Plantation Slavery and Economic Development in the Antebellum Southern United States

The relationship of plantation slavery in the Americas to economic and social development in the regions it was dominant has long been a subject of scholarly debate. The existing literature is divided into two broad interpretive models –'planter capitalism' (Fogel and Engerman, Fleisig) and the 'pre-bourgeois civilization' (Genovese, Moreno-Fraginals). While each grasps aspects of plantation slavery's dynamics, neither provides a consistent and coherent historical or theoretical account of slavery's impact on economic development because they focus on the subjective motivations of economic actors (planters or slaves) independent of their social context. Borrowing Robert Brenner's concept of 'social property relations', the article presents an alternative analysis of the dynamics of plantation slavery and their relation to economic development in the regions it dominated.     

高校女生体育课堂教学的现状及对策

调查发现女生中只有33．97％对体育课有兴趣，原因是：体育意识不成熟、教材存在重复现象、有严重的心理障碍、没有突破传统的教学方法、课外活动缺乏行之有效的组织管理等。应采取的措施有：明确高校体育教育理念、加强思想教育、改革体育教学模式、合理选择教学内容和方法等。     

课堂环境中加大口语语言输入的效果研究

如何有效地提高学生口语能力是大学英语教学中重要课题。本实验以非英语专业学生为研究对象,在有限的课堂教学时间内通过加大口语语言素材的输入,提高学生的口语交际能力,以寻求一种有效的教学模式。     

Convenient estimators for the panel probit model: Further results

Bertschek and Lechner (1998) propose several variants of a GMM estimator based on the period specific regression functions for the panel probit model. The analysis is motivated by the complexity of maximum likelihood estimation and the possibly excessive amount of time involved in maximum simulated likelihood estimation. But, for applications of the size considered in their study, full likelihood estimation is actually straightforward, and resort to GMM estimation for convenience is unnecessary. In this note, we reconsider maximum likelihood based estimation of their panel probit model then examine some extensions which can exploit the heterogeneity contained in their panel data set. Empirical results are obtained using the data set employed in the earlier study. Helpful comments and suggestions by Irene Bertschek and Michael Lechner are gratefully acknowledged. This paper has also benefited from comments by two anonymous referees and from seminar participants at the Center for Health Economics at the University of York. Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the author.     

The impact of environmental regulation on productivity in German industries

The objective of this paper is to adjust a traditional total factor productivity (TFP) measure for the direct effect of environmental regulation on material and capital input. For this purpose we consider the fact that part of material input and pollution abatement capital have not been used to increase output but to cover the cost of using the environment as a factor of production. Therefore TFP growth rates are lower if part of the material input is allocated to abatement activities instead of producing output. We propose to treat compliance with environmental regulation as an unproductive input linked to the use of productive material input. Our aim is to answer and discuss two questions: How to measure the effect of environmental regulation on TFP, and does the effect matter. We examine data from 1975–1991 for ten pollution intensive German industries.We would like to thank Cornelia Oßwald for valuable research assistance. We are especially grateful to two anonymous referees for many helpful comments.     

多层次需求的库存配置策略

在分析多层次需求对库存策略的影响之后，给出了另外一种较简单的解决方法。该方法是在定量订货模型的基础上对库存进行配置，能适应不同的需求分布。     

中华民族的伟大复兴，呼唤马克思主义及其经济学的指导

中国的经济快速增长，正在和平崛起，但中国目前仍是一个发展中国家，人均GDP较低。中华民族需要复兴，但这需要马克思主义及其经济学的指导。西方经济学有其不可克服的阶级局限性，它维护私有制而反对公有制，承认差别而不主张共同富裕，主张自由竞争而反对政府调控，维护发达国家利益而无视发展中国家利益，更无解决“三农”问题之策，等等。所以，我们必须坚持特别是要发展马克思主义及其经济学，当然还需注意吸收西方经济学的可取之处。公有制与市场经济的结合、公平与效率的协调、市场调节与宏观调控的关系、城乡关系、地区关系、政企关系、官民关系等一系列重大问题，都需要马克思主义及其经济学进一步作出科学回答。     

Pricing-to-market tests in instrumental regressions: Case of the transportation equipment industry

Pricing-to-market (PTM) theory suggests that exporting monopolistic firms adjust their destination-specific mark-ups in the face of exchange rate shocks. A large proportion of the existing evidence for PTM comes from Wald tests applied to OLS- and IV-estimated parameters of single-equation models. Such tests can seriously over-reject in the presence of endogeneity and weak instruments so that some of the available results supporting PTM could be spurious. In this paper we revisit the PTM evidence for Japanese and German exporting firms in the transportation equipment industry. Using the model of Marston (1990), we apply exogeneity and LR-LIML-based tests for which the error probability is controlled irrespective of the quality of the available instruments. Our results show right-hand-side endogeneity in almost all of the examined PTM equations. In addition, we find that statistical decisions often differ depending on whether they are based on the traditional Wald test or on our proposed test.The authors would like to thank Philippe Barla, Jean-Thomas Bernard, Christos Constantatos, Larry Schembri, seminar participants at the Bank of Canada, and two anonymous referees for useful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Richard Marston for providing data. Finally, a special thanks to Marjorie Santos for excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are our own and should not be attributed to the Bank of Canada.First version received: May 2002/Final version received: December 2002     

古代岭南州府城市近郊风景的公共性研究

“城市山林”作为中国园林史研究中屡被提及的重要概念，已有了具体而明确的理论赋义。与之形成反差的，是当代研究长期缺乏对该词的历史溯源。为此，基于《四库全书》检索得到一定数量的文献史料，对“城市山林”概念的发展演变进行了初步考析。从中发现，“城市山林”并非一开始就是独立的概念；“城市”与“山林”两词媾和的过程，本质上是文人阶层有关“人之栖居”问题的长期思辨与抉择。而对此的认知，或将有助于更好地理解“园林”与“城市山林”之间的关系。     

Productivity,earnings, and profit sharing — An econometric analysis of alternative models

The theoretical status of the relationship between productivity, wages, and profit sharing (PS) is poor. Only some alternative hypotheses can be formulated. From these explanations six different econometric models are derived. Using data of the German Socio-Economic Panel the models are estimated and tests and indicators are employed to choose the best model. Our investigation speaks in favour of hybrid simultaneous Tobit models where the level of profit sharing is positively correlated with productivity which induces positive wage effects on the one hand. But on the other hand the level of wages is also relevant to the question whether a firm introduces or decides to continuePS and which amount ofPS should be paid.What is obvious is not always true and introspection is a notoriously unreliable guide to empirical magnitudes. Blinder (1990, p.2)