Local conflict and development projects in Indonesia : part of the problem or part of a solution ?

Drawing on an integrated mixed methods research design, the authors explore the dynamics of the development-conflict nexus in rural Indonesia, and the specific role of development projects in shaping the nature, extent, and trajectories of"everyday"conflicts. They find that projects that give inadequate attention to dispute resolution mechanisms in many cases stimulate local conflict, either through the injection of development resources themselves or less directly by exacerbating preexisting tensions in target communities. But projects that have explicit and accessible procedures for managing disputes arising from the development process are much less likely to lead to violent outcomes. The authors argue that such projects are more successful in addressing project-related conflicts because they establish direct procedures (such as forums, facilitators, and complaints mechanisms) for dealing with tensions as they arise. These direct mechanisms are less successful in addressing broader social tensions elicited by, or external to, the development process, though program mechanisms can ameliorate conflict indirectly through changing norms and networks of interaction.Post Conflict Reintegration,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Education and Society,Rural Poverty Reduction,Population Policies

The Emergence of Captive Finance Companies and Risk Segmentation of the Consumer Loan Market:Theory and Evidence

A parental seller with market power to some degree in its product market can earn rents. In this context, there is a gain to granting credit for the purchase of the product and thus the establishment of captive finance company for expanding the sales by offering loans to consumers who need financing for purchase of durable good. This paper examines the optimal behavior of such a durable good seller and its captive finance company when the consumer loan market is segmented into captive and independent lending institutions under symmetric and imperfect information on borrower’s creditworthiness. The model presents that one critical difference for captive finance company will be its credit standard. Specifically, the model indicates that captive finance company will follow a more lenient credit standard, leading to the prediction that the likelihood of repayment of a captive loan is lower than that of a bank loan, other things equal. This prediction is tested using unique data sets drawn from a major credit bureau in the U.S. The analysis of credit bureau data shows that a captive automobile loan is less likely to be repaid than a bank automobile loan, which supports the theoretical prediction.Monopolistic Competition, Consumer Loan Market, Captive Finance Company, Differential Loan Performances

Perivascular fibroblast activation states in human skin diseases

The perivascular adventitia (PA) senses and responds to injuries in blood vessels and the tissues they feed. Cells in the PA form the outermost vascular layer, joining the circulatory system to other organs. Housing hematopoietic, mesenchymal and neuronal cells allows flexible adventitial responses to diverse perturbations. However, the PA response can also be pathogenic. Thickening of the adventitia may drive ischemia and hypertension. It can also be a niche for local lymphocyte priming in diseases such as idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension. Despite their importance, PA contributions to skin diseases were understudied. The hypothesis that contrasting two cutaneous diseases, scleroderma and discoid lupus erythematosus (DLE), would illuminate discrete PA alterations was explored. Vascular changes are prominent, but distinct, in both diseases. Studying perivascular adventitial changes in these diseases may yield insights into both dermal and vascular pathologies. PA fibroblasts in healthy human skin were phenotypically distinct from the surrounding dermal fibroblasts. In both scleroderma and DLE, PA fibroblasts expanded and expressed surface markers not observed in healthy skin including vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM1), podoplanin (PDPN) and the p75 low affinity nerve growth factor receptor (NGFR). Elaborated networks of PA fibroblasts in DLE expressed VCAM1 and enmeshed dense, T cell-rich infiltrates. Transcriptional analyses indicated positive correlations between VCAM1, T cell chemoattractants and interleukin (IL)-15, which promotes their survival. Activated PA fibroblasts in DLE likely create a supportive niche for T cells infiltrating the skin. In contrast, enlarged PA fibroblast networks in scleroderma expressed NGFR in the absence of leukocyte infiltrates. This PA fibroblast phenotype was shared among reparative and pathologic scarring, and four dermal tumors. NGFR is a mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) marker, and expanded NGFR+ mesenchymal cells were immediately adjacent to cluster of differentiation (CD)34+ and CD73+ PA MSC. Expression of NGFR by PA fibroblasts is likely associated with reparative responses. Different stimuli induced VCAM1 and NGFR on cultured human dermal fibroblasts, supporting these as discrete activation states. In conclusion, these studies demonstrated the responsive and plastic nature of human dermal PA mesenchymal cells, and pointed to connections with vascular alterations in skin diseases

Credit Cards on Campus: Academic Inquiry, Objective Empiricism, or Advocacy Research? A Response

The authors react to the critique by Robert Manning and Ray Kirshak (in this issue) about the paper Usage of Credit Cards Received through College Student- Marketing Programs, which originally appeared in Journal of Student Financial Aid, 2004

Usage of Credit Cards Received Through College Student-Marketing Programs

This article provides benchmark measures of college student credit card usage by utilizing a pooled sample of over 300,000 recently opened credit card accounts. The analysis compares behavior over 12 months of account history for three groups of accounts: those opened by young adults through college student marketing programs; those opened through conventional marketing channels by young adults ages 18-24; and those opened through conventional channels by older adults. Results indicate that student marketed accounts have smaller balances, lower credit limits, and lower utilization rates than accounts opened by the other groups. Student accounts are more likely to be delinquent and have a higher likelihood of charge-off, but both the delinquency and charge-off rates for student accounts and non-student-marketed accounts of young adults converged within 24 months. These findings are consistent with card issuers’ statements that they establish student accounts with relatively low credit limits expecting that the large majority of new, young cardholders will learn how to manage a credit card, establish a credit history, and become longer-term customers

On Barron and Strachey's Cartesian Product Function

Over forty years ago, David Barron and Christopher Strachey published a startlingly elegant program for the Cartesian product of a list of lists, expressing it with a three nested occurrences of the function we now call foldr. This program is remarkable for its time because of its masterful display of higher-order functions and lexical scope, and we put it forward as possibly the first ever functional pearl. We first characterize it as the result of a sequence of program transformations, and then apply similar transformations to a program for the classical power set example. We also show that using a higher-order representation of lists allows a definition of the Cartesian product function where foldr is nested only twice

A Family of Calabi-Yau Varieties and Potential Automorphy

Mathematic