Discrimination, Income Determination and Inequality – The case of Shenzhen

This paper estimates the income effect of non productivity related discriminatory factors, compared to productivity related returns on human capital in Shenzhen. The design of the Shenzhen Household Survey 2005 that was employed enables us to include a large set of discriminating factors in a Mincer Becker type of income model. Further, we are able to take a unique look at the migrant population in this outstanding urban centre. Our results show that the human capital approach holds. We also find strong evidence of a significant influence of social norms and policies, particularly relevant in a developing and transition economy, even in such an exceptional city.Shenzhen, Income distribution, Education, Transition process

New Firm Creation and Failure: A Matching Approach

We propose that the rate of creation and failure of new firm start-ups can be modelled as a search and matching process, as in labor market matching models. Deriving an "entrepreneurial" Beveridge curve, we show that a successful start-up depends on the efficiency with which entrepreneurial ability is matched with business opportunity, and outline a number of possible applications of this matching approach to assist in formalizing the economics of entrepreneurship.Entrepreneurship, start-ups, labor market matching

Corpus Linguistics and the Law: Extending the Field from a Statistical Perspective

During the last 5–10 years, corpus-linguistic applications have slowly become more widespread in matters of legal interpretation; specifically, we see more court cases in which corpus-linguistic data are brought to bear on the (original) ordinary/public meaning of expressions in legal texts (in briefs and judicial opinions), but also more academic research focusing on if/how corpus-linguistic methods can shed light on the plain/ordinary meaning of words in a legal text.While this development is welcome, it also comes with shortcoming/risks, some of which are now hotly debated in recent and forthcoming law review articles. In particular, there is a whole family of currently debated shortcomings/risks that is virtually exclusively due to the fact that several early adopters/promoters of corpus methods for legal applications have been massively simplifying the field of corpus linguistics to what they know and what seems convenient.This is not useful for several reasons, one of which is that it makes corpus-linguistic applications in the legal field more vulnerable to various lines of attack in the legal literature. More important, however, is that reductionist corpus-linguistic applications also undermine the strength of the cases that corpus linguistics can (help) make. In this paper, I will discuss a few applications that showcase the wider range of methods that proper/full-fledged corpus analysis has to offer: one case study on historical trends in corpus data based on frequencies augmented with required but never-used additional statistics such as dispersion and uncertainty/robustness estimates; the other involves applying semantic vector spaces and word embeddings to explore (heuristically) the scope of terms

Statutory Retirement Age and Lifelong Learning

The employability of an aging population in a world of continuous technical change is top of the political agenda. Due to endogenous human capital depreciation, the effective retirement age is often below statutory retirement age resulting in unemployment among older workers. We analyze this phenomenon in a putty-putty human capital vintage model and focus on education and the speed of human capital depreciation. Introducing a two-stage education system with initial schooling and lifelong learning, not even lifelong learning turns out to be capable of aligning economic and statutory retirement. However, lifelong learning can increase the number of people reaching statutory retirement age and hence reduce the problem of old age unemployment in an aging society.lifelong learning, retirement, unemployment, education system

Towards a dynamic behavioral profile : a diachronic study of polysemous 'sentir' in Spanish

This study examines the diachronic evolution of the polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir (‘to feel’) by means of a corpus-based dynamic Behavioral Profile (BP) analysis. Methodologically, it presents the first application of the BP approach to historical data and proposes some methodological innovations not only within the current body of research in historical semantics, but also with regard to previous applications of the BP approach. First, whereas the majority of existing studies in quantitative historical semantics are largely based on observed frequencies or percentages of collocational co-occurrence, our study leverages more complex historical data that are based on the similarities of vectors. Second, this study also provides an extension of the methodological apparatus of the BP approach by complementing the traditional Hierarchical Agglomerative Cluster analysis (HAC) with a dynamic BP approach derived from Multidimensional Scaling maps (MDS). Theoretically, this methodology contributes to a comprehensive perspective on the process of Constructionalization and the nature of networks, which is illustrated on the basis of the development of the Discourse Marker (DM) lo siento (‘I’m sorry’)

Syntax from and for discourse II: More on complex sentences as meso-constructions

Abstract This paper presents a direct continuation of preceding corpus-linguistic research on complex sentence constructions with temporal adverbial clauses in a cognitive and usage-based framework (Diessel 2008; Hampe 2015). Working towards a more systematic construction-based account of complex sentences with before-, after-, until- and once-clauses in spontaneously spoken English, Hampe (2015) hypothesised that the morpho-syntactic realisations of configurations with initial adverbial clauses systematically diverge from those of configurations with final ones as a reflection of the specific functionality of each and that usage properties that are found across instantiations with a coherent functional load are retained in the schematisations creating constructions. This paper employs a multinomial regression in order to test to which extent each of eight closely related complex-sentence constructions with either initial or final before-, after-, until- and once-clauses can be predicted from the realisation of a few key morpho-syntactic properties of the respective adverbial and matrix clauses involved. The results support an analysis of complex-sentence constructions as meso-constructions that are not only specific about the subordinator and the positioning of the adverbial clause, but also retain “traces” of characteristic usage properties

Ordinary Meaning and Corpus Linguistics

This Article discusses how corpus analysis, and similar empirically based methods of language study, can help inform judicial assessments about language meaning. We first briefly outline our view of legal language and interpretation in order to underscore the importance of the ordinary meaning doctrine, and thus the relevance of tools such as corpus analysis, to legal interpretation. Despite the heterogeneity of the judicial interpretive process, and the importance of the specific context relevant to the statute at issue, conventions of meaning that cut across contexts are a necessary aspect of legal interpretation. Because ordinary meaning must in some sense be generalizable across contexts, it would seem to be subject in some way to the empirical verification that corpus analysis can provide. We demonstrate the potential of corpus analysis through the study of two rather infamous cases in which the reviewing courts made various general claims about language meaning. In both cases, United States v. Costello and Smith v. United States, the courts made statements about language that are contradicted by corpus analysis. We also demonstrate the potential of corpus analysis through Hart’s no-vehicles-in-the-park hypothetical. A discussion of how to approach Hart’s hypothetical shows the potential but also the complexities of the kind of linguistic analyses required by such scenarios. Corpus linguistics can yield results that are relevant to legal interpretation, but performing the necessary analyses is complex and requires significant training in order to perform competently. We conclude that while it is doubtful that judges will themselves become proficient at corpus linguistics, they should be receptive to the expert testimony of corpus linguists in appropriate circumstances

Linguistic annotation in/for corpus linguistics

This article surveys linguistic annotation in corpora and corpus linguistics. We first define the concept of 'corpus ' as a radial category and then, in Section 2, discuss a variety of kinds of information for which corpora are annotated and that are exploited in contemporary corpus linguistics. Section 3 then exemplifies many current formats of annotation with an eye to highlighting both the diversity of formats currently available and the emergence of XML annotation as, for now, the most widespread form of annotation. Section 4 summarizes and concludes with desiderata for future developments.