Does Guanxi matter to nonfarm employment?:

Because land is scarce, farmers in China increasingly have to rely on nonfarm activities to enhance their incomes. The functioning of rural nonfarm labor markets is therefore crucial in determining who has access to nonfarm employment. Previous studies have identified human capital as a key factor determining the selection of workers in the rural nonfarm economy. Using a detailed household survey of northern and northeastern China, this paper shows that guanxi (social networks), has also played an important role. With limited nonfarm job opportunities and poor market information, farmers with better social contacts are more likely to obtain nonfarm jobs. Moreover, guanxi has a larger effect on the nonfarm employment opportunities of male workers than female workers.Employment, Nonagricultural Rural areas China., Social networks China.,

A conical approach to Laurent expansions for multivariate meromorphic germs with linear poles

We use convex polyhedral cones to study a large class of multivariate meromorphic germs, namely those with linear poles, which naturally arise in various contexts in mathematics and physics. We express such a germ as a sum of a holomorphic germ and a linear combination of special non-holomorphic germs called polar germs. In analyzing the supporting cones -- cones that reflect the pole structure of the polar germs -- we obtain a geometric criterion for the non-holomorphicity of linear combinations of polar germs. This yields the uniqueness of the above sum when required to be supported on a suitable family of cones and assigns a Laurent expansion to the germ. Laurent expansions provide various decompositions of such germs and thereby a uniformized proof of known results on decompositions of rational fractions. These Laurent expansions also yield new concepts on the space of such germs, all of which are independent of the choice of the specific Laurent expansion. These include a generalization of Jeffrey-Kirwan's residue, a filtered residue and a coproduct in the space of such germs. When applied to exponential sums on rational convex polyhedral cones, the filtered residue yields back exponential integrals.Comment: 30 page