The division of labour between academia and industry for the generation of radical inventions

The Journal of Technology Transfer - The paper investigates the relationship between public research and radical technological development. This study draws on the theory of recombinant innovation...     

Interpersonal Sensitivity, Romantic Stress, and the Prediction of Depression: A Study of Inner-City, Minority Adolescent Girls

The role of interpersonal sensitivity in the relation between romantic stress and depression was examined in 55 adolescent girls from an inner-city high school. Depression, interpersonal sensitivity, and chronic and episodic romantic stress were measured at two time points, 6 months apart. Interpersonal sensitivity was found to moderate the longitudinal relation between romantic stress (both chronic and episodic) and depression. In contrast, interpersonal sensitivity did not potentiate depressive responses to non-romantic interpersonal stress, suggesting particular importance of stress in the romantic domain for adolescent girls. Results indicate that girls' sensitivities to romantic relationship stress should be specifically addressed in depression prevention and intervention programs.Received her PhD from the University of Southern California. Research interests include the influence of romantic relationship factors, such as romantic stress and dating violence, on the development of depression during adolescence.Received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Research interests include the interplay between adolescent depression, personality disorder symptoms, and interpersonal variables including adjustment in friendships and romantic relationships.Research interests include cognitive and interpersonal factors in adolescent depression.     

见证改变

许多年来,我们所做的一切,就是为了让人们了解,世界各地贫穷的人们都渴望能够得到金融系统的支持。这种支持将改变他们的生活———全球各地的摄影师见证了这一点。世界银行扶贫协商小组(CGAP)是一个独立的政策研究中心,致力于让全球穷人能接触到金融服务。CGAP由30多家发展机构和私人基金支持,共同的目标是消除贫困。CGAP...     

Gender, social support, and depression in criminal justice-involved adolescents

Knowing where criminal justice-involved teens look for support and whether those supports reduce depression has important and possibly gender-specific treatment implications for this vulnerable population. This study examines the relationships between social support and depression in a mixed-gender sample of 198 incarcerated adolescents. Greater support from families and overall and greater satisfaction with supports predicted lower depression for boys and girls. Support from siblings and extended family strongly predicted lower depression; support from parents and from friends was either not related or only weakly related to depression. Girls reported higher levels of depression, more support from friends and extended family, and less support from parents than did boys. Family, sibling, and overall support were stronger predictors of depression for girls than for boys. Results suggest that nonparent family members, especially siblings and extended family, provide important emotional resources for teens in the criminal justice system.     

Who is the Author of Halakhah?

The Jewish Law (Halakahh) is probably the older legal system working in our time. It is established on a hierarchy of different texts. The oldest and more authoritative is the Torah (the five books of Moshe), then come the Mishnah, the Talmud, the compilation as Maimonide’s Mishne Torah and Caro’s Shulchan Arukh, then the responsa of the rabbis. While the authorship of the later texts is more or less clear, the one of the Torah is highly problematic, also in the self-understanding of Jewish hermeneutics. This question is discussed in the present paper not from a philological-historical point of view, but from a semiotic one, trying to understand what devices and regimes of enunciation are enacted by the text in order to establish its semiotic-juridical effects. A special double enunciation frame is proposed as the mark of the legislative power in the text, in correlation with another textual device, a sort of divine “signature”. The further evolution of the authorship of the Jewish Law is discussed in its relation with the question of the autonomy in the interpretation of the sacred text.     

Allele sharing in first-degree and unrelated pairs of individuals in the Ge F I AmpFlSTR Profiler Plus database

Eleven Italian forensic laboratories participated in a population study based on the AB Profiler Plus loci with proficiency testing. The validated database, including 1340 individuals, is available on-line. Tests for Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, gametic unbalance, and heterogeneity of gene frequency were generally not significant. Gene frequencies at each locus were consistent with those of two previously published Italian studies, but different from a third. Individuals of each subsample were paired, and the total number of alleles shared across the nine loci was determined in each pair. The analysis was replicated over the total sample. In addition, two samples of mother-child pairs (N=315) and full-sib pairs (N=91) were subjected to allele sharing analysis. The resulting distributions were sufficiently distinct from the sample of unrelated pairs as to be of practical usefulness.     

Public markets, private orderings and corporate governance

In the New Property Rights approach the degree of incompleteness of markets is taken independently of the cost of the public ordering and of their efficiency relatively to private orderings. In this approach “public markets,” similarly to a Swiss cheese, are either assumed to be nonexistent empty holes (because of infinite third party verification costs) or assumed to be smooth and efficient (because of zero third party verification costs). When we allow for positive but not infinite third party verification costs we are necessarily pushed back to the insights of Commons, Coase, Fuller and Williamson. The degree of (in)completeness of public markets becomes an endogenous economic problem and managers can be seen as agents that make “second order” specific investments to run specific relations that cannot be efficiently handled by public markets. Managers and the public authorities build respectively private and public “legal equilibria” that set the working rules within which transactions can take place. Private and public legal equilibria are not only substitutes but also complements. This complementarity is an important source of the path dependency that characterizes the development of different legal systems. The framework is applied to GM’s acquisition of Fisher Body. We suggest that, contrary to the claims of the New property Rights approach, the advantages of the acquisition were not due to the superior incentives of the new private owners but should be rather related to the replacement of public markets by the new private ordering set up by Alfred Sloan.     

Reasonable,Ruled, Responsible

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The paper begins by posing the theoretical problem of the foundation of reasonable...     

Can a contractarian be a paternalist? The logic of James M. Buchanan’s system

We consider the simplest version of a jungle economy à la Piccione-Rubinstein, wherein as many agents as goods are assumed, agents consume at most one indivisible good, and a transitive strong power relation exists. We first study the wilderness of jungle equilibria, i.e., whether they are Pareto-minimal (an allocation is Pareto-minimal if it is impossible to reduce the welfare of one agent without increasing the welfare of another). We show that jungle equilibria are not necessarily Pareto-minimal. We then study and characterize the set of Pareto-minimal jungle equilibria. Second, we tackle the case of equally powerful people, in contrast to the assumption that the power relation is asymetric. Assuming specifically a transitive weak power relation, we show that jungle equilibria exist, but that they are not always unique, nor Pareto-optimal. We also provide conditions under which those equilibria are Pareto-minimal.

     

Correction to: Abstract rules for complex systems

European Journal of Law and Economics - The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The name of corresponding author Mario Mario Rizzo was incorrect. The correct name...