A NON-GAUSSIAN TIME SERIES ANALYSIS OF RURAL RETAIL BUSINESS COUNTS*

ABSTRACT. Determinants of the number of retail firms serving a rural area have been investigated by drawing on demand threshold analysis to analyze cross-sectional data. The relevance of such studies to an individual community may be limited if it is characterized by differential levels or unique types of economic activity. Alternatively, conducting the analysis using time-series data on an individual community may lead to problems associated with non-normal and nonstationary data. These problems are addressed by formulating a state-space model of time-series count data. The discrete, nonnegative nature of count data is accommodated by using a conjugate prior for the Poisson location parameter. A guide function is used to link the prior to the state vector and Bayes rules are used for updating.     

THE EMPLOYMENT CREATION EFFECTS OF FACTOR SUBSIDIES: SOME ESTIMATES FOR NORTHERN IRELAND MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY, 1955-1983

In this paper, I use estimates of the parameters of an industry demand function and a CES production function for Northern Ireland manufacturing in order to measure the relative impact of factor subsidies on employment, capital, and output. A simulation model is able to differentiate the output and substitution effects of subsidies. The results indicate that since manufacturing industry in the province tends to operate with a labor-intensive technology and, since its price-elasticity of demand for output is very low, the employment creating effects of capital subsidies are strongly negative.     

Tokugawa Confucian Sermons as Popular Emotional Education: The Moral and Pedagogical Philosophy of Hosoi Heishū*

This article contributes to the growing literature on the nexus of religion and emotion, thinking through the ways in which historians of Japan can make interventions in the field, and exploring research methodologies that speak to a pre‐modern and non‐Christian milieu. In looking to the moral and pedagogical philosophy of Hosoi Heishū (1728–1801), a Tokugawa Confucian teacher and itinerant preacher, this article places an emphasis on the use of contextualised and historically‐specific emic categories of belief and feeling. To do so, it explores the popularising movement of Japanese Confucianism in the late eighteenth century, tracing Hosoi's development of vernacular sermonising and his identification of emotion as both a subject and object of instruction. His rhetorical style and pedagogy is unpacked, followed by an analysis of his popular reception, before turning to a sermon case study to observe these ideas in action. This article offers new insights into the viewing habits and emotional expectations of Tokugawa audiences, underscoring the ways in which emotion terms and concepts can change meaning in how they are defined, embodied, expressed, and valued as part of a broader habitus.