London School of Economics and Political Science

About: London School of Economics and Political Science is a education organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Population. The organization has 8759 authors who have published 35017 publications receiving 1436302 citations.

Women's Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival

Abstract: The global migration and trafficking of women is anchored in particular features of the current globalization of economies in both the north and the south. Making this legible requires that we look at globalization in ways that are different from the mainstream view, confined to emphasizing the hypermobility of capital and to the ascendance of information economies. The growing inmiseration of governments and whole economies in the global south has promoted and enabled the proliferation of survival and profit-making activities that involve the migration and trafficking of women. To some extent these are older processes, which used to be national or regional that can today operate at global scales. The same infrastructure that facilitates cross-border flows of capital, information and trade is also making possible a whole range of cross-border flows not intended by the framers and designers of the current globalization of economies. Growing numbers of traffickers and smugglers are making money off the backs of women and many governments are increasingly dependent on their remittances. A key aspect here is that through their work and remittances, women enhance the government revenue of deeply indebted countries and offer new profit making possibilities to `entrepreneurs' who have seen other opportunities vanish as a consequence of global firms and markets entering their countries or to long time criminals who can now operate their illegal trade globally. These survival circuits are often complex, involving multiple locations and sets of actors constituting increasingly global chains of traders and `workers'. A central point of the article is that it is through these supposedly rather value-less economic actors – low-wage and poor women – that key components of these new economies have been built. Globalization plays a specific role here in a double sense, contributing to the formation of links between sending and receiving countries, and, secondly, enabling local and regional practices to become global in scale.

Endogenous Political Institutions

Abstract: A fundamental aspect of institutional design is how much society chooses to delegate unchecked power to its leaders. If, once elected, a leader cannot be restrained, society runs the risk of a tyranny of the majority, if not the tyranny of a dictator. If a leader faces too many ex post checks and balances, legislative action is too often blocked. As our critical constitutional choice we focus upon the size of the minority needed to block legislation, or conversely the size of the (super) majority needed to govern. We analyse both 'optimal' constitutional design and 'positive' aspects of this process. We derive several empirical implications, which we then discuss.

Functional-Coefficient Regression Models for Nonlinear Time Series

Abstract: The local linear regression technique is applied to estimation of functional-coefficient regression models for time series data. The models include threshold autoregressive models and functional-coefficient autoregressive models as special cases but with the added advantages such as depicting finer structure of the underlying dynamics and better postsample forecasting performance. Also proposed are a new bootstrap test for the goodness of fit of models and a bandwidth selector based on newly defined cross-validatory estimation for the expected forecasting errors. The proposed methodology is data-analytic and of sufficient flexibility to analyze complex and multivariate nonlinear structures without suffering from the “curse of dimensionality.” The asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators are investigated under the α-mixing condition. Both simulated and real data examples are used for illustration.