Debt in just societies: A general framework for regulating credit

Debt presents a dilemma to societies: successful societies benefit from a substantial infrastructure of consumer, commercial, corporate, and sovereign debt but debt can cause substantial private and social harm. Pre‐crisis and post‐crisis solutions have seesawed between subsidizing and restricting debt, between leveraging and deleveraging. A consensus exists among governments and international financial institutions that financial stability is the fundamental normative principle underlying financial regulation. Financial stability, however, is insensitive to equality concerns and can produce morally impermissible aggregations in which the least advantaged in a society are made worse off. Solutions based only on financial stability can restrict debt without accounting for the risk of harm to persons least able to bear the risk, worsen preexisting inequalities, destroy or impair the net worth of households, and impose unfavorable distributive consequences. This article offers a new approach to assist policymakers in developing and evaluating regulation to take criteria in addition to financial stability into account, but which do not undermine the aim of financial stability. It calls for a luck egalitarian approach, offering policymakers options to take the debtor's choices into account while still accounting for cognitive mistakes people often make in debt decisionmaking. It offers a general framework for the underlying principles for the regulation of debt: its focus is not on any particular forms of debt or its regulation but in structuring debt regulation more generally. It offers a set of recommendations on how regulators can take concerns about luck and equality into account in regulatory design.     

Class War in the Voting Booth: Bias Against High-Income Congressional Candidates

Do Americans care how much money congressional candidates earn? We conducted three experiments to examine how candidates' incomes affect voters' perceptions of the candidates' traits and ultimately their vote intention. Subjects evaluated otherwise identical candidates with annual incomes randomly varying between $75,000, $3 million, and a candidate with no income information provided. Results from the three experiments are remarkably similar. Subjects viewed the $3 million earner as significantly more intelligent than the candidate with no income information provided, but this benefit of high income was overshadowed by significant biases against the $3 million candidate. Subjects consistently viewed the $3 million earner as less honest, less caring, and less representative of them than the other candidates. Ultimately, subjects were less likely to say they would vote for the $3 million candidate. These findings demonstrate that the campaign advantages that high-income candidates enjoy are somewhat offset by voters' initial bias against them.     

Housing prices and wealth inequality in Western Europe

Abstract

Comparative political economy (CPE) has robustly examined the political and institutional determinants of income inequality. However, the study of wealth, which is more unequally distributed than income, has been largely understudied within CPE. Using new data from the World Income Database (WID), this article examines how economic, political and institutional dynamics shape wealth-to-income ratios within Western European and OECD countries. It is found that the political and institutional determinants that affect income inequality have no short- or long-run effects on the wealth-to-income ratio. Rather, the rise in wealth-to-income ratios is driven by rising housing prices, as well as price changes in other financial assets, not home ownership or national saving rates. The article concludes by examining how the changing dynamics of housing prices and wealth inequality will increasingly shape intergenerational – and associated class-based – political conflict in Western Europe.     

Migrant women breadwinners in Italy during the crisis: improvement or trap?

Gender gaps in some aspects of the labour market in Europe narrowed during the recent economic crisis, mainly because men were hit harder and because of the ‘added worker effect’. Therefore, the number of families with a single wage-earner, in particular female-headed households, increased. However, the differential impact of the crisis on male and female labour force in part was an unintended effect of the ‘gendered’ and ‘racialized’ structure of the labour market. Occupational concentration in care and reproductive work and the public sector in fact protected women from unemployment. Adopting an intersectional approach and using individual and household data from the Labour Force Survey from 2008 to 2015, the aim of this paper is to assess to what extent the gendered and ‘racialized’ structure of the Italian labour market has changed, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, and to what extent the increase in female breadwinner families, especially among migrants, hides widening or narrowing intersectional inequalities by gender and citizenship.     

Fragile states and the evolution of risk governance: intervention,prevention and extension

Following the plane crashes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, Ulrich Beck claimed that the West would need to pursue ‘border-transcending new beginnings’ towards a more cosmopolitan world. Rather than any radical transformation along cosmopolitan lines, however, this paper maps a process of incremental reform and policy bricolage, where the post-cold war politics of intervention, and the securitisation of development, have been extended to encompass international terrorism in three overlapping phases. Although these overlapping phases – intervention, prevention and extension – are reflexive moments, they constitute a strengthening of the prevailing rationalities and technologies of risk rather than a radical rupture.     

日本家庭在循环经济发展中的经验和做法及对我国的启示

家庭作为消费领域的基本单元,对循环经济发展起到重要促进作用。日本是最早发展循环经济的国家之一,其家庭促进循环经济发展的成功经验值得中国借鉴。由此得到启示,我国应重视家庭这一循环经济发展的切入点,提高公众对循环经济的认知度、重视女性在循环经济实践中的地位、完善城市生活垃圾回收体系、加强家庭环境教育、深化"绿色住宅"理念,促进循环经济的深入发展。     

Asset Ownership and Future Orientation of Youth and Their Parents: Evidence From Ghana

Although future orientation influences a variety of desirable behaviors, few studies have examined the relationship between economic resources and future orientation. In this study, we investigated whether and how asset ownership influences future orientation. We analyzed survey data collected from 3,007 Ghanaian youth and their parents. We used factor analysis to determine the psychometric qualities of our instruments, and propensity score analysis to examine the relationship between asset ownership and future orientation. Results suggest that asset ownership influences future orientation of youth and their parents. However, the direction of the relationship depends on the type of asset. Ownership of household possessions, including televisions contributes to higher levels of future orientation, but livestock ownership has a negative effect on future orientation. We discuss implications for future research, as well as programs for youth and their families.     

户籍制度改革的几点思考

当前,我国的户籍制度改革已经进入了重要阶段,我国的户籍改革制度将走向何方,一直是人们所关注的。随着改革开放的深入发展,我国目前的户籍制度与我国市场经济的不适应性已凸显。     

Understanding unequal turnout: Education and voting in comparative perspective

Well-educated citizens vote more frequently than the poorly educated in some countries, including the USA. However, in many countries, no such differences are observed. One classical explanation of the presence or absence of this inequality in voting is that the strength of left-wing forces sharpens or reduces it. An alternative explanation is that some institutional arrangements and contextual features disproportionately affect the voter participation of some individuals depending on their resources, thus shaping turnout inequality. These theories are tested using multilevel modeling with data from 28 advanced industrial democracies. Compulsory voting reduces inequalities because under this system quasi-universal turnout is achieved. In addition, the poorly educated vote more frequently when the voting procedure is easy and when there are few political parties, thus reducing turnout inequality. However, strong left-wing parties and trade unions are not associated with more equal turnout.     

Increasingly unequal turnout in Eastern European new democracies: Communist and transitional legacies versus new institutions

Unequal turnout, namely that educated citizens are more likely to vote, has been a long-standing pre-occupation of scholars of political participation and has been shown to exist across established democracies in varying degrees. Using pooled cross-sectional individual level data covering the period from 1990 to 2007 across 12 post-communist new democracies, this paper examines the applicability of existing explanations for unequal turnout in the Eastern European context. The paper shows that while voting procedures explain some cross-national variation in unequal turnout, turnout inequality is likewise shaped over time by processes related to the transition from communism, primarily the fading of initial excitement with democratic elections. The mechanism of learning among mature voters rather than generational replacement dominates the latter process.