Informality and the Development and Demolition of Urban Villages in the Chinese Peri-urban Area

The fate of Chinese urban villages (chengzhongcun) has recently attracted both research and policy attention. Two important unaddressed questions are: what are the sources of informality in otherwise orderly Chinese cities; and, will village redevelopment policy eliminate informality in the Chinese city? Reflecting on the long-established study of informal settlements and recent research on informality, it is argued that the informality in China has been created by the dual urban-rural land market and land management system and by an underprovision of migrant housing. The redevelopment of chengzhongcun is an attempt to eliminate this informality and to create more governable spaces through formal land development; but since it fails to tackle the root demand for unregulated living and working space, village redevelopment only leads to the replication of informality in more remote rural villages, in other urban neighbourhoods and, to some extent, in the redeveloped neighbourhoods. © 2012 Urban Studies Journal Limited

Experiments with document archive size detection

The size of a document archive is a very important parameter for resource selection in distributed information retrieval systems. In this paper, we present a method for automatically detecting the size (ie the number of documents) of a document archive, in case the archive itself does not provide such information. In addition, a method for detecting incremental change of the archive size is also presented, which can be useful for deciding if a resource description has become obsolete and needs to be regenerated. An experimental evaluation of these methods shows that they provide quite acurate information

Multifactor consumption based asset pricing model of the UK stock market: The US stock market as a wealth reference

Copyright @ 2011 University of BirminghamHere a multifactor model of UK stock returns is developed, replac- ingHere a multifactor model of UK stock returns is developed, replacing the conventional consumption habit reference by a relation that depends on US wealth. Two step Instrumental Variables and Generalized Method of Moments estimators are applied to reduce the impact of weak instruments. The standard errors are corrected for the generated regressor problem and the model is found to explain UK excess returns by UK consumption growth and expected US excess returns. Hence, controlling for nominal effects by subtracting a risk free rate and conditioning on real US excess returns provides an appealing explanation of the equity premium puzzle. US excess returns. Hence, controlling for nominal e¤ects by subtracting a risk free rate and conditioning on real US excess returns provides an appealing explanation of the equity premium puzzle

A multifactor consumption based asset pricing model of the UK stock market: The US stock market as a wealth reference

Here a multifactor model of UK stock returns is developed, replacing the conventional consumption habit reference by a relation that depends on US wealth. Two step Instrumental Variables and Generalized Method of Moments estimators are applied to reduce the impact of weak instruments. The standard errors are corrected for the generated regressor problem and the model is found to explain UK excess returns by UK consumption growth and expected US excess returns. Hence, controlling for nomina l effects by subtracting a risk free rate and conditioning on real US excess returns provides a coherent explanation of the equity premium puzzle

Multifactor consumption based asset pricing models using the US stock market as a reference: Evidence from a panel of developed economies

In this paper we extend the time series analysis to the panel framework to test the C-CAPM driven by wealth references for developed countries. Specifically, we focus on a linearised form of the Consumption-based CAPM in a pooled cross section panel model with two-way error components. The empirical ndings of this two-factor model with various specifications all indicate that there is significant unobserved heterogeneity captured by cross-country fixed e¤ects when consumption growth is treated as a common factor, of which the average risk aversion coefficient is 4.285. However, the cross-sectional impact of home consumption growth varies dramatically over the countries, where unobserved heterogeneity of risk aversion can also be addressed by random effects

Multi-objective resource selection in distributed information retrieval

In a Distributed Information Retrieval system, a user submits a query to a broker, which determines how to yield a given number of documents from all possible resource servers. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective model for this resource selection task. In this model, four aspects are considered simultaneously in the choice of the resource: document's relevance to the given query, time, monetary cost, and similarity between resources. An optimized solution is achieved by comparing the performances of all possible candidates. Some variations of the basic model are also given, which improve the basic model's efficiency