H Kim

Lower subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) and higher personal relative deprivation (PRD) relate to poorer health. Both constructs concern people’s perceived relative social position, but they differ in their emphasis on the reference groups people use to determine their comparative disadvantage (national population vs. similar others) and the importance of resentment that may arise from such adverse comparisons. We investigated the relative utility of SSS and PRD as predictors of self-rated physical and mental health (e.g., self-rated health, stress, health complaints). Across 6 studies, self-rated physical and mental health were on the whole better predicted by measures of PRD than by SSS while controlling for objective socioeconomic status (SES), with SSS rarely contributing unique variance over and above PRD and SES. Studies 4 to 6 discount the possibility that the superiority of PRD over SSS in predicting health is due to psychometric differences (e.g., reliability) or response biases between the measures.

The role of government in East Asian economic development has been a contentious issue. Two competing views have shaped enquiries into the source of the rapid growth of the high-performing Asian economies and attempts to derive a general lesson for other developing economies: the market-friendly view, according to which government intervenes little in the market, and the developmental state view, in which it governs the market. What these views share in common is a conception of market and government as alternative mechanisms for resource allocation. They are distinct only in their judgement of the extent to which market failures have been, and ought to be, remedied by direct government intervention. This collection of essays suggests a breakthrough, third view: the market-enhancing view. Instead of viewing government and the market as mutually exclusive substitutes, it examines the capacity of government policy to facilitate or complement private sector co-ordination. The book starts from the premiss that private sector institutions have important comparative advantages over government, in particular in their ability to process information available on site. At the same time, it recognizes that the capabilities of the private sector are more limited in developing economies. The market-enhancing view thus stresses the mechanisms whereby government policy is directed at improving the ability of the private sector to solve co-ordination problems and overcome other market imperfections. In presenting the market-enhancing view, the book recognizes the wide diversity of the roles of government across various East Asian economiesincluding Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and China and its path-dependent and developmental stage nature.

Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well-defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate the tractability and interest of our proposed measure by measuring the specificity of coding DNA and other factors in a simple model of the production of mRNA.

In this study, we examine the determinants of corporate environmental responsibility, as well as the relationship between legal systems and CER as measured by a unique set of global environmental cost data. Results of our analyses show that firms’ legal origins affect CER, which requires a long-term management perspective. Specifically, our results indicate that civil law firms exhibit significantly higher levels of CER than common law firms. In addition, results of an auxiliary test suggest that manager shareholding has a significant, nonlinear relationship with CER. The association between a firm’s legal origin and its CER performance remains robust after controlling for the effects of managerial ownership and issues related to endogeneity. Our findings imply that although the majority of corporate law studies in the past few decades provide support for the common law system emphasizing the maximization of shareholder value and investor protection, the civil law system stressing the maximization of stakeholder wealth and the importance of CER may become more influential in the coming decades as CER becomes central to firms’ operations.

In this study, we examine whether corporate environmental responsibility plays a role in enhancing operating performance in the financial services sector. Because achieving success with CER investing is often a long-term process, we maintain that by effectively investing in CER, executives can decrease their firms’ environmental costs, thereby enhancing operating performance. By employing a unique environmental dataset covering 29 countries, we find that the reducing of environmental costs takes at least 1 or 2 years before enhancing return on assets. We also find that reducing environmental costs has a more immediate and substantial effect on the performance of financial services firms in well-developed financial markets than in less-developed financial markets. These results are economically and statistically significant and robust even after alleviating endogeneity and using an additional performance measure. We interpret our empirical results as supporting the social impact and reputation-building hypothesis. Our findings also suggest that policy makers dealing with corporate sustainability management should pursue an environment-centered industry policy not only at the manufacturing sector but also at the financial services sector, as firms in both sectors with lower environmental costs perform better

1. Self-Love, Sociability, and Autonomy: Some Presuppositions of Kant’s Account of Practical Law -- Jeffrey Edwards // 2. The Virtuous Republic: Rousseau and Kant on the Relation between Civil and Moral Religion -- Günter Zöller // 3. Kant, Pistorius, and Accessing Reality -- Halla Kim // 4. Kant, Fichte, and Transcendental Idealism -- Tom Rockmore // 5. Fichte’s Project: The Jena Wissenschaftslehre -- Daniel Breazeale // 6. The Unity of Reason in Kant and Fichte -- Steven Hoeltzel // 7. Idealism and Nihilism -- Benjamin D. Crowe // 8. Fichte and Semantic Holism -- Yukio Irie // 9. “In and Of Itself Nothing is Finite”: Schelling’s Nature (or So-called Identity) Philosophy -- Michael Vater // 10. Conceptual Schemes, Realism, and Idealism: A Hegelian Approach to Concepts and Reality -- Christian Tewes

In this book, the author provides an insightful look at Confucianism and Christianity. The study argues that the religious philosophies of Wang Yang-ming and Karl Barth are actually similar views of a common issue. The issue is radical humanization. The author explains how Wang and Barth take one's commitment as the point of departure. He analyzes similarities in their articulation of this humanization, their views of evil, and their overall definition of radical humanity. Wang Yang-ming and Karl Barth provides a unique and balanced study of Confucianism and Christianity, avoiding tagging either religion as inferior or superior. This book will provide excellent reading for students, theologians, and scholars of religion as well as ministers who are interested in inter-religious dialogue and the theology of religion. It is also highly appropriate for graduate courses such as "Christianity and Other Religions," "The Gospel Across Culture," "The Theology of Karl Barth," and "Confucianism."

The thesis is a critical and comprehensive examination of Immanuel Kant's theory of practical reason. I argue that considerable light is thrown upon Kant's view when it is considered in light of the British naturalist ethics stretching from Hobbes to Hutcheson, and especially Hume. Consideration of the naturalist ethics is important because of that tradition's radical skepticism about the power of pure practical reason. While not many scholars emhasize this point, Kant's ethics is not so much a response to amoralism as a response to naturalism about practical reason. Such naturalism is pernicious on Kant's view because it undermines the universality, and accordingly the necessity, of moral claims. It is from this perspective that I examine Kant's views on instrumental reasoning, moral reasoning, justification of the moral law and freedom, and the doctrine of the unity of reason. ;I begin with a short introduction in which I discuss and illuminate the importance of the British empirical-naturalist ethics for Kant's system. ;In Chapter I, I explore Kant's theory of instrumental reasoning. By extensively discussing Kant's account of the hypothetical imperative, I show that Kant's general theory of practical reasoning cannot be fully appreciated apart from an understanding of the hypothetical imperative. ;In Chapter II, I discuss Kant's theory of moral reasoning. I first introduce Hume's moral psychology as background, and then discuss Kant's "transcendental psychology" of morality. I then examine his view of the categorical imperative in this light. ;In Chapter III, I critically examine Kant's various attempts to authenticate the moral law and freedom. ;Chapter IV consists of a reconstruction of Kant's overall response to Humean skepticism about pure practical reason--in particular, Kant's thesis of the unity of reason. Kant's claim that reason is not merely instrumental but capable of self-legislation seems to suggest that Humean skepticism about the power of pure practical reason is misguided. Kant thus seems to provide the means by which to combat naturalist skepticism about the power of pure practical reason.