Intergenerational mobility in self-employment: a regional approach

Self-employment is an important option in the work careers of many. It may be seen as a learning process illustrated for example in the social development model by Gibb and Ritchie (1982) and in the model of entrepreneurial careers by Dyer (1994). In the former, entrepreneurship is mainly seen in terms of the situations which individuals encounter and the social groups to which they relate. Among many others, family background, education and work experience have an effect directly, or indirectly through intentions (see Krueger and Carsrud 1993)on becoming self-employed. The children of parents owned a business are more likely to see such a career as more acceptable than working for someone else. An individual who has a self-employed parent possess a kind of 'entrepreneurial human capital'. Family background may provide self-confidence and social support, a supply of resources needed by the business, and strategic capacity to learn and organise for new activities. The movement to self-employment may also simply arise because children tend to inherit family firms. This paper analyses self-employment among children with parents owned a business based on the Finnish Longitudinal Census data and the Longitudinal Employment statistics from the period of 1970 to 1995 (1998). This exceptionally wide register based data makes possible the examination of intergenerational mobility in different regions. In the data file, individuals belonging to age-group 0-14 years as of 1970 have the socio-economic status, industry and occupational status of their household reference person, mostly the father, included in their record. Our sample is consisted of those children in 1970 who are from families of self-employed. The aim of this paper is to describe and model the swift into self-employment among children of self-employed parents. The explanatory variables are divided into three categories: family background, individual characteristics, and regional features. The analysis refers to the year 1995, and when possible, to the year 1998. Follow-up of individuals throughout the study period will also be made. Main questions concern the role of family background, sex, education, industry and region in the inheritance of entrepreneurship. The results are also compared with the results based on a sample of individuals belonging to the same age group but with non self-employed parents.

On the Existence of Markov Perfect Equilibria in Perfect Information Games

We study the existence of pure strategy Markov perfect equilibria in two-person perfect information games. There is a state space X and each period player's possible actions are a subset of X. This set of feasible actions depends on the current state, which is determined by the choice of the other player in the previous period. We assume that X is a compact Hausdorff space and that the action correspondence has an acyclic and asymmetric graph. For some states there may be no feasible actions and then the game ends. Payoffs are either discounted sums of utilities of the states visited, or the utility of the state where the game ends. We give sufficient conditions for the existence of equilibrium e.g. in case when either feasible action sets are finite or when players' payoffs are continuously dependent on each other. The latter class of games includes zero-sum games and pure coordination games.dynamic games, Markov perfect equilibrium

Valuating Payoff Streams under Unequal Discount Factors

We study repeated prize allocation problem when the discount factors f the agents are not equal. It is shown that the feasible set of payoffs is not well behaved. In particular, it is not convex as it contains holes and caves. The Pareto frontier is everywhere discontinuous and there is an open subset of discount factors such that the feasible set is totally disconnected.payoffs, differentiated discount factor, repeated games

More Borda Count Variations for Project Assesment

We introduce and analyze the following variants of the Borda rule: median Borda rule,geometric Borda rule, Litvak’s method as well as methods based on forming linear combinations of entries in the preference outranking matrix. The properties we focus upon are the elimination of the Condorcet loser as well as several consistency-type criteria.Borda rule, median rule, Nash welfare function, outranking matrix, maximin rule, consistency

On the Existence of Undominated Elements of Acyclic Relations

We study the existence of undominated elements of acyclic and irreflexive relations. A sufficient condition for the existence is given in the general case without any topological assumptions. Sufficient conditions are also given when the relation in question is defined on a compact Hausdorff space. We study the existence of fixed points of acyclic correspondences, the existence of stable sets, and the possibility of representing the relation by a real valued function.acyclic relations, undominated elements

Physics of the Cosmic Microwave Background and the Planck Mission

This lecture is a sketch of the physics of the cosmic microwave background. The observed anisotropy can be divided into four main contributions: variations in the temperature and gravitational potential of the primordial plasma, Doppler effect from its motion, and a net red/blueshift the photons accumulate from traveling through evolving gravitational potentials on their way from the primordial plasma to here. These variations are due to primordial perturbations, probably caused by quantum fluctuations in the very early universe. The ongoing Planck satellite mission to observe the cosmic microwave background is also described.Comment: Proceedings of the 2010 CERN Summer School, Raseborg (Finland), submitted for publication in a CERN Yellow Repor