Entanglements in multispecies voluntourism: conservation and Utila's affect economy

Abstract

Through a case study of conservation voluntourism this article brings together critical political ecology, multispecies ethnography, and studies of humanitarian tourism to advance a political ecology of multispecies conservation voluntourism. The article presents multispecies conservation voluntourism as a field that produces and is produced by an “affect economy”, or an economy based on the exchange or trade in the relational. Since the mid-1990s, life on Utila, Honduras, a popular discount backpacker scuba destination located along the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, has been deeply transformed by the growth of dive tourism, the ecological destruction it has produced, and now the conservation voluntourism industry emerging in its wake. Seventy percent of Utila is comprised of mangroves and associated wetlands, home to several endangered and endemic species. Using examples of whale shark tourism, lionfish hunts, and iguana tracking, this article shows how conservation organizations operate as affect generators, enabling the privilege of engaging in multispecies encounters. Engaging in multispecies conservation voluntourism produces value in the form of cultural capital which is then exchanged for material outcomes by volunteers in the global economy; at the same time, this form of voluntourism obscures local relationships to nature and alters multispecies assemblages from past configurations.     

Does corruption slow down innovation? Evidence from a cointegrated panel of U.S. states

I investigate the long-run relationship between corruption and innovative activity using annual data from 48 contiguous U.S. states between 1977 and 2006. Using U.S. data allows me to work with a panel long enough to exploit time series properties of the data. I use two different measures of innovative activity: one measuring the quantity and the other measuring the quality of the patents granted. I also use two different measures of corruption: one based on the number of corruption convictions, the other based on number of corruption stories covered in Associated Press news wires. Following Pedroni (1999, 2000), I estimate the cointegrating relationship between corruption and innovative activity with Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS). The results indicate that corruption indeed slows down innovation in the long-run.     

The distributional impact of unification and the 1992–93 recession on West German households

The 1992–93 recession in the western states of Germany has been attributed, in substantial measure, to the macroeconomic consequences of policies to finance unification. Studies of the costs of unification have not attempted to measure the burden of the recession. We estimate a dynamic, panel model of household incomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and use it to forecast what these incomes would have been in 1992–94 without a recession. Using a ratio of actual to forecast incomes, we compare the relative burden of the recession across households. Our findings suggest that western households below the median income bore the brunt of the combined impact of unification and the recession of 1992–93.
JEL classification: P3, D3, E3.     

Multiple Species Boreal Forests – What Faustmann Missed

Recent research in natural sciences shows that the dynamics in boreal forests are much more complex than what many models traditionally used in forestry economics reflect. This essay analyzes some challenges of accounting for such complexity. It shows that the optimal harvesting strategy for forest owners is history dependent and for some states of the forest, more than one strategy may be optimal.This paper confirms earlier literature on shallow lakes and coral reefs and shows that this kind of phenomena seem much more common than previously thought. They are valid for a wide range of ecosystems that cover large surfaces and they do not depend on the choice of some specific function to model the non-linearity. There are also indications that theses results could be obtained even for resources with concave growth if at least one species with non-linear growth affects their dynamics.     

Completing the State Space with Subjective States

We define an opportunity act as a mapping from an exogenously given objective state space to a set of lotteries over prizes, and consider preferences over opportunity acts. We allow the preferences to be possibly uncertainty averse. Our main theorem provides an axiomatization of the maxmin expected utility model. In the theorem we construct subjective states to complete the objective state space. As in E. Dekel et al. (Econometrica, in press), we obtain a unique subjective state space. We also allow for preference for flexibility in some of the subjective states and commitment in others. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: D81.     

Absorbing Team Games

A team is a group of people having the same motives but possibly different available actions. A team game is a game where two teams face each other. An absorbing game is a repeated game where some of the entries are absorbing, in the sense that once they are chosen the play terminates, and all future payoffs are equal to the payoff at the stage of termination. We prove that every absorbing team game has an equilibrium payoff and that there are -equilibrium profiles with cyclic structure. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C73.     

多媒体环境下英语教学中师生角色的变化——多媒体环境下外语教学情感目标实现策略研究

多媒体技术促进了教学模式的改变,引起了师生角色的变化,对教师自身的素质提出了挑战.新的教学模式,要求教师在教学活动中,充分发挥与体现教师的"主导"和学生的"主体"作用.不仅教师的教法要改变,而且学生以往学习的习惯、方法、态度等也要改变.培养和发展师生积极的情感态度是英语教学的重要目标之一.     

How group efficacy mediates the relationship between group affect and identification

This study examines the mediating role of group efficacy on the relationship between group affect and group identification by integrating the collective cognition process. Using a sample of forty-seven work groups in Study 1, the results show that group efficacy fully mediates the relationship between positive and negative group affect and group identification. Study 2 applies a two-wave panel design to verify the impact of group efficacy on group identification. The results of Study 2 indicate that group efficacy relates positively to the development of group identification. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

A general endogenous grid method for multi-dimensional models with non-convexities and constraints

The endogenous grid method (EGM) significantly speeds up the solution of stochastic dynamic programming problems by simplifying or completely eliminating root-finding. We propose a general and parsimonious EGM extended to handle (1) multiple continuous states and choices, (2) multiple occasionally binding constraints, and (3) non-convexities such as discrete choices. Our method enjoys the speed gains of the original one-dimensional EGM, while avoiding expensive interpolation on multi-dimensional irregular endogenous grids. We explicitly define a broad class of models for which our solution method is applicable, and illustrate its speed and accuracy using a consumption–saving model with both liquid assets and illiquid pension assets and a discrete retirement choice.