Suchergebnisse

This study examines the extent to which individual's attitudes toward government responsibility for child care provisions are influenced by personal characteristics as well as the social contexts in which these attitudes are formed. The analysis draws on data from a random sample of 24, 240 respondents in 12 of the countries included in the European Social Survey (ESS) round 4 (2008-2009). The analytic framework focuses on individual-level factors related to self-interest, perceptions of the current care available and egalitarian ideology as well as the societal context reflected in the alternative institutional arrangements for social welfare represented by the countries clustered into different welfare state regimes. The findings indicate that among the individual level variables, although factors related to self interest were significant, egalitarian ideology had the relatively strongest impact on the respondents' level of support for government provision of child care. At the institutional level the introduction of welfare regimes increased the proportion of explained variance well beyond that accounted for by individual level factors. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

This study examines the extent to which individual's attitudes toward government responsibility for child care provisions are influenced by personal characteristics as well as the social contexts in which these attitudes are formed. The analysis draws on data from a random sample of 24, 240 respondents in 12 of the countries included in the European Social Survey (ESS) round 4 (2008-2009). The analytic framework focuses on individual-level factors related to self-interest, perceptions of the current care available and egalitarian ideology as well as the societal context reflected in the alternative institutional arrangements for social welfare represented by the countries clustered into different welfare state regimes. The findings indicate that among the individual level variables, although factors related to self interest were significant, egalitarian ideology had the relatively strongest impact on the respondents' level of support for government provision of child care. At the institutional level the introduction of welfare regimes increased the proportion of explained variance well beyond that accounted for by individual level factors. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

We examine the theoretical interrelations between progressive income taxation and macroeconomic (in)stability in an otherwise standard one-sector real business cycle model with utility-generating government purchases of goods and services. When private and public consumption expenditures are complements in the household utility and the tax schedule is progressive, we analytically show that the economy exhibits indeterminacy and sunspots if and only if the degree of government-spending preference externality is higher than a critical threshold. Unlike traditional Keynesian-type stabilization policies, raising the tax progressivity may destabilize this version of our model by generating endogenous cyclical fluctuations. Moreover, the economy always displays saddle-path stability and equilibrium uniqueness under utility substitutability between private and public consumptions and progressive taxation.

Abstract. In recent years, an important development in flood management has been the focal shift from flood protection towards flood risk management. This change greatly promoted the progress of flood control research in a multidisciplinary way. Moreover, given the growing complexity and uncertainty in many decision situations of flood risk management, traditional methods, e.g., tight-coupling integration of one or more quantitative models, are not enough to provide decision support for managers. Within this context, this paper presents a beneficial methodological framework to enhance the effectiveness of decision support systems, through the dynamic adaptation of support regarding the needs of the decision-maker. In addition, we illustrate a loose-coupling technical prototype for integrating heterogeneous elements, such as multi-source data, multidisciplinary models, GIS tools and existing systems. The main innovation is the application of model-driven concepts, which put the system in a state of continuous iterative optimization. We define the new system as a model-driven decision support system (MDSS ). Two characteristics that differentiate the MDSS are as follows: (1) it is made accessible to non-technical specialists; and (2) it has a higher level of adaptability and compatibility. Furthermore, the MDSS was employed to manage the flood risk in the Jingjiang flood diversion area, located in central China near the Yangtze River. Compared with traditional solutions, we believe that this model-driven method is efficient, adaptable and flexible, and thus has bright prospects of application for comprehensive flood risk management.

This article examines the quantitative interrelations between sectoral composition of public spending and equilibrium (in)determinacy in a two-sector real business cycle model with positive productive externalities in investment. When government purchases of consumption and investment goods are set as constant fractions of their respective sectoral output, we show that the public-consumption share plays no role in the model's local dynamics, and that a sufficiently high public-investment share can stabilize the economy against endogenous belief-driven cyclical fluctuations. When each type of government spending is postulated as a constant proportion of the economy's total output, we find that there exists a trade-off between public consumption versus investment expenditures to yield saddle-path stability and equilibrium uniqueness. © 2014 Western Economic Association International.

This article examines the quantitative interrelations between sectoral composition of public spending and equilibrium (in)determinacy in a two-sector real business cycle model with positive productive externalities in investment. When government purchases of consumption and investment goods are set as constant fractions of their respective sectoral output, we show that the public-consumption share plays no role in the model's local dynamics, and that a sufficiently high public-investment share can stabilize the economy against endogenous belief-driven cyclical fluctuations. When each type of government spending is postulated as a constant proportion of the economy's total output, we find that there exists a trade-off between public consumption versus investment expenditures to yield saddle-path stability and equilibrium uniqueness. © 2014 Western Economic Association International.

Computational Social Choice is an interdisciplinary research area involving Economics, Political Science, and Social Science on the one side, and Mathematics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems) on the other side. Typical computational problems studied in this field include the vulnerability of voting procedures against attacks, or preference aggregation in multi-agent systems. Parameterized Algorithmics is a subfield of Theoretical Computer Science seeking to exploit meaningful problem-specific parameters in order to identify tractable special cases of in general computationally hard problems. In this paper, we propose nine of our favorite research challenges concerning the parameterized complexity of problems appearing in this context. This work is dedicated to Jianer Chen, one of the strongest problem solvers in the history of parameterized algorithmics, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Keywords: NP-hard problems; parameterized complexity; fixed-parameter tractability; kernelization; exact algorithms; voting; decision making; cake cutting