The role of personality traits in pension decisions: Findings and policy recommendations

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Applied Economics on 04 Feb 2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2018.1563670Many countries need to stimulate pension participation and contribution to ensure their citizens are prepared adequately for retirement. Identifying at-risk groups with tendencies of not joining pension plans will help governments target strategies to improve pension awareness and participation. This study investigates the role of personality traits in pension decision making using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Our results demonstrate that Extraversion significantly correlates with non-participation in private pensions, including both employer run and personal pensions. Individuals who are high in Conscientiousness are more likely to participate and pay more into personal pensions. Openness to experience is negatively correlated with saving via personal pensions. Agreeableness and Extraversion correlate inversely with the amount contributed to personal plans. This paper discusses our findings in detail and offers policy implications which may help promote pension participation and ease the problem of old age poverty.Peer reviewe

Context-Patch Face Hallucination Based on Thresholding Locality-Constrained Representation and Reproducing Learning

Face hallucination is a technique that reconstruct high-resolution (HR) faces from low-resolution (LR) faces, by using the prior knowledge learned from HR/LR face pairs. Most state-of-the-arts leverage position-patch prior knowledge of human face to estimate the optimal representation coefficients for each image patch. However, they focus only the position information and usually ignore the context information of image patch. In addition, when they are confronted with misalignment or the Small Sample Size (SSS) problem, the hallucination performance is very poor. To this end, this study incorporates the contextual information of image patch and proposes a powerful and efficient context-patch based face hallucination approach, namely Thresholding Locality-constrained Representation and Reproducing learning (TLcR-RL). Under the context-patch based framework, we advance a thresholding based representation method to enhance the reconstruction accuracy and reduce the computational complexity. To further improve the performance of the proposed algorithm, we propose a promotion strategy called reproducing learning. By adding the estimated HR face to the training set, which can simulates the case that the HR version of the input LR face is present in the training set, thus iteratively enhancing the final hallucination result. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed TLcR-RL method achieves a substantial increase in the hallucinated results, both subjectively and objectively. Additionally, the proposed framework is more robust to face misalignment and the SSS problem, and its hallucinated HR face is still very good when the LR test face is from the real-world. The MATLAB source code is available at https://github.com/junjun-jiang/TLcR-RL

Analyzing eventual leader election protocols for dynamic systems by probabilistic model checking

Leader election protocols have been intensively studied in distributed computing, mostly in the static setting. However, it remains a challenge to design and analyze these protocols in the dynamic setting, due to its high uncertainty, where typical properties include the average steps of electing a leader eventually, the scalability etc. In this paper, we propose a novel model-based approach for analyzing leader election protocols of dynamic systems based on probabilistic model checking. In particular, we employ a leading probabilistic model checker, PRISM, to simulate representative protocol executions. We also relax the assumptions of the original model to cover unreliable channels which requires the introduction of probability to our model. The experiments confirm the feasibility of our approach

Confucius Institutes

Confucius Institutes are a cluster of non-profit educational organizations that promote the Chinese language and culture outside China. At the center of this cluster is the Confucius Institute Headquarters, a public-sector institution affiliated with the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China that also operates under the name of Hanban. Hanban (汉办), in Chinese, is a colloquial abbreviation of the Guojia hanyu guoji tuiguan lingdao xiaozu bangongshi (国家汉语国际推广领导小组办公室), the official English title of which is the Office of Chinese Language Council International. Overseen by the Confucius Institute Headquarters/Hanban, the first Confucius Institute opened its door in Seoul in November 2004. As of December 2017, there were 525 Confucius Institutes and 1,113 Confucius Classrooms in 146 countries and territories around the world. Although the Confucius Institutes are sometimes viewed in parallel to other state-sponsored cultural institutions such as the British Council, Alliance Française, and Goethe-Institut, their structure and development strategies are significantly different from the foreign counterparts, which often operate as stand-alone corporations. Confucius Institutes and Classrooms, however, are normally affiliated to universities, schools, cultural organizations, and community centers outside China, and they are almost always jointly established and managed between the host institutions and their Chinese partner institutions, which are generally, though not without exception, universities in China. The Confucius Institute Headquarters/Hanban provides financial support and teaching resources to Confucius Institutes and Classrooms around the world. It also selects the Chinese director for and sends teaching staff and volunteers from China to Confucius Institutes and Classrooms. These directors, teaching staff, and volunteers are often selected from the Chinese partner institutions. For each Confucius Institute, the host institution appoints one of its staff members as the foreign director, who manages the Institute together with the Chinese director. On some occasions, the foreign director acts as the chief operation officer of their Confucius Institute and the Chinese director plays an assisting role. Due to these complicated arrangements, the actual levels of autonomy, styles of operation, and ranges of activities can be considerably diverse among different Confucius Institutes and Classrooms despite the standardized Constitution and By-Laws set up by the Confucius Institute Headquarters/Hanban. Although the Confucius Institute Headquarters/Hanban restricts its objectives to teach the Chinese language, promote the Chinese culture, and enhance the development of multiculturalism, Confucius Institutes and Classrooms are widely regarded by observers both within and outside China as important players in the making and shaping of China’s soft power. Confucius Institutes have received both criticisms and admiration for their activities as well as their rapid development and expansion. Assessments have also been made on the impact that Confucius Institutes have on international economic and people flows, as well as on China’s image and influence. The rest of this article starts by introducing sources that offer general overview on Confucius Institutes. It is then divided into several thematic sections that focus on the most discussed aspects of Confucius Institutes, including their operation and development, their involvement in shaping China’s soft power, perceptions of Confucius Institutes in academia and media, and the impact that Confucius Institutes have on various aspects of China’s relations with the rest of the world