Migrant Entrepreneurs and Credit Constraints under Labour Market Discrimination

We use a unique data of representative migrants and urban local workers in 15 Chinese cities to investigate entrepreneurship and credit constraints under labour market discrimination. We divide self employed into prefer to be self-employed and prefer to have a salaried job but cannot find one; and divide salaried workers into want-to-be entrepreneurs and happy-to-be salaried workers. Over 40 percent of migrant workers are either currently or want-to-be entrepreneurs. Both groups are very similar in terms of risk taking preferences and network size. Want-to-be entrepreneurs however suffer from credit constraints identified by negative financial shocks in the year before. Our back-of-envelope calculation reveals that overcoming the current level of credit constraints may be worth 2% of GDP per year direct earnings increases.entrepreneurs, credit constraints, migration, China

Semi-Open Space and Micro-Environmental Control for Improving Thermal Comfort, Indoor Air Quality, and Building Energy Efficiency

Local air delivery, heating, and cooling combined with local space partition and confinement (called semi-open space or SOS) have the potential to provide micro-environment that is tailored to the individual preference of the occupants, and hence increase the percentage of satisfied occupancy from currently 80% to near 100%. This research investigates the use of a micro-environmental control system (µX) and semi-open space (SOS) to efficiently provide the desired thermal comfort and air quality conditions for individual occupants while the ambient air temperature set-points were relaxed for reducing the overall energy consumption of the building. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was developed and validated. The model in combination with the results from full-scale chamber experiments was used to evaluate the performance of proposed cooling/heating delivery system and the role of the SOS. During summer time, a cooler air was supplied locally. It was found that the cooling performance increased more by increasing the supply air flow rate than reducing the supply air temperature when the total cooling power is constant, and the cooling performance of the Air Terminal Devices (ATDs) was highly dependent on the shooting angle. The cooling efficiency increased dramatically with the supply air temperature. Also, both the CFD model simulation and experimental work has demonstrated that the heat loss by the manikin was sensitive to the distance between the diffuser and the manikin. However, this effect was also related to the clothing material on the manikin. During the winter time, the idea of heating a person with only a warm air jet was shown to be not efficient, but the confinement box was able to improve the heating performance by two to three times. A more ergonomically-friendly warming foot mat with a reflective box was very effective to restore people’s thermal comfort when the ambient space air was maintained at a lower temperature set-point for energy saving. The existence of the cubicle, as an SOS, significantly changed the airflow pattern in the office, and hence the thermal environment and air quality distribution. The cubicle could “protect” the occupants from the background air flow by reducing the average velocity as well as increasing the average temperature in the occupied space. The openness of the cubicle weakened the “protection” of the cubicle depending on the opening’s orientation and size. The “protection” may not be favored regarding thermal comfort and air quality when the emission is inside the cubicle, but it should be encouraged when the emission is outside the cubicle. The combination of the µX with the SOS can create an independent micro-environment regarding thermal comfort and air quality as well as maintain the privacy of the occupant. As a secondary goal, the ability of the CFD model to adequately predict the local heat transfer from the human body and its limitation were also investigated. The case without the µX compared better with the experiment than the case with the µX from the heat transfer point of view. The effect of the clothing material could be properly represented by a constant temperature difference or as a layer of thermal resistance. Moreover, it was found the fidelity of the surface temperature control for the manikin affected the validation of the CFD model. The concept of SOS was defined for the first time in this study and SOS’s role in shaping the microenvironment with and without local heat, cooling and ventilation were investigated both numerically and experimentally. The detailed CFD model developed has accurate representation of the effects of the manikin’s geometry and the effect of clothing thermal resistance on the boundary conditions for the CFD simulation, which can be used for the investigation of effects of air velocity, temperature, room air flow pattern and clothing on the local and overall average heat loss from human bodies and the resulting thermal comfort of the building occupants under various internal room and partition configurations

Rejoinder: Quantifying the Fraction of Missing Information for Hypothesis Testing in Statistical and Genetic Studies

Rejoinder to "Quantifying the Fraction of Missing Information for Hypothesis Testing in Statistical and Genetic Studies" [arXiv:1102.2774]Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS244REJ the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Quantifying the Fraction of Missing Information for Hypothesis Testing in Statistical and Genetic Studies

Many practical studies rely on hypothesis testing procedures applied to data sets with missing information. An important part of the analysis is to determine the impact of the missing data on the performance of the test, and this can be done by properly quantifying the relative (to complete data) amount of available information. The problem is directly motivated by applications to studies, such as linkage analyses and haplotype-based association projects, designed to identify genetic contributions to complex diseases. In the genetic studies the relative information measures are needed for the experimental design, technology comparison, interpretation of the data, and for understanding the behavior of some of the inference tools. The central difficulties in constructing such information measures arise from the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, aims in practice. For large samples, we show that a satisfactory, likelihood-based general solution exists by using appropriate forms of the relative Kullback--Leibler information, and that the proposed measures are computationally inexpensive given the maximized likelihoods with the observed data. Two measures are introduced, under the null and alternative hypothesis respectively. We exemplify the measures on data coming from mapping studies on the inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes. For small-sample problems, which appear rather frequently in practice and sometimes in disguised forms (e.g., measuring individual contributions to a large study), the robust Bayesian approach holds great promise, though the choice of a general-purpose "default prior" is a very challenging problem.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-STS244 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A Study On Amphetamine Type Stimulant (ATS) Users In Selected States In Malaysia

Terdapat peningkatan yang ketara dalam bilangan orang yang menggunakan Amphetamine type Stimulants (ATS) di Malaysia sejak beberapa tahun yang lalu There has been a tremendous increase in the number of people using Amphetamine Type Stimulants (ATS) in Malaysia over the last several year

機械学習を用いた文化心理学における探索的研究アプローチ

京都大学新制・課程博士博士(人間・環境学)甲第23271号人博第986号新制||人||233(附属図書館)2020||人博||986(吉田南総合図書館)京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻(主査)教授 内田 由紀子, 教授 齋木 潤, 教授 月浦 崇学位規則第4条第1項該当Doctor of Human and Environmental StudiesKyoto UniversityDGA

Effects of Semi-Open Space on Micro-Environmental Control

Semi-open space (SOS) is defined as a space semi-confined by partitions in an open space environment. Most of the previous indoor environmental researches were focused on the open space environment, while only a few of them looked into the performance of the SOS. The existence of the SOS is for providing a certain level of privacy to the occupant, but it has been reported that it significantly affects the room air distribution, hence the thermal environment and indoor air quality. The micro-environment control system is defined as a system which provides heating, cooling or ventilation to the occupant locally. In this study, we evaluated the performance of a cubicle, as an SOS in the office, with different configurations, including opening size and orientation, and the combination of the micro-environmental control system and SOS in providing improved indoor air quality. The work included the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation representing a typical office space with one cubicle. The results showed that the cubicle “protects” the occupants from background air flow but this protection may not always be favored, and the location of the pollutant source significantly influenced the performance of the cubicle. The combination of the micro-environmental control system helped create an independent micro-environment as well as offset the effect of the cubicle