Does the Market Pay Off? Earnings Inequality and Returns to Education in Urban China

The paper examines earnings inequality and earnings returns to education in China among four types of workers characterized by their labor market history. Compared to workers staying in the state sector, early market entrants no longer enjoyed advantages. The commonly observed higher earnings returns to education in the market sector are only limited to recent market entrants. This results from the aggregation of two very different types of workers: those who were "pushed" and those who "jumped" into the market in later stage of the reform. The findings challenge the prevailing wisdom that education is necessarily more highly rewarded by the market sector.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39838/3/wp454.pd

A Unified Relay Framework with both D-F and C-F Relay Nodes

Decode-and-forward (D-F) and compress-and-forward (C-F) are two fundamentally different relay strategies proposed by (Cover and El Gamal, 1979). Individually, either of them has been successfully generalized to multi-relay channels. In this paper, to allow each relay node the freedom of choosing either of the two strategies, we propose a unified framework, where both the D-F and C-F strategies can be employed simultaneously in the network. It turns out that, to fully incorporate the advantages of both the best known D-F and C-F strategies into a unified framework, the major challenge arises as follows: For the D-F relay nodes to fully utilize the help of the C-F relay nodes, decoding at the D-F relay nodes should not be conducted until all the blocks have been finished; However, in the multi-level D-F strategy, the upstream nodes have to decode prior to the downstream nodes in order to help, which makes simultaneous decoding at all the D-F relay nodes after all the blocks have been finished inapplicable. To tackle this problem, nested blocks combined with backward decoding are used in our framework, so that the D-F relay nodes at different levels can perform backward decoding at different frequencies. As such, the upstream D-F relay nodes can decode before the downstream D-F relay nodes, and the use of backward decoding at each D-F relay node ensures the full exploitation of the help of both the other D-F relay nodes and the C-F relay nodes. The achievable rates under our unified relay framework are found to combine both the best known D-F and C-F achievable rates and include them as special cases

Geometry effects in confined space

In this paper we calculate some exact solutions of the grand partition functions for quantum gases in confined space, such as ideal gases in two- and three-dimensional boxes, in tubes, in annular containers, on the lateral surface of cylinders, and photon gases in three-dimensional boxes. Based on these exact solutions, which, of course, contain the complete information about the system, we discuss the geometry effect which is neglected in the calculation with the thermodynamic limit $V\to \infty$, and analyze the validity of the quantum statistical method which can be used to calculate the geometry effect on ideal quantum gases confined in two-dimensional irregular containers. We also calculate the grand partition function for phonon gases in confined space. Finally, we discuss the geometry effects in realistic systems.Comment: Revtex,15 pages, no figur