Suchergebnisse

Purpose
This paper aims to provide an overview of the development periods of home-based learning in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 pandemic, then discusses the differences in how the more affluent and well-educated middle-class parents and the economically and culturally disadvantaged working-class parents have dealt with the challenges of this new learning mode in their children's education.


Design/methodology/approach
This research mainly adopted the qualitative research method, and used data from multiple sources, including online and offline participant observations, informal interviews and second-hand official reports.


Findings
The preliminary findings suggest that due to the closure of the formal schooling system, the impact of unequal family resources – such as tangible economic investment and intangible cultural and social support – on students' academic performance has been exposed, thus reinforcing the pre-existing inequality between different social classes.


Research limitations/implications
The findings of this paper are primarily based on preliminary observations and informal interviews, and it needs more systematic studies, both qualitative and quantitative, are needed to provide further empirical evidence to demonstrate the impacts of digital, housing and knowledge divide between the middle- and working-class families on students' academic performance.


Originality/value
The paper presents new empirical data concerning the class mechanisms underlying home-based learning during the class suspension in Hong Kong. It shows that home-based learning in this challenging time has exposed the existing inequality in education.

PurposeChina's rapid economic growth has greatly changed its consumption pattern of agricultural food. Wealthy Chinese consumers demand food of superior quality. However, with the national grain security goal focused primarily on self-sufficiency, China has no choice but to keep increasing the scale of agricultural industrialization and modernization, which inevitably brings in unwanted chemical input that puts food safety at risk. China's consumers started to adopt an alternative food supply method. This paper aims to examine how Chinese consumers use privatized ways (i.e. their own social capital) to select high-quality local agricultural products as a unique type of inverted quarantine.Design/methodology/approachThis paper mainly used a qualitative research method, including participant observation and in-depth interviews as the main sources of data. For the fieldwork, two providers of high-quality food in Beijing were selected as the research sites. Data were collected by in-depth interviews with consumers and organizers of the two local food suppliers and participant observation of online and offline interactions between food providers and consumers.FindingsInstead of seeing development of consumer citizenship, what is witnessed is consumers use their private resources or networks to deal with risks created by institutional failure. In this sense, it is a type of inverted quarantine, but is different from what Szasz described in his book. Instead of purchasing bottled water or organic food sold in the mainstream supermarkets, Chinese middle-class consumers rely more on their personal relations with food suppliers and start to adopt an alternative way of food supply.Research limitations/implicationsBeijing consumers are among the most privileged, in terms of income level and access to alternative trusted sources of food. Therefore, the findings of this paper may not be applicable to other provincial cities in China. A comparative research on healthy food consumption patterns among major cities in China still require further attention. In addition, with the flourish of online shopping platforms, it is highly likely that the current shopping patterns among the affluent middle-class consumers will change accordingly.Originality/valueThis paper reveals the current uncertainty experienced by Chinese middle-class consumers and showed their concerns related to food safety. It may shed some lights on the current discussion about middle-class anxiety in Mainland China. It also developed a typology of inverted quarantine with empirical evidence, and therefore helps further develop the concept of inverted quarantine.

We study the effect of public information on collective decision-making in a committee with members of both common and conflicting interests. We show that the set of preferences that allow for the existence of an informative voting equilibrium can be heavily restricted by the presence of a public signal, regardless of the size of the committee and the choice of the voting threshold value. What's worse, the presence of the public information introduces an inefficient equilibrium which robustly exists across different voting rules. To mitigate the harmful effect of the public information, we propose to use a class of more flexible voting rules, whose threshold values depend on both the precision and the realization of the public signal, that may restore the informative voting equilibrium. In particular, in a standard setting with common interest agents, the contingent voting rule that we construct not only always restores the informative voting equilibrium but also achieves full informational efficiency.

Surveys measuring happiness or preferences generate discrete ordinal data. Ordered response models, which are used to analyze such data, suffer from an identification problem. Their conclusions depend on distributional assumptions about a latent variable. We propose using response times to solve that problem. Response times contain information about the distribution of the latent variable through a chronometric effect. Using an online survey experiment, we verify the chronometric effect. We then provide theoretical conditions for testing conventional distributional assumptions. These assumptions are rejected in some cases, but overall our evidence is consistent with the qualitative validity of the conventional models. (JEL C14, D60, D91, I31)