Data on the annual aggregated income taxes of the Italian municipalities over the quinquennium 2007–2011 See

This dataset contains the annual aggregated income taxes of all the Italian municipalities over the years 2007–2011. Data are clustered over the Italian regions and provinces. The source of the data is the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance. The administrative variations in Italy over the quinquennium have been taken into account. Data are useful to understand the economic structure of Italy at the microscopic level of municipalities. They can serve also for making comparisons between ...

Ausloos, Marcel; Cerqueti, Roy; Mir, Tariq A.

Extracting the Information Shocks from the Bank of England Inflation Density Forecasts See

This paper shows how to extract the density of the information shocks from the revisions of the Bank of England’s inflation density forecasts. An information shock is defined in this paper as a random variable that contains the set of information made available between two consecutive forecasting exercises and that has been incorporated into a revised forecast for a fixed point event. Studying the moments of these information shocks can be useful to understand how the Bank has changed it...

Díaz, Carlos

Sailing through marketing: A critical assessment of spatiality in marketing literature See

Marketing has historically been entangled with the study of geography, which has become a very popular focus in the marketing literature nowadays. However, spatially-oriented perspectives in marketing tend to rest on a conceptual divide between place-oriented and space-oriented thinking, thus inhibiting the production of more eclectic and creative spatial knowledge. This conceptual paper endeavors to overcome this dichotomy by rethinking spatiality in terms of boundedness, openness, functiona...

Giovanardi, Massimo; Lucarelli, Andrea

Public sector ‘Modernisation’: examining the impact of a change agenda on local government employees in England See

Can public sector reform change service performance for the better? This is a hotly contested debate which carries significant theoretical and practical importance. In England, as in many countries, modernisation was at the heart of local government reform and represented an interpretation of New Public Management into a policy framework. This paper examines the role of the modernisation change agenda in England and what this has subsequently meant for ‘service improvement’. Drawing on both d...

Glennon, R.; Hodgkinson, I. R.; Knowles, J.; Radnor, Z.; Bateman, Nicola Ann

Organising as a strategy to reach precarious and marginalised workers. A review of debates on the role of the political dimension and the dilemmas of representation and solidarity See

Organising as a trade union strategy has caught the imagination of the labour movement over the past 20 years or so. The vast possibilities of new forms of organising go hand in hand with concern about its highly constrained and sometimes hierarchical use. This article looks at key aspects of the debate, focusing on the question of how new forms of organising reach out to more vulnerable and precarious workers. Similar to other colleagues in the field, we conclude that there are political and...

Martínez Lucio, Miguel; Marino, Stefania; Connolly, Heather

‘Justice for Janitors’ goes Dutch: the limits and possibilities of unions’ adoption of organizing in a context of regulated social partnership See

Organising has been adopted as a strategy for union renewal in the Netherlands, where the dominant repertoire has been consensus-based social dialogue. Certain Dutch unions have developed strategies inspired by the US ‘organising model’ and have been relatively successful in recruiting and mobilising under-represented workers. Despite some tensions emerging, the introduction of organising resulted in the greater representation of workers in sectors such as cleaning, which has to an extent com...

Connolly, Heather; Marino, Stefania; Martinez Lucio, Miguel

In Search of Ethics: From Carroll to Integrative CSR Economics See

Archie Carroll’s ground-breaking research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is widely acknowledged. Revisiting his classic CSR pyramid framework, the paper evolved a novel synthesis of ethics and economics, yielding an ‘integrative CSR economics’. This approach to CSR is conceptually coherent since it is grounded in one ‘discipline’ or research program only; i.e. economics. This reduces conceptual confusion which today is still attributed to many CSR approaches, especially ones that tr...

Wagner-Tsukamoto, Sigmund

An integrative approach to improving patient care pathways See

Purpose: Globally, healthcare managers continue to struggle with managing increasing demands for their services with limited or shrinking resources. It is therefore, clear that systems, processes and practices need to change to meet these challenges. We assess how integrating two improvement technologies, Lean and Integrated Care Pathways (ICPs) might help. Design/methodology/approach: Lean in healthcare and ICP provide a platform to develop conceptual frameworks for integrating two approache...

Radnor, Zoe; Williams, Sharon J.

Affective commitment within the public sector: antecedents and performance outcomes between ownership types See

How to generate affective commitment and realize its performance potential is deemed critical to public management. But in the context of service outsourcing, does ownership type influence its antecedents and performance outcomes? Drawing on postal survey data for English leisure providers, we find training is an antecedent across public and private ownership types; performance appraisal is an antecedent for private ownership only; while performance-related pay carries an insignificant effect...

Hodgkinson, Ian R.; Hughes, Paul; Radnor, Zoe; Glennon, Russ

The Relationship Between Design and Marketing in the Fashion Industry See

(Opening paragraph) This Special Issue investigates key factors in the relationship between designers and marketers in management roles. Several previous studies have investigated the nature of the relationship between marketing and design, viewing them as existing within different cultures and modes of thinking. For example, Roberts-Lombard and Holland (2011) identified key differences in approaches to working practice, in that designers in their study were innovative and creative via design...

Goworek, Helen; Perry, Patsy; Kent, Anthony

Dynamical phase diagrams of a love capacity constrained prey–predator model See

One interesting question in love relationships is: finally, what and when is the end of this love relationship? Using a prey–predator Verhulst–Lotka–Volterra (VLV) model we imply cooperation and competition tendency between people in order to describe a “love dilemma game”. We select the most simple but immediately most complex case for studying the set of nonlinear differential equations, i.e. that implying three persons, being at the same time prey and predator. We describe four different s...

Simin, P. Toranj; Jafari, Gholam Reza; Ausloos, Marcel; Caiafa, Cesar Federico; Caram, Facundo... et al.

Public goods games and psychological utility: Theory and evidence See

We consider a theoretical model of a public goods game that incorporates reciprocity, guilt-aversion/surprise-seeking, and the attribution of intentions behind these emotions. In order to test our predictions, we implement the ‘induced beliefs method’ and a within-subjects design, using the strategy method. We find that all our psychological variables contribute towards the explanation of contributions. Guilt-aversion is pervasive at the individual-level and the aggregate-level and it is rela...

Dhami, Sanjit; Wei, M.; al-Nowaihi, A.

The Ellsberg paradox: A challenge to quantum decision theory? See

We set up a simple quantum decision model of the Ellsberg paradox. We find that the matching probabilities that our model predict are in good agreement with those empirically measured by Dimmock et al. (2015). Our derivation is parameter free. It only depends on quantum probability theory in conjunction with the heuristic of insufficient reason. We suggest that much of what is normally attributed to probability weighting might actually be due to quantum probability.

al-Nowaihiy, Ali; Dhamiz, Sanjit

Network effects on labor contracts of internal migrants in China: a spatial autoregressive model See

This paper studies the fact that 37% of the internal migrants in China do not sign a labor contract with their employers, as revealed in a nationwide survey. These contract-free jobs pay lower hourly wages, require longer weekly work hours, and provide less insurance or on-the-job training than regular jobs with contracts. We find that the co-villager networks play an important role in a migrant’s decision on whether to accept such insecure and irregular jobs. By employing a comprehensive nat...

Baltagi, Badi H.; Deng, Ying; Ma, Xiangjun

Are Quantum Models for Order Effects Quantum? See

The application of principles of Quantum Mechanics in areas outside of physics has been getting increasing attention in the scientific community in an emergent disciplined called Quantum Cognition. These principles have been applied to explain paradoxical situations that cannot be easily explained through classical theory. In quantum probability, events are characterised by a superposition state, which is represented by a state vector in a N-dimensional vector space. The probability of an eve...

Moreira, Catarina; Wichert, Andreas

Probabilities and Shannon's Entropy in the Everett Many-Worlds Theory See

Following a controversial suggestion by David Deutsch that decision theory can solve the problem of probabilities in the Everett many-worlds we suggest that the probabilities are induced by Shannon's entropy that measures the uncertainty of events. We argue that a relational person prefers certainty to uncertainty due to fundamental biological principle of homeostasis.

Wichert, Andreas; Moreira, Catarina

Vertical integration and product differentiation See

We study a new channel of downstream rent extraction through vertical integration: competition for integration. Innovative downstream firms create value and profit opportunities through product differentiation, which however affects an upstream monopolist’s incentive to vertically integrate. By playing the downstream firms against each other for integration, the upstream firm can extract even more than the additional profits generated by the downstream firms’ differentiation activities...

Zanchettin, Piercarlo; Mukherjee, Arijit

The Earnings and Employment Gap between Natives and Immigrants in the UK between 1981 and 2006 See

We exploit the sizeable and long Lifetime Labour Market Database (LLMDB) to estimate the immigrant-native employment gap across gender, across continents of nationality and across lengths of stay in the UK between 1981 and 2006. These estimates are a novel contribution, as estimates for men and women are scarce in the literature and estimates across immigrants' origin and length of stay are as yet unavailable. Furthermore, we estimate the employment gap as the differential in the number of ...

Lemos, Sara

Quasi Ex Ante Inflation Forecast Uncertainty See

We propose a measure of the effects of monetary policy based on analysis of the distribution of ex-post inflation forecast uncertainty. We argue that the difference between the distributions of the ex-ante and ex-post uncertainties reflects the impact of monetary policy decisions. Using the theoretical background of the New Keynesian model with imperfect information and a monetary policy rule, we derive a proxy for ex-ante inflation uncertainty called quasi ex-ante forecast uncertainty, ...

Charemza, Wojciech; Díaz, Carlos; Makarova, Svetlana