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We introduce a new method to measure the temporal discounting of money. Unlike preceding methods, our method requires neither knowledge nor measurement of utility. It is easier to implement, clearer to subjects, and requires fewer measurements than existing methods. (JEL C91, D11, D12, D91)

"Sprachstandserhebungsverfahren im Elementarbereich sind in der Praxis inzwischen weit verbreitet, obwohl ihr Einsatz und ihre Konsequenzen nach wie vor kontrovers diskutiert werden. Während die vorliegenden Verfahren bereits in zahlreichen Publikationen beschrieben wurden, wird bisher kaum diskutiert, inwiefern sie den Kriterien der empirischen Sozialforschung entsprechen und welche Bedeutung ein zunehmender Einsatz solcher Verfahren für die pädagogische Praxis hat. Gegenstand dieses Beitrages ist die Frage, welche Vor- und Nachteile der Einsatz bestimmter Typen von Erhebungsverfahren mit sich bringt. Dafür wird zunächst ein Überblick über die landesweiten Sprachstandserhebungen in den Bundesländern gegeben und aufgezeigt, welche Kriterien bei der Sprachstandserhebung von Kindern im Vorschulalter bedeutungsvoll sind. Anschließend werden zentrale Qualitätskriterien für den Einsatz von alltagsintegrierten Beobachtungsverfahren einerseits und standardisierte Erhebungsverfahren andererseits dargestellt. In einem weiteren Abschnitt werden kritische Perspektiven auf Bemühungen zur 'Vermessung' durch landesweit einheitliche und standardisierte Verfahren sowohl aus Sicht der Kindheitsforschung als auch von Expert/innen für Sprachförderung vorgestellt. Der Beitrag schließt mit einer Reihe von Hinweisen auf weiteren Entwicklungs- und Forschungsbedarf." (Autorenreferat)

"Social scientists seek to develop systematic ways to understand how people make meaning and how the meanings they make shape them and the world in which they live. But how do we measure such processes? Measuring Culture is an essential point of entry for both those new to the field and those who are deeply immersed in the measurement of meaning. Written collectively by a team of leading qualitative and quantitative sociologists of culture, the book considers three common subjects of measurement-people, objects, and relationships-and then discusses how to pivot effectively between subjects and methods. Measuring Culture takes the reader on a tour of the state of the art in measuring meaning, from discussions of neuroscience to computational social science. It provides both the definitive introduction to the sociological literature on culture as well as a critical set of case studies for methods courses across the social sciences"--

International audience ; It is useful to suggest that the history of measuring poverty between 1942 and 1990 follows three phases. For twenty years after Beveridge there was no point in measuring poverty since it had been taken care of by the thriving welfare state. The next phase, during which poverty was "rediscovered" in the midst of plenty, witnessed genuine attempts to assess and quantify relative deprivation. Poverty was considered in terms of a new set of dynamics. The last phase, during the Thatcher years, is for some critics the most shameful: there was ample proof that poverty was widespread and that the most vulnerable categories were being marginalized even further by the government's pursuit of market orientated policies. Whether the Thatcher Governments were right or wrong is a subject of political debate. One thing is certain however: social policies during the 1980s tended to expose and exacerbate the ugliest possible aspects of very basic "want". In this way public opinion was made uncompromisingly aware of the nature and incidence of poverty, the indubitable signs of an unequal nation.

International audience ; It is useful to suggest that the history of measuring poverty between 1942 and 1990 follows three phases. For twenty years after Beveridge there was no point in measuring poverty since it had been taken care of by the thriving welfare state. The next phase, during which poverty was "rediscovered" in the midst of plenty, witnessed genuine attempts to assess and quantify relative deprivation. Poverty was considered in terms of a new set of dynamics. The last phase, during the Thatcher years, is for some critics the most shameful: there was ample proof that poverty was widespread and that the most vulnerable categories were being marginalized even further by the government's pursuit of market orientated policies. Whether the Thatcher Governments were right or wrong is a subject of political debate. One thing is certain however: social policies during the 1980s tended to expose and exacerbate the ugliest possible aspects of very basic "want". In this way public opinion was made uncompromisingly aware of the nature and incidence of poverty, the indubitable signs of an unequal nation.

International audience ; It is useful to suggest that the history of measuring poverty between 1942 and 1990 follows three phases. For twenty years after Beveridge there was no point in measuring poverty since it had been taken care of by the thriving welfare state. The next phase, during which poverty was "rediscovered" in the midst of plenty, witnessed genuine attempts to assess and quantify relative deprivation. Poverty was considered in terms of a new set of dynamics. The last phase, during the Thatcher years, is for some critics the most shameful: there was ample proof that poverty was widespread and that the most vulnerable categories were being marginalized even further by the government's pursuit of market orientated policies. Whether the Thatcher Governments were right or wrong is a subject of political debate. One thing is certain however: social policies during the 1980s tended to expose and exacerbate the ugliest possible aspects of very basic "want". In this way public opinion was made uncompromisingly aware of the nature and incidence of poverty, the indubitable signs of an unequal nation.

AbstractInequality is important, both for its own sake and for its political, social, and economic implications. However, measuring inequality is not straightforward, as it requires decisions to be made on the variable, population, and distributional characteristics of interest. These decisions will naturally influence the conclusions that are drawn so they must be closely linked to an underlying purpose, which is ultimately defined by a social welfare function. This paper outlines important considerations when making each of these decisions, before surveying recent advances in measuring inequality and suggesting avenues for future work.

What do we mean by inequality comparisons? If the rich just get richer and the poor get poorer, the answer might seem easy. But what if the income distribution changes in a complicated way? Can we use mathematical or statistical techniques to simplify the comparison problem in a way that has economic meaning? What does it mean to measure inequality? Is it similar to National Income? Or a price index? Is it enough just to work out the Gini coefficient?Measuring Inequality tackles these questions and examines the underlying principles of inequality measurement and its relation to welfare economi

Recent research on international interdependence has led to increasingly sophisticated conceptualizations of the phenomenon. However, it has not been very successful in measuring interdependence, nor in testing theories about it. Although the theoretical message of most interdependence research is that interdependence is multinational or systemic, empirical operationalization has tended to concentrate on looking for interdependence (or integration, or community) as a relationship between a pair of nation states, rather than as an international pattern of behavior among an entire set of countries. Complicating these empirical analyses is their lack of operationally defined end states. In general, the approach has been to look for changes or differences in behavior, rather than for absolute levels of interdependence or integration. This is, at best, only an indirect test of the validity of a theory, regardless of how well or how badly it enables one to examine and compare one set of nations with another or the same set over time.

Principal-agent analyses of delegation to international organizations have advanced our understanding of international cooperation through institutions. However, broader tests of why and when states delegate are not possible without a clear means for objectively identifying and measuring delegation. This paper develops a metric for delegation based upon the services the agent provides to its principals and the resources and autonomy it has to provide those services. This numerical metric is continuous and generalizable to a wide variety of principal-agent relationships. This paper then demonstrates the face validity of the measure with case studies of delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The paper concludes with a test of Realist and Institutionalist hypotheses for cooperation using the delegation metric, demonstrating the complexity of the underlying reasons we observe delegation. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11558-009-9076-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Adapted from the source document.

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents Page -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Notes on Contributors and Editors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- PART I: THE PROBLEM AND ITS IDENTIFICATION -- 2 Measuring Corruption -- 3 Corruption Definition and Measurement -- 4 What are We Trying to Measure? Reviewing the Basics of Corruption Definition -- 5 Measuring Corruption – The Validity and Precision of Subjective Indicators (CPI) -- 6 Measuring the Immeasurable: Boundaries and Functions of (Macro) Corruption Indices -- 7 The Non-Perception Based Measurement of Corruption: A Review of Issues and Methods from a Policy Perspective -- 8 Perceptions, Experience and Lies: What Measures Corruption and What do Corruption Measures Measure? -- PART II: THE CASE STUDIES -- 9 Corruption Indices for Russian Regions -- 10 Corruption Risk Areas and Corruption Resistance -- 11 The Public as Our Partner in the Fight Against Corruption -- 12 Citizen Report Cards -- 13 Corruption and Patronage Politics: 'Harambee' in Kenya -- 14 Measuring Corruption: Exploring the Iceberg

With global supply chains, any value added or production task can be traded as part of goods. This means that competitiveness can be measured either in terms of?tasks? (Bems and Johnson, 2012), or goods, but with goods prices reflecting the cost of tasks embedded in those goods. We show that when measuring competitiveness in goods, the formula used in computing the real effective exchange rates at the IMF (Bayoumi, Lee, and Jayanthi, 2005) needs to be expressed in terms of the price of value added and needs an additional term, which captures a gain or loss in competitiveness of goods due to o

In addition to the legal and political implications of the case, the United States Supreme Court's decision in Baker v. Carr brought sharply into public focus the technical problem of how to measure legislative malapportionment. The case itself exemplifies these various dimensions of the issue, for the majority opinion of Mr. Justice Clark and the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Harlan disagree not only regarding the law and the public policy of judicial intervention; they are also in manifest disagreement concerning "the facts" of malapportionment in Tennessee as of the time of the decision in March 1962. Our survey of the scholarly literature on the subject of apportionment, during the past decade, convinces us that the contributions of political scientists (and other commentators on the question) have made less than satisfactory progress thus far in the direction of devising an adequate metric to assist in the evaluation of what all concede is today a major problem in the theory and practice of democratic politics. In the absence of a reliable and valid method for measuring differences in apportionment along a common dimension, it is difficult to see how rational consideration of the normative aspects of the issue may be possible.