How has Economic Restructuring Affected China’s Urban Workers?*

Using data from the China Urban Labor Survey conducted in five large Chinese cities at year end 2001, we quantify the nature and magnitude of shocks to employment and worker benefits during the period of economic structuring from 1996 to 2001, and evaluate the extent to which adversely affected urban workers had access to public and private assistance. Employment shocks were large and widespread, and were particularly hard on older workers and women. Unemployment reached double digits in all sample cities and labor force participation declined by 8 percent. Urban residents faced modest levels of wage and pension arrears, and sharp declines in health benefits. Public assistance programs for dislocated workers had limited coverage, with most job-leavers relying upon private assistance to support consumption, mainly from other household members.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40014/3/wp628.pd

Skill-Biased Technical Change and the Cost of Higher Education: An Exploratory Model

We document trends in higher education costs and tuition over the past 50 years. To explain these trends, we develop and simulate a general equilibrium model with skill- and sector-biased technical change. We assume that higher education suffers from Baumol's (1967) service sector disease, in that the quantity of labor and capital needed to educate a student is constant over time. Calibrating the model, we show that it can explain the rise in college costs between 1959 and 2000. We then use the model to perform a number of numerical experiments. We find, consistent with a number of studies, that changes in the tuition discount rate have little long-run effect on college attainment.

How has Economic Restructuring Affected China’s Urban Workers?*

Using data from the China Urban Labor Survey conducted in five large Chinese cities at year end 2001, we quantify the nature and magnitude of shocks to employment and worker benefits during the period of economic structuring from 1996 to 2001, and evaluate the extent to which adversely affected urban workers had access to public and private assistance. Employment shocks were large and widespread, and were particularly hard on older workers and women. Unemployment reached double digits in all sample cities and labor force participation declined by 8 percent. Urban residents faced modest levels of wage and pension arrears, and sharp declines in health benefits. Public assistance programs for dislocated workers had limited coverage, with most job-leavers relying upon private assistance to support consumption, mainly from other household members.labor, unemployment, China, restructuring

Homeostasis and Well Being

The paper suggests that maintenance of a homeostatic equilibrium provides a rationale for many actions of economic agents. Homeostatic equilibrium has physical, economic, emotional, psychological and environmental dimensions. The characteristics of this equilibrium include feelings of safety, trust, connectedness with friends, family and community, and a predictable and welcoming social and work environment. Individuals generally make decisions that help them move toward and achieve this state of equilibrium. Departure from homeostasis reduces well being and stimulates agents to take actions that will return them to a state of homeostasis. This hypothesis is tested with probit analysis using sample responses from the four waves of the World Values Surveys conducted between 1980 and 2002. Results generally support the homeostasis hypothesis. Variables that reflect departure from homeostasis such as divorce and poor health are highly significant, pointing to a reduction in well being. Variables that reflect the importance of friends, family, a trusting social and work environment have significant impacts to raise well being.

Topological magnetoplasmon

Classical wave fields are real-valued, ensuring the wave states at opposite frequencies and momenta to be inherently identical. Such a particle-hole symmetry can open up new possibilities for topological phenomena in classical systems. Here we show that the historically studied two-dimensional (2D) magnetoplasmon, which bears gapped bulk states and gapless one-way edge states near zero frequency, is topologically analogous to the 2D topological p+\Ii p superconductor with chiral Majorana edge states and zero modes. We further predict a new type of one-way edge magnetoplasmon at the interface of opposite magnetic domains, and demonstrate the existence of zero-frequency modes bounded at the peripheries of a hollow disk. These findings can be readily verified in experiment, and can greatly enrich the topological phases in bosonic and classical systems.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 1 supporting materia

High Dimensional Semiparametric Gaussian Copula Graphical Models

In this paper, we propose a semiparametric approach, named nonparanormal skeptic, for efficiently and robustly estimating high dimensional undirected graphical models. To achieve modeling flexibility, we consider Gaussian Copula graphical models (or the nonparanormal) as proposed by Liu et al. (2009). To achieve estimation robustness, we exploit nonparametric rank-based correlation coefficient estimators, including Spearman's rho and Kendall's tau. In high dimensional settings, we prove that the nonparanormal skeptic achieves the optimal parametric rate of convergence in both graph and parameter estimation. This celebrating result suggests that the Gaussian copula graphical models can be used as a safe replacement of the popular Gaussian graphical models, even when the data are truly Gaussian. Besides theoretical analysis, we also conduct thorough numerical simulations to compare different estimators for their graph recovery performance under both ideal and noisy settings. The proposed methods are then applied on a large-scale genomic dataset to illustrate their empirical usefulness. The R language software package huge implementing the proposed methods is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network: http://cran. r-project.org/.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures; the Annals of Statistics, 201

Emission spectrum of a dressed exciton-biexciton complex in a semiconductor quantum dot

The photoluminescence spectrum of a single quantum dot was recorded as a secondary resonant laser optically dressed either the vacuum-to-exciton or the exciton-to-biexciton transitions. High-resolution polarization-resolved measurements using a scanning Fabry-Perot interferometer reveal splittings of the linearly-polarized fine-structure states that are non-degenerate in an asymmetric quantum dot. These splittings manifest as either triplets or doublets and depend sensitively on laser intensity and detuning. Our approach realizes complete resonant control of a multi-excitonic system in emission, which can be either pulsed or continuous-wave, and offers direct access to the emitted photons.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Hemoglobin A1c Levels Modify Associations between Dietary Acid Load and Breast Cancer Recurrence.

BackgroundMetabolic acidosis promotes cancer metastasis. No prospective studies have examined the association between dietary acid load and breast cancer recurrence among breast cancer survivors, who are susceptible to metabolic acidosis. Hyperglycemia promotes cancer progression and acid formation; however, researchers have not examined whether hyperglycemia can modify the association between dietary acid load and breast cancer recurrence.MethodsWe studied 3081 early-stage breast cancer survivors enrolled in the Women's Healthy Eating and Living study who provided dietary information through 24-h recalls at baseline and during follow-up and had measurements of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) at baseline. We assessed dietary acid load using two common dietary acid load scores, potential renal acid load (PRAL) score and net endogenous acid production (NEAP) score.ResultsAfter an average of 7.3 years of follow-up, dietary acid load was positively associated with recurrence when baseline HbA1c levels were ≥ 5.6% (median level) and ≥5.7% (pre-diabetic cut-point). In the stratum with HbA1c ≥ 5.6%, comparing the highest to the lowest quartile of dietary acid load, the multivariable-adjusted hazard ratio was 2.15 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.34-3.48) for PRAL and was 2.31 (95% CI 1.42-3.74) for NEAP. No associations were observed in the stratum with HbA1c levels were <5.6%. P-values for interactions were 0.01 for PRAL and 0.05 for NEAP.ConclusionsOur study demonstrated for the first time that even at or above normal to high HbA1c levels, dietary acid load was associated with increased risk of breast cancer recurrence among breast cancer survivors.ImpactsOur study provides strong evidence for developing specific dietary acid load guidelines based on HbA1c levels