The Impact of Natural Resources: Survey of Recent Quantitative Evidence

Abstract

The cross-country empirical evidence for the natural resource curse is ample, but unfortunately fraught with econometric difficulties. A recent wave of studies on measuring the impact of natural resource windfalls on the economy exploits novel datasets such as giant oil discoveries to identify effects of windfalls, uses natural experiments and within-country econometric analysis, and estimates local impacts. These studies offer more hope in the search of quantitative evidence.     

Schönheitschirurgie-Patientinnen als „ugly dopes“? Zur Medialität der Entscheidungsfindung für plastisch-chirurgische Eingriffe

The mass media’s view on the current practices of aesthetic surgery is typically negotiated in the social sciences within the realm of ideology critique: The claim is that the mass media culture industry encourages particularly female consumers to undergo surgical interventions in order to optimize their body and thus instructs them to better market themselves (their entrepreneurial self). Furthermore, this process is not sufficiently reflected by the patients; according to the discourse in social science, they mutate to “ugly dopes” who are not truly aware of the conditions to which their decision for physical optimization is subject. This paper proposes a different reading of the mediality of plastic surgery, based on an empirical analysis of interviews with plastic surgery patients. The media certainly play a crucial role as carriers of format templates for body images, but they also are being translated in particular practical contexts. There is no continuum between the body images that are displayed by the media and their individual acquirement. The medial format templates must be actively incorporated into the conflictual everyday contexts of decision making. The effect of the media is therefore accounted for by their connectivity to life-world and has a permanent, continuous irritation as a result, caused by body images.     

Shifting Foundations: women economists in the Weimar Republic

This article draws on a biographical case study of the first women to obtain doctorates in economics at the University of Berlin between 1900 and 1925. Their educational opportunities and experiences were linked to the networks that tied the women’s and social reform movements, as well as to the disciplinary differentiation of the German social sciences and the development of social work. These connections allowed them to exploit particular employment niches before and during the First World War, but the foundations of the expertise upon which women economists could call did not hold in the new political and institutional context of the Weimar Republic. What these early graduates patched together in response reveals a complex of opportunities and limitations presented by their simultaneous exploitation of essentialist and expertise‐based arguments.     

Gas Supply and EU–Russia Relations

Drawing on New Institutional Economics (NIE) theory, the article argues that EU energy policy towards Russia damages security of supply because it neglects the specific aims and propensities of Russia and Gazprom. EU Commission initiatives are based on the promotion of interdependence through market opening, favouring a policy of competition over security of supply. The reason for this focus is found in the EU's embedded inclination towards liberal markets. Russia, by contrast, has chosen suboptimal state control of natural resources over the frontier capitalism of the 1990s. Sustainability of the current rent based system and geopolitical considerations are essential to Russia and Gazprom. In this situation a pragmatic approach that aims at security of supply and security of demand seems to be more successful. In this approach, liberalisation of the market can only be a long-term goal.     

Relationship of life events and social support with psychological dysfunction among adolescents

Relationships among major life events, perceived social support, and psychological disorder were assessed in a sample of older adolescents. Negative life events and satisfaction with social support were significantly and independently related to a range of psychological symptoms. Further, the relationship between negative events and disorder was moderated by gender, the types of events experienced, and anticipated change in the psychosocial environment. The importance of the use of standardized and psychometrically sound measures of life events, social support, and psychological disorder is highlighted.Received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1980. An assistant professor, he is currently investigating stress and coping among children and adolescents.Received her Ph.D. from the University of Vermont in 1985. An assistant professor, she is currently studying social support.Received Ed. M. from Harvard Universtiy. He is a doctoral student in clinical psychology interested in the role of social support in coping with stress during adolescence.Received her BA from the University of Vermont. She is a doctoral student in clinical psychology.     

Political tolerance and stages of moral development: A conceptual and empirical alternative

The latest revisionism in the study of political tolerance has produced some of the most provocative well-designed research in the field of political science. In particular, the work by Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus offers one of the most fully specified and rigorously executed models of public opinion formation. Yet this contemporary revisionism is flawed. This paper argues that these researchers misconceptualize tolerance, that this misconception contaminates their measurement process, that the resulting model is misspecified, and that the political conclusions offered are not supported in fact or principle. More generally this paper argues that the field of public opinion as a whole has been trapped by limited conceptions about the nature of cognitive constraint and by simplistic and inadequate methods for measuring and identifying this constraint. To remedy this, a developmental measure of cognitive moral stages is fashioned along lines suggested by Kohlberg. This measure satisfies a number of tests for both validity and reliability and appears to be one of the most powerful predictors of tolerance and intolerance — if not the most powerful single predictor.