Happy in the service of the Company: the purchasing power of VOC salaries at the Cape in the 18th century

This paper contributes to the debate on the level and trajectory of welfare at the Cape of Good Hope during the 18th century. Recent scholarship (for example, Allen 2005) has calculated and compared the levels and evolution of real wages in various European and Asian economies since the early modern period. To this lit-erature we add evidence for unskilled and skilled workers of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope during the 18th century, following De Zwart (2009; 2011), who recently presented evidence for unskilled workers in the Cape for the latter half of the 17th century and the 18th century. We calculate job-specific real wages in a three-step argument; from the narrowest international comparison of wage rates in terms of silver content to one based on a basket of widely consumed goods. The paper’s contributions lie in the breadth of the com-parisons, the inclusion of skilled workers in the comparison and the adaptation of the consumption basket to local conditions and relative prices at the Cape. The results support the hypothesis that at the start of the 18th century, the Cape Col-ony was relatively poor on an international comparison, but as the century un-folded, gained considerably on even the richest contemporary societies.Real wages, Dutch East India Company (VOC), Cape Colony, Compari-sons of living standards, Economic history of South Africa, Economic history of the Cape Colony

A new and direct test of the ‘gender bias’ in multiple-choice questions

Local and international research has identified a bias in favour of male students with MCQs. If correctly identified, this bias holds implications for reasonable assessment strategies in economics courses. A standard method used in the literature is to relate student performance to various features of the learning environment (such as the type of question) and to student-specific characteristics (such as past performance and lecture attendance). A more direct approach is possible: we set comparable questions (in three categories – graphs, quantitative and theory) in the written and MCQ sections of three tests in the introductory microeconomics course at the University of Stellenbosch. This allows a direct comparison between the performance of male and female students (overall and per question category), without the need to model overall student performance. The number of students in this course, almost 2000, offers a suitably large sample for studying this question. Our evidence does not confirm the strong claims about gender bias in the literature; indeed we find the opposite: a strong positive female gender effect, but for written questions only. We also find no evidence of higher risk-aversion by female students towards MCQ questions with negative marking.Gender bias, Economics education

The conflict resolution styles and relationship satisfaction of couples living in New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

Communication forms an integral part of couple interactions and managing conflictual communications competently greatly contributes to the quality of a relationship. This study was a partial replication of Vito's Canadian study (1998) and was designed to investigate self-reported levels of relationship satisfaction and life satisfaction, conflict resolution styles and perceived effectiveness of problem solving in individuals in cohabiting or marital relationships. These variables were examined with self-report data from 75 participants (61 women and 14 men) who participated in a mail survey. The measures used to examine these variables of interest included the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale, Conflict Resolution Styles Inventory, Life-as-a-whole Index and a subscale of the Couple Problem-Solving Scale which measured the perceived effectiveness of personal and partner problem solving. Correlational calculations and hierarchical multiple regression analyses demonstrated that conflict resolution styles accounted for a significant amount of variance in relationship satisfaction. In particular it was found that the conflict resolution style of positive problem solving was positively related to relationship satisfaction. Individuals who, however, reported higher levels of the so-called "negative" conflict resolution styles of conflict engagement, withdrawal and compliance obtained concurrent lower scores on relationship satisfaction. Further data analyses indicated that self-reported levels of relationship satisfaction were positively related to life-as-a-whole satisfaction. Self-reported levels of perceived effectiveness of personal and partner problem solving ability were also found to be positively related to relationship satisfaction. These preceding relationships were maintained once additional factors such as duration of relationship and other demographic variables were controlled for

An Existential Perspective on Addiction Treatment: A Logic-based therapy case study

In this essay I argue that a comprehensive understanding of addiction and its treatment should include an existential perspective. I provide a brief overview of an existential perspective of addiction and recovery, which will contextualize the remainder of the essay. I then present a case study of how the six-step philosophical practice method of Logic-Based Therapy can assist with issues that often arise in addiction treatment framed through an existential perspective

Archimedean theory and ϵ\epsilon-factors for the Asai Rankin-Selberg integrals

In this paper, we partially complete the local Rankin-Selberg theory of Asai $L$-functions and $\epsilon$-factors as introduced by Flicker and Kable. In particular, we establish the relevant local functional equation at Archimedean places and prove the equality between Rankin-Selberg's and Langlands-Shahidi's $\epsilon$-factors at every place. Our proofs work uniformly for any characteristic zero local field and use as only input the global functional equation and a globalization result for a dense subset of tempered representations that we infer from work of Finis-Lapid-M\"uller. These results are used in another paper by the author to establish an explicit Plancherel decomposition for $\mathrm{GL}_n(F)\backslash \mathrm{GL}_n(E)$, $E/F$ a quadratic extension of local fields, with applications to the Ichino-Ikeda and formal degree conjecture for unitary groups

A new proof of Jacquet-Rallis's fundamental lemma

We give a new proof of the so-called Lie algebra version of Jacquet-Rallis's fundamental lemma for local non-Archimedean fields of characteristic zero. This proof is local and based on a previous result of W. Zhang on the compatibility of smooth transfer with a (partial) Fourier transform.Comment: Streamlined proof avoiding to use the existence of smooth transfer and local relative trace formula

Compulsion in Roman Law

Doctoral Thesis [portion]An overview of metus and condictio in Roman law