): (i) more favorable results when interest differentials (IDs) are large and (ii) instability across samples. Simulations demonstrate that explanations of the results using large IDs based on the hypothesis of a “zone of speculative inactivity” are inconsistent with empirical evidence. Furthermore, it is shown that, if agents forecast IDs based on long-run values, coefficient estimates will be unstable if rates of decay in IDs vary significantly and, for ex post UIP to hold, IDs must decay in absolute value. This is consistent with OECD country data.     

The moderating influence of style of information processing on media perceptions and information exposure

This study investigated the extent to which style of information processing relates to media perceptions and information exposure. The results showed that visually oriented individuals were more favourably predisposed to the television medium and reported greater exposure to this medium than verbally oriented individuals. Verbally oriented individuals reported greater exposure to print media information than did visually oriented individuals. An exploratory interaction hypothesis between information processing style and gender was not supported. The implications of these results and future research directions are discussed.     

Furthering Organizational Priorities with Less Than Truthful Behavior: A Call for Additional Tools

Though codes of ethics exist in many businesses, employees still view less than truthful behaviors to be a significant ethical problem. The current study examines the related and somewhat counterintuitive issue of less than truthful behaviors intended to further organizational priorities. Such behaviors risk violating one organizational priority (e.g., adhering to a code of ethics) to achieve another. Data indicated four unique though non-mutually exclusive motivations: (1) to avoid confrontation or conflict; (2) to ensure quality in the delivery of a product or service; (3) to buy time for an organization’s strategy to play out; and (4) for self-protection or self-enhancement. The evidence further suggests that enhanced managerial training, particularly in handling confrontation and conflicts, could reduce the contradiction between stated codes of ethics and actual behaviors.     

Reparations for African‐Americans as a Transfer Problem: A Cautionary Tale

We examine how different methods of reparations payments to African‐Americans affect both the black and nonblack populations of the United States using the framework of the transfer‐problem from international trade theory as a theoretical foundation. We find that reparations payments that provide incentives for blacks to use the payment toward purchases of goods and services produced by nonblacks might expand the income gap. Also a reparations payment in the absence of productive capacity owned by blacks is found to have no final positive impact on black income. These results indicate that a reparations payment strategy must be carefully and cautiously conceived in order to achieve the desired effects.     

Bivariate income distributions for assessing inequality and poverty under dependent samples

As indicators of social welfare, the incidence of inequality and poverty is of ongoing concern to policy makers and researchers alike. Of particular interest are the changes in inequality and poverty over time, which are typically assessed through the estimation of income distributions. From this, income inequality and poverty measures, along with their differences and standard errors, can be derived and compared. With panel data becoming more frequently used to make such comparisons, traditional methods which treat income distributions from different years independently and estimate them on a univariate basis, fail to capture the dependence inherent in a sample taken from a panel study. Consequently, parameter estimates are likely to be less efficient, and the standard errors for between-year differences in various inequality and poverty measures will be incorrect. This paper addresses the issue of sample dependence by suggesting a number of bivariate distributions, with Singh–Maddala or Dagum marginals, for a partially dependent sample of household income for two years. Specifically, the distributions considered are the bivariate Singh–Maddala distribution, proposed by Takahasi (1965), and bivariate distributions belonging to the copula class of multivariate distributions, which are an increasingly popular approach to modelling joint distributions. Each bivariate income distribution is estimated via full information maximum likelihood using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey for 2001 and 2005. Parameter estimates for each bivariate income distribution are used to obtain values for mean income and modal income, the Gini inequality coefficient and the headcount ratio poverty measure, along with their differences, enabling the assessment of changes in such measures over time. In addition, the standard errors of each summary measure and their differences, which are of particular interest in this analysis, are calculated using the delta method.     

The New Deal and Modern Memory

The “Great Recession,” which began at year‐end 2007, was precipitated by plunging real estate values, followed by borrower defaults and financial crisis for the public and private institutions that supplied loanable funds to the mortgage market. With economic growth not yet returned to trend, three years on more than 9% of the American labor force remains unemployed. Current macroeconomic events, perhaps inevitably, have been compared to those of the Great Depression of 1929–1933, both in terms of severity and of the efficacy of the public policies adopted ostensibly to restore prosperity. In this article, I review the literature on the New Deal, paying particular attention to modern scholarship emphasizing the role of presidential politics and antibusiness political rhetoric in deepening and prolonging the Great Depression. The parallels between then and now suggest that the two economic contractions had similar causes and elicited equally counterproductive policy responses.