Incentives for teacher relocation: Evidence from the Gambian hardship allowance

We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30–40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on the distribution and characteristics of teachers across schools. A geographic discontinuity in the policy's implementation and the presence of common pre-treatment trends between hardship and non-hardship schools provide sources of identifying variation. We find that the hardship allowance increased the share of qualified (certified) teachers by 10 percentage points. The policy also reduced the pupil–qualified teacher ratio by 27, or 61% of the mean, in recipient schools close to the distance threshold. Further analysis suggests that these gains were not merely the result of teachers switching from non-hardship to hardship schools. With similar policies in place in more than two dozen other developing countries, our study provides an important piece of evidence on their effectiveness.     

健身器材市场现状研究

采用问卷,实地调查等方法,对健身器材市场现状进行研究分析.得出目前体育健身器材种类少,价格高,占地面积大,质量监督机制不完善等.     

Does the Great Firewall Really Isolate the Chinese? Integrating Access Blockage With Cultural Factors to Explain Web User Behavior

The dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all websites. We develop a conceptual framework that integrates access blockage with social structures to explain Web users’ choices, and argue that users visit websites they find culturally proximate and that access blockage matters only when such sites are blocked. We examine the case of China, where online blockage is notoriously comprehensive, and compare Chinese Web usage patterns with those elsewhere. Analyzing audience traffic among the 1000 most visited websites, we find that websites cluster according to language and geography. Chinese websites constitute one cluster, which resembles other such geolinguistic clusters in terms of both its composition and its degree of isolation. Our sociological investigation reveals a greater role of cultural proximity than access blockage in explaining online behaviors.     

关于我国外汇市场主要汇率的协整分析

自1973年布雷顿森林体系崩溃以来，世界外汇市场的汇率就表现出巨幅而且频繁波动的特征。由于外汇市场风险极大，因而要捕捉到汇率运动的规律就十分困难。目前，几家中国的商业银行推出了个人外汇买卖业务。本文着重对几种汇率之间的协整关系进行实证分析，以期发现它们之间是否存在长期的稳定的关系。其结果将有助于投资者制定决策并且有效地规避风险。     

我国技术市场发展存在的问题及对策

本文分析了我国技术市场发展的历程、现状以及存在的问题，并针对这些问题提出了一些对策。     

外贸拓展新兴市场应关注的问题及对策——以汕头为例

随着近两年国务院出台的一系列稳定外贸增长政策措施陆续实施,其积极效应正在渐显,其中外贸拓展新兴市场是重要方面。文章通过汕头海关近年的相关统计数据,以汕头为例分析外贸拓展新兴市场的进展情况,在概述与新兴市场国家进出口贸易迅速发展的情况下,指出应关注的问题,提出完善自贸区、建立体系、重视进口和摒弃低价数量扩张等对策。     

东北地区产业结构与劳动力市场城乡整合关系的实证研究

本文通过对东北地区产业结构和劳动力市场城乡整合的变动趋势及1990—2008年期间东北地区产业结构与劳动力市场城乡整合程度的相关关系分析,利用OLS回归分析方法,通过建立线性回归模型,验证产业结构对城乡劳动力市场融合的作用,得出了东北地区产业结构调整是劳动力市场城乡整合重要动力机制的结论。在以上研究的基础上,提出了促进产业结构和劳动力市场城乡整合协调发展的相关对策。     

On the Possibility of Organ Markets and the Performativity of Economics

Callon's (1998) ‘performativity thesis’ encourages us to consider how the boundaries of the economy are negotiated. This paper explores one such discussion: the contributions of economics to the debates over the introduction of markets for transplant organs. The paper pays particular attention to the normative aspects of economic valuation. It examines the philosophical antecedents of economic contributions to the debate, notes the rhetorical and linguistic power of economic calculation and then focuses on three distinct sets of calculations concerning the value of a transplant kidney: a contingent valuation calculation, a risk-premia based calculation, and a cost-efficiency simulation. In each case, it shows that economic facts, once created, may travel freely through normative debates and claim moral force. The technical process of economic modelling is therefore seen to be a crucial aspect of the economisation of this area, and of economic performativity more generally.     

DRILLING THROUGH THE ALLEGHENY MOUNTAINS

In 1999, Carruthers and Stinchcombe provided the classic discussion of ‘the social structure of liquidity’: the institutional arrangements that support markets in which ‘exchange occurs easily and frequently’. Our argument in this paper is that the material aspects of these arrangements – and particularly the materiality of prices – need far closer attention than they normally receive. We develop this argument by highlighting two features of new assemblages that have been created in financial markets since 1999. First, these assemblages give sharp economic significance to spatial location and to physical phenomena such as the speed of light (the physics of these assemblages is Einsteinian, not Newtonian, so to speak). Second, they have provoked fierce controversy focusing on ultra-fast ‘high-frequency trading’, controversy in which issues of materiality are interwoven intimately with questions of legitimacy, particularly of fairness.     

Street Papers,Work and Begging: ‘Experimenting’ at the Margins of Economic Legitimacy

Street papers are publications produced specifically for sale by the homeless and other vulnerable people in many countries around the world. Their social status is, however, often conspicuously unstable: ‘Get a job!’ has been reported as a common insult addressed to vendors, and street paper organisations have responded with their own rhetoric and strategies that aim at disrupting any analogy with begging. The present analysis frames these rhetorical confrontations as a struggle over economic legitimacy, highlighting some of the ways in which social actors build and sever the normatively loaded associations that position them and others in social space, and how the ‘experimental’ combination of business and social responsibilities tests social actors' abilities to adapt to this practice.