TheConvergence of the Italian Regions and Unemployment: Theory and Evidence

We explore the links between the halt of the convergence process of Italian regions at the beginning of the 1970s and the increase in regional unemployment dispersion. We consider a neoclassical exogenous growth model with an imperfect labor market and show that during the transitional dynamics the imperfections of the labor market negatively influence the output growth rate. In particular, the model implies that centralized bargaining is likely to set a national minimum wage that is too high with respect to the labor productivity of the less developed regions, resulting in a negative impact on their per capita output growth. We test the implications of the model on a regional panel data set using the GMM framework. Both our market distortion measure and the unemployment rate are found to significantly lower the growth rate of per capita output.     

INTERREGIONAL WAGE DIFFERENTIALS: AN EQUILIBRIUM PERSPECTIVE*

ABSTRACT This paper empirically analyzes two competing explanations for observed interregional wage differentials among full-time U.S. workers: (1) differences in the average levels of market valued labor characteristics, and (2) differences in rates of return to the characteristics. Hedonic wage equations are estimated for broad U.S. regions using detailed measures of human capital, work environment, and personal attributes collected by a national random sample mail survey. Statistical tests reveal little tendency for interregional structural shifts in the wage equations estimated, an outcome which rests on the inclusion of important, but seldom measured, wage determining variables.     

Revisiting interregional wage differentials: New evidence from Spain with matched employer-employee data

This article examines wage differences across Spain's NUTS-2 regions along the entire wage distribution based on matched employer-employee microdata from 2006 to 2014. Unlike previous related studies, we properly control for differences in regional purchasing power parities, which are very large in practice. Although part of the raw regional wage differences observed is explained by differences between regions in productive structures, and, to a much lesser extent, in labor forces, noteworthy, very similar throughout the wage distribution regional differences net of composition effects arise even after controlling for a broad set of individual and firm characteristics.     

Regional Wage Inequality in China, 1996-2010

This paper examines regional wage inequality in China between 1996 to 2010, subdividing that time span into a period of increased wage inequality during 1996-2002 and one of stable to decreasing inequality for 2003-2010. Based on the interplay between wage levels and wage growth, the authors develop a typology whereby China's provinces can be assigned to either peripheral, emerging, lagging, or leading regions. The particular characteristics associated with each type of wage region, and the factors underlying shifts of particular provinces from one category to another between the two periods, enable them to identify specific causes for the reversal (after 2002) of the trend toward increasing wage inequality (the causes especially reflect wage patterns in the mining and energy industries, information and communication technology industries, and foreign-invested enterprises). The recent wage convergence involves instances of both interior provinces advancing from the "emerging" to the "leading" wage category as well as the decline of a few "leading" coastal provinces to "lagging" status.     

Knowledge-Based Performance Assessment of Existing RC Buildings

One of the most challenging aspects of the seismic assessment of existing buildings is the characterization of structural modeling uncertainties. Recent codes, such as Eurocode 8, seem to synthesize the effect of structural modeling uncertainties in the so-called confidence factors that are applied to mean material property estimates. The confidence factors are classified and tabulated as a function of discrete knowledge levels acquired based on the results of specific in-situ tests and inspections. In this approach, the effect of the application of the confidence factors on structural assessment is not explicitly stated. This work presents probabilistic performance-based proposals for seismic assessments of RC buildings based on the knowledge levels. These proposals take advantage of the Bayesian framework for updating the probability distributions for structural modeling parameters based on the results of tests and inspections. As structural modeling parameters, both the mechanical material properties and also the structural detailing parameters are considered. These proposals can be categorized based both on the amount of structural analysis effort required and on the type of structural analysis performed. An efficient Bayesian method is presented which relies on simplified assumptions and employs a small sample of structural model realizations and ground motion records in order to provide an estimate of structural reliability. As an alternative proposal suitable for code implementation, the simplified approach implemented in the SAC-FEMA guidelines is adapted to existing structures by employing the efficient Bayesian method. This method takes into account the effect of both ground motion uncertainty and the structural modeling uncertainties on the global performance of the structure, in a closed-form analytical safety-checking format. These alternative proposals are demonstrated for the case study structure which is an existing RC frame. In particular, it is shown how the parameters for the safety-checking format can be estimated and tabulated as a function of knowledge level, outcome of tests, and the type of structural analysis adopted.     

Investigating Difference: Applications of Wealth Ranking and Household Survey Approaches among Farming Households in Southern Zimbabwe

Wealth ranking and household survey approaches to understanding wealth stratification are applied in tandem for a sample of farming households in southern Zimbabwe. While conventional surveys usually stratify sample populations according to criteria chosen by the researcher, wealth ranking is based on criteria offered by local people. Patterns of wealth and well-being over time, between ecological zones and in relation to local indicators are explored with focus groups of men and women. The rankings emerging from these discussions are compared with survey data for the same household sample. The wealth rankings are highly correlated with livestock ownership, farm asset holdings, crop harvests and crop sales. Wealth ranks derived from farmers' analyses are then compared with a cluster analysis of the survey data, with both discrepancies and overlaps discussed. It is concluded that wealth ranking provides an accurate indicator of relative wealth and that ranking can be a useful complementary method to be employed alongside survey assessments. In addition, qualitative discussions during ranking exercises reveal details of the historically, socially and economically constructed understandings of wealth and well-being of different actors. The conventional assumption that surveys always provide ‘better’ data is thus questioned.     

Regional labor markets and the household migration decision

"The current work extends the modeling of the household migration decision to take into account location-specific influences and relates these to regional wage differentials. This allows for more complete analysis of real wage gains or losses associated with migration and inferences regarding the nature of equilibrium or disequilibrium wage differentials between regions." Data are from the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the period 1976-1978. "The results indicate systematic and often substantial influences of household location on the nominal wage and on both job and residence mobility. Based on these findings, comparisons of wage growth patterns are made for those changing jobs and region of residence status. Although compared to other households the wage growth of these migrants is on average lower before migration and higher after migration, the analysis provides no support for arguments that nominal regional wage differentials reflect systematic ordering of real wage differentials. This finding suggests that real wage gains are closely tied to the interregional migration decision but are not related to regional nominal wage differentials in a simple fashion."     

NEOLITHISATION AND MEGALITHIC ORIGINS IN NORTH-WESTERN FRANCE: A REGIONAL INTERACTION MODEL

Summary. This article reviews recent publications on Neolithic and Megalithic origins in North-Western France, and focuses on a debate within French archaeology between a 'Parisian' school, which emphasises the influence of Bandkeramik communities, and an 'Atlantic' school which emphasises contact along the Atlantic facade with Impressed Ware groups. It is argued that this debate is largely sterile, and an alternative model is proposed, stressing different forms of interaction between Neolithic and Mesolithic groups in different regions.     

Population growth among U.S. regions and metropolitan areas: a test for causality

ABSTRACT This paper explores theories of population growth, and implied economic growth, among the major U.S. metro areas and regions. One set of theoretical arguments favor the growth of large cities, while an alternative set of arguments favor the growth of the smaller urban areas. Still another set of arguments combine economic space and urban size in the concept of regional growth centers as the engines of regional growth. Granger causality tests are applied to determine the role of urban size or growth centres as engines of regional growth. The test results indicate no causal relationship exists.     

Biogeographical Regionalization,its Stages and Criteria

A historical approach to biogeographical regionalization is proposed. The approach is based on the assumption that the highest ranking hierarchical units in such a regionalization represent the oldest biogeographical regions, with the more detailed taxonomic units formed in subsequent historical periods. The regionalization process involves three stages: (a) faunistic-floristic investigation of the study area; (b) the identification of habitats of species that more or less coincide; (c) a determination whether the distribution of these characteristic species displays a cause-and-effect relationship with the geographical environment. The historical criterion is emphasized throughout, the regions are viewed as the product of the historical differentiation of a physical-geographic territory.     

A war in search of a rationale

The recent publications of memoirs by former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith have reopened the debate over the origins of the Iraq War. Both men—who were widely blamed for the ‘intelligence failure’ on weapons of mass destruction and the exaggerated connection between Al‐Qaeda and Iraq—purport to set the record straight about what really happened inside the Bush administration during the run‐up to the war. Yet, both men have actually produced books marked by a strange combination of self‐pity and disingenuousness. This article looks at their attempts at self‐justification in light of the growing evidence that the decision to invade was made in mid‐2002; if true, their arguments that they were participating in a genuine policy debate rather than a search for a rationale become problematic. Rather than exculpating themselves, their memoirs instead serve as damning indictments of both men, showing how Tenet and Feith enabled the President's decision to wage war on Iraq as a matter of choice rather than necessity.     

The Geography of Economic Development and Racial Discrimination in Brazil

This study investigates the relationship between unequal resource and population distribution and racial wage inequality in Brazil. Using sample data from the 1980 Brazilian census, monthly wages were estimated for white and Afro-Brazilian men working in nine metropolitan areas. Estimates showed that racial disparities in wages existed across all regional labour markets. Regression-based decomposition analysis found that a substantial portion of the racial wage gap was due to discrimination (unequal pay), while estimates of the magnitude of labour market discrimination indicated considerable variation by geographical area. Discrimination was higher in the predominantly white and highly developed areas of the South than in the former slave and underdeveloped regions of the Northeast.     

Geographical and Temporal Weighted Regression (GTWR)

Both space and time are fundamental in human activities as well as in various physical processes. Spatiotemporal analysis and modeling has long been a major concern of geographical information science (GIScience), environmental science, hydrology, epidemiology, and other research areas. Although the importance of incorporating the temporal dimension into spatial analysis and modeling has been well recognized, challenges still exist given the complexity of spatiotemporal models. Of particular interest in this article is the spatiotemporal modeling of local nonstationary processes. Specifically, an extension of geographically weighted regression (GWR), geographical and temporal weighted regression (GTWR), is developed in order to account for local effects in both space and time. An efficient model calibration approach is proposed for this statistical technique. Using a 19‐year set of house price data in London from 1980 to 1998, empirical results from the application of GTWR to hedonic house price modeling demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority to the traditional GWR approach, highlighting the importance of temporally explicit spatial modeling.     

Population Synthesis: Comparing the Major Techniques Using a Small, Complete Population of Firms

Recently, disaggregate modeling efforts that rely on microdata have received wide attention by scholars and practitioners. Synthetic population techniques have been devised and are used as a viable alternative to the collection of microdata that normally are inaccessible because of confidentiality concerns or incomplete because of high acquisition costs. The two most widely discussed synthetic techniques are the synthetic reconstruction method (IPFSR), which makes use of iterative proportional fitting (IPF) techniques, and the combinatorial optimization (CO) method. Both methods are described in this article and then evaluated in terms of their ability to recreate a known population of firms, using limited data extracted from the parent population of the firms. Testing a synthetic population against a known population is seldom done, because obtaining an entire population usually is too difficult. The case presented here uses a small, complete population of firms for the City of Hamilton, Ontario, for the year 1990; firm attributes compiled are number of employees, 3-digit standard industrial classification, and geographic location. Results are summarized for experiments based upon various combinations of sample size and tabulation detail designed to maximize the accuracy of resulting synthetic populations while holding input data costs to a minimum. The output from both methods indicates that increases in sample size and tabulation detail result in higher quality synthetic populations, although the quality of the generated population is more sensitive to increases in tabular detail. Finally, most tests conducted with the created synthetic populations suggest that the CO method is superior to the IPFSR method.     

Contiguity Constraints for Single‐Region Site Search Problems

This paper proposes an explicit set of constraints as a general approach to the contiguity problem in site search modeling. Site search models address the challenging problem of identifying the best area in a study region for a particular land use, given that there are no candidate sites. Criteria that commonly arise in a search include a site's area, suitability, cost, shape, and proximity to surrounding geographic features. An unsolved problem in this modeling arena is the identification of a general set of mathematical programming constraints that can guarantee a contiguous solution (site) for any 0–1 integer‐programming site search formulation. The constraints proposed herein address this problem, and we evaluate their efficacy and efficiency in the context of a regular and irregular tessellation of geographic space. An especially efficient constraint form is derived from a more general form and similarly evaluated. The results demonstrate that the proposed constraints represent a viable, general approach to the contiguity problem.     

Did the Nationalist Government Manipulate the Chinese Bond Market? A Quantitative Perspective on Short-Term Price Fluctuations of Domestic Government Bonds, 1932–1934

Based on a newly constructed set of data, this paper offers a quantitative perspective on the Nationalist Government’s relations with China’s domestic bond markets during the period 1932–34. For all the recent revisionist scholarship on the achievements of Nationalist state-building, the perception of the Nationalist elite as corrupt is still widely accepted. In order to demonstrate the empirical potential of quantitative financial history, this paper tests one particular assertion: that members of the Nationalist elite manipulated the issue price of domestic government bonds in order to enrich themselves and their associates. We test this by calculating two price data correlations: that of a first sample of government bonds, all of them issued before 1932, and that of a second sample of government bonds, which includes bonds issued during the period under review. The price fluctuations of the first sample are correlated with each other to a much higher degree than those of the second sample. This indicates that the prices of bonds in the first sample were reacting similarly to the same range of influences, while the bonds issued during the period under review and included in the second sample were displaying individual price fluctuations. One possible explanation for this is that members of the Nationalist elite enriched themselves or their associates by issuing domestic government bonds at artificially low prices. In sum, the article illustrates both the potential and the limitations of quantitative history: it allows us to test and dismiss a precisely formulated hypothesis about Nationalist corruption, but it is only one possible way in which statistical analysis can be applied and does not cover the whole realm of state practices.     

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TIME SERIES APPROACHES TO MODELING INTERSECTORAL AND INTERCOUNTY EMPLOYMET LINKAGES IN RURAL REGIONAL LABOR MARKETS*

ABSTRACT. The performance of five criteria for identifying significant interregional labor market linkages is compared. The criteria suggest differential model specifications based on the implicit tradeoff between parsimony and specification bias. Models were specified using: Akaike's final prediction error; Schwarz's Bayesian information criterion; an input-output model; Aoki's time series algorithm; and a combined input-outputi/time series approach. Models of the changes in monthly employment for twelve industries in six regions in northeastern Utah were specified using each criterion. Models based on Schwarz's criterion and the input-output criterion were preferred to those based on other criteria.     

Continent-wide or region-specific? A geometric morphometrics-based assessment of variation in Clovis point shape

Researchers have debated the existence of regional variation in Clovis points for over 60 years. Here, we report an attempt to resolve this argument using a large sample of Clovis points from dated assemblages and a suite of shape analysis methods known as geometric morphometrics. The study tested the two main hypotheses that have been put forward in the debate: the continent-wide adaptation hypothesis, which holds that Clovis points do not vary regionally, and the regional environmental adaptation hypothesis, which holds that there is regional variation as a consequence of Clovis groups adjusting their food-getting toolkits to local conditions. We used discriminant function analysis and a multivariate extension of the t test to assess whether differences in shape exist at two scales. The first set of analyses compared points from the most obvious environmental regions in North America, the East and the West. The second set of analyses investigated differences among points from subregions within the East and West. The analyses revealed significant differences between points from the East and the West and among points from some subregions. Follow-up analyses demonstrated that these differences are not the result of the most common confounding factors, raw material quality and resharpening. As such, the analyses support the regional environmental adaptation hypothesis rather than the continent-wide adaptation hypothesis. We conclude from this that Clovis people modified their points to suit the characteristics of local prey and/or the habitats in which they hunted.     

What Was Parliamentary Reporting? A Study of Aims and Results in the London Daily Newspapers, 1780–96*

The nature of these newspaper reports – that is, the character of their principal content – has never been studied, despite its obvious importance and, as we shall see, its marked differences from our Hansard. This article relates their nature to a vital feature of parliamentary leadership, the ability to lead the argument in debate. The practical reasoning in parliamentary deliberation and justification, especially what speakers contributed towards the outcome or ‘the sense of the debate’, predominated in these reports. This implied a need for reporters to concentrate on the ‘substance’ of speeches and their bearing on the motion. One result was that speeches which were judged to define or develop arguments pro and con were treated at length, the defining speeches most extensively and others in proportion to what they added. Conversely, speeches which reiterated known positions or which were irrelevant to the arguments in hand were omitted or downplayed, even if they were important in some other way, while whole debates which added little to ongoing discussion could be treated quite briefly. But if being a front bencher did not guarantee coverage, being a back bencher was no bar: the criterion was the importance of a speaker's contribution, while the manner of coverage accented what was contributed. The reporters’ concerns emphasized debates that promised significant change in matters of national importance, but gave relatively little attention to recurrent or localised business as such. Their writing – they were known as debate writers or news-writers – was interpretation answering to evaluative and selective criteria rather than a record in a simple sense. Their work is not to be understood in the same terms as a modern Hansard, and in particular not as a defective Hansard, but rather is such that it requires further work on a wide range of new research questions if it is to be understood to best effect, a requirement which suggests a need to study it critically before using it as source material.     

On the Evolution of Relative Prices and Its Nature at the Regional Level: The Case of Spain

This paper studies the relevance and nature of shifts in relative prices at the regional level in Spain. Deviations in relative prices tend to be small (at most half a point of inflation annually) but persistent. They are determined by features intrinsic to deep economic integration, in particular, wage mechanisms operating at the national level. This is in stark contrast to evidence at the international level. Therefore, while acknowledging that divergent price evolutions are possible in the European Monetary Union, their nature will be different from those observed among Spanish regions.