The Economics of Households in South Africa

This chapter first provides a brief historical review of household formation and its disruption during the apartheid decades. It then uses national micro-data (1995–2018) to describe broad changes in household formation since the democratic transition. Among these trends, the chapter highlights a sizeable increase in household formation and a decrease in average household size, associated partly with a rise in single-person households and a fall in fertility rates. Gendered living arrangements have also changed considerably as the share of households with a co-resident couple has fallen. Specifically, the growth of households where all resident adults are either female or male has far exceeded overall household formation, and the share of children living only with their mother has risen apace. However, households also continue to be stretched to include members who live elsewhere for much of the year. The chapter then sketches the variation in economic resources across different household types, highlighting changes in recent decades.

Alleviating the B̄ → Dτντ and B̄ → D∗τντ puzzle in the MSSM

We show that Supersymmetric effects driven by penguin contributions to the [Formula: see text] transition are able to account simultaneously for a sizeable increase of both branching ratios of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] with respect to the Standard Model predictions, thereby approaching their experimentally measured values. We emphasize that a light chargino and neutralino, with masses less than 300 GeV, in addition to a large stau/sneutrino mass and a large [Formula: see text], are essential for enhancing the effect of the lepton penguin [Formula: see text], which is responsible for the improved theoretical predictions with respect to current data.

Moonshot innovations: Wishful Thinking or Business-As-Usual?

‘Our mind-set will be to avoid the moonshot’ said Boeing CEO James McNerney at a Wall Street analysts meeting in Seattle nearly 5 years ago (see Gates, 2014). The ambitious, exploratory and risky endeavour dubbed as moonshot project of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had sunk billions of dollars in an industry where end-users demanded more comfort and convenience for less cost. According to McNerney, moonshots do not work in a price-sensitive environment. It is argued that they also tend to take the focus away from more immediate value capture opportunities as seen through Google’s loss on its core Cloud Platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Google’s parent company Alphabet which oversees Google X (a semi-secret moonshot project lab) more recently reported that it had incurred a US$1.3billion in operating loss on moonshot projects with a sizeable increase in compensation of employees and executives working on these projects (Alphabet, 2018). Notably, none of the Google X lab spin-outs (e.g. Loon – a balloon-based internet project, Waymo – self-driving car project, Wing – drone delivery project) have been identified as commercially viable. Despite the uncertainties and failures, the focus on moonshot innovations continues to proliferate in academia (Kaur, Kaur and Singh, 2016; Strong and Lynch, 2018) and practice (Martinez, 2018). Yourden (1997) even wrote an interesting book on perseverance and tenacity to keep going even after failed projects. Proponents of moonshot thinking have claimed that it can help solve society’s biggest challenges (e.g. cure cancer, see Kovarik, 2018) with some suggesting to encourage such thinking by paying failure bonuses (Figueroa, 2018). Yet others remain sceptical, positing that moonshot is ‘awesome and pointless’ (Haigh, 2019, p.4). A proverbial question, thus, emerges: are moonshot innovations simply wishful thinking or can they be part of business-as-usual? In part, the answer may be two-fold – 1) understanding the value of moonshot thinking, and 2) understanding moonshot challenges. (...)

The ‘Two Experiments’ of Kant’s Religion: Dismantling the Conundrum

The past decade has seen a sizeable increase in scholarship on Kant’s Religion. Yet, unlike the centuries of debate that inform our study of his other major works, scholarship on the Religion is still just in its infancy. As such, it is in a particularly vulnerable state where errors made now could hinder scholarship for decades to come. It is the purpose of this article to mitigate one such danger, a danger issuing from the widely assumed view that the Religion is shaped by ‘two experiments’. I will begin with a survey of the four current interpretations of the experiments, and then propose one further interpretation, one that hopefully will help dismantle this alleged ‘conundrum’ and thereby help scholarship on the Religion move beyond this early misstep.

International Charitable Connections: the Growth in Number, and the Countries of Operation, of English and Welsh Charities Working Overseas

This paper provides new empirical evidence about English and Welsh charities operating internationally. It answers basic questions unaddressed in existing work: how many charities work overseas, and how has this number changed over time? In which countries do they operate, and what underlies these geographical patterns? It makes use of a unique administrative dataset which records every country in which each charity operates. The results show a sizeable increase in the number of charities working overseas since the mid-1990s. They show that charities are much more likely to work in countries with colonial and linguistic ties to the UK, and less likely to work in countries with high levels of instability or corruption. This considerable geographical unevenness, even after controlling for countries’ population size and poverty, illustrates the importance of supply-side theories and of institutional factors to an understanding of international voluntary activity. The paper also serves to provide a new perspective on international charitable operation: while it is the large development charities that are household names, the results reveal the extent of small-scale ‘grassroots’ registered charitable activity that links people and places internationally, and the extent of activity in ‘developed’ as well as ‘developing’ country contexts.

MONETARY POLICY, INFLATION AND UNEMPLOYMENT: IN DEFENSE OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

To what extent did deviations from the Taylor rule between 2002 and 2006 help to promote price stability and maximum sustainable employment? To address that question, I estimate a New Keynesian model with unemployment and perform a counterfactual experiment where monetary policy strictly follows a Taylor rule over the period 2002:Q1–2006:Q4. I find that such a policy would have generated a sizeable increase in unemployment and resulted in an undesirably low rate of inflation. Around mid-2004, when the counterfactual deviates the most from the actual series, the model indicates that the probability of an unemployment rate greater than 8% would have been as high as 80%, whereas the probability of an inflation rate above 1% would have been close to zero.

Photoinduced Effects in EPR Spectra of Copper Doped Potassium Tantalate

The UV illumination effects in KTaO3 single crystals with Cu2+ impurity ions have been studied by electron paramagnetic resonance method. Single crystals both “as-grown” and thermally treated in oxygen atmosphere were investigated. It was found that the EPR signal of the Cu2+ centers decreases in the “as-grown” crystals during UV-irradiation at 365 nm, in the wholeinvestigated temperature range (3.7- 300 K). On the contrary, for the oxidized specimens a sizeable increase of the EPR signal of Cu2+ centers (except the signal from exchange coupled pair centers) is observed under UV illumination in some temperature regions.

InAsN Grown by Plasma-Assisted Gas Source MBE

We report the structural, electrical and optical properties of bulk InAsN alloy with various nitrogen contents deposited on (100) InP substrates by using plasma-assisted gas source molecular beam epitaxy. It is found that the fundamental absorption edge of InAsN, as compared to that of InAs, shifts to higher energy due to Burstein-Moss effect. A dramatic increase of the electron effective mass in a nitrogen-containing III-V alloy is also observed from infrared reflectivity and Hall measurement on these degenerate InAsN samples. The sizeable increase on electron effective mass is consistent with the theoretical predictions based on band-anticrossing model.