Sexual orientation and labour relations: new evidence from Athens,Greece

We use data from the 2008–2009 Athens Area Study (AAS) to provide the first evidence on the relationship between men's sexual orientation and wages in the Greek capital, Athens. Gay and bisexual men are found to receive significantly lower monthly wages than heterosexual male workers after accounting for demographic and occupational characteristics. The estimations reveal that educated gay and bisexual workers face lower wage differentials than less-educated gay and bisexual workers, which is consistent with the statistical theory of discrimination. However, wage gaps are significant at all educational attainment levels, suggesting that these workers face strong prejudices in the Athenian labour market. The same pattern holds also across all occupations and sectors. Furthermore, to better understand the determinants of the wage gaps, we compare gay/bisexual men with both married and unmarried heterosexual men. By making these comparisons, we are able to disentangle the penalty associated with being unmarried from other human-capital explanations for the wage gap.     

Backing out of private pension provision: lessons from Germany

Financing pensions in the EU is a challenge. Many EU countries introduced private pension schemes to compensate declining public pension levels due to reforms made necessary by demographic change. In 2001, Germany introduced the Riester pension. Ten years after introduction the prevalence rate of this voluntary private pension scheme approximates 37 %. However, numerous criticisms raise doubts that the market for Riester products is transparent. Using the 2010 German SAVE survey, this article investigates terminated and dormant Riester contracts on a household level for the first time. Respectively 14.5 and 12.5 % of households who own or have owned a Riester contract terminated or set dormant their contract. We find that around 45 % of terminated or dormant Riester contracts are caused at least partly by product-related reasons, which is significantly higher than for endowment life insurance contracts. The uptake of a new contract after a termination is more likely if a termination is product-related. Nevertheless, after a termination 73 % of households do not sign a new contract, which can have serious long-term consequences for old-age income. Households with low income, low financial wealth or low pension literacy are more likely to have terminated or dormant contracts. Low income and low financial wealth households also have the lowest prevalence rate of Riester contracts and are at higher risk of old-age poverty.     

Understanding the adoption of new brands through salespeople: a multilevel framework

So far there has been scant empirical attention paid to the role of the sales force in the adoption of new brands in the early implementation stages. We test a framework of internal (sales manager and salespeople) brand adoption using an empirical multilevel study. Our findings suggest that the construct of expected customer demand (ECD) plays an important role in sales force brand adoption. First, ECD directly influences salespeople’s and sales managers’ brand adoption. Second, ECD serves as a cross-level moderator of new brand adoption transmission. We find the influence of sales managers’ brand adoption on salespeople’s brand adoption to be stronger when salespeople’s ECD is lower.     

Beyond necessity versus opportunity entrepreneurship: some lessons from English deprived urban neighbourhoods

When discussing the motivations of entrepreneurs, it has become commonplace to represent them dichotomously as either necessity or opportunity driven. This paper evaluates critically this dualistic depiction of entrepreneurs’ motives through an examination of the rationales of entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs living in a deprived urban neighbourhood of an English city, a group of entrepreneurs who have been conventionally depicted as largely driven by necessity into entrepreneurship in the absence of alternative means of livelihood. Reporting the results of a face-to-face questionnaire conducted in 2008 with 459 respondents and a further 18 follow-up in-depth interviews, the finding is that forcing individual entrepreneurs’ motives into one or other of these categories grossly over-simplifies their rationales which in lived practice are not only a mixture of both opportunity and necessity but also temporally fluid shifting most often from more necessity- to more opportunity-oriented rationales. The outcome is to reveal that the opportunity versus necessity dichotomy, which uses the perceptions of an entrepreneur’s originating condition as the defining feature of their motivations, is a misleading way of categorising types of entrepreneurship not only because motivations change over time but also because entrepreneurs are frequently driven by both necessity as well as opportunity factors. The result is a call to move beyond the conventional either/or depiction of opportunity versus necessity entrepreneurship and towards a richer, more nuanced and dynamic appreciation of entrepreneurs’ motivations.     

‘Breaking the ICE’: workplace democracy in a modernized social Europe

The EU seeks to improve its labour market performance through implementing the Lisbon and European Employment Strategies which encourage the modernization of work organization through the development of partnership with the assistance of an ‘appropriate’ regulatory framework. Key aspects of this latter framework concern workers' rights regarding information, consultation and participation in corporate governance. European labour laws, introduced in the 1970s, sought to strengthen employers' consultation with their workforce and, more recently, the changing economic, technological and organizational environment has returned issues related to workplace democracy to the top of the social policy agenda. Here we evaluate the significance of the new Directive on Information and Consultation with Employees (ICE) within the context of this planned modernization of European social policy. In doing so, we re-examine the historical development of workers' consultation laws in Europe and assess the economic rationale for regulating workplace social dialogue in an enlarged Social Europe.     

Should all Choices Count? Using the Cut-Offs Approach to Edit Responses in a Choice Experiment

Should we give equal weight to all responses in a choice experiment? Previous Choice Modelling papers have considered the issue of the internal consistency of choices—such as the extent to which strictly-dominated options are chosen. In this paper, a different focus is employed, namely the extent to which people choose options which violate their stated upper or lower limits for the acceptable levels for individual attributes. Since hypothetical over-statement of WTP has been a focus in stated preference studies, we concentrate on violations of stated upper limits of WTP, and explore the effects of “editing” such choices using a variable censoring rule and alternative approaches to re-classifying choices. The empirical case study is a choice experiment on eco-tourists in Rwanda. Our main conclusion is that the suggested approach offers a useful way of imposing consistency on choices, and that editing choices in this manner has an appreciable impact on estimated willingness to pay. However, issues remain with regard to explaining why people apparently violate their stated maximum willingness to pay.     

Accounting for Negative,Zero and Positive Willingness to Pay for Landscape Change in a National Park

In contingent valuation, despite the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others, most studies restrict willingness to pay to being non‐negative. In this paper, we investigate the impact of allowing for negative, zero and positive preferences for prospective changes in woodland cover in two UK national parks, the Lake District and the Trossachs. An extended spike model is used to accomplish this. The policy implications of not allowing for negative values in terms of aggregate benefits are also investigated, by comparing the extended spike model with a simple spike making use of only zero and positive bids, and a model which considers positive bids only. We find that ignoring negative values over‐states the aggregate benefits of a woodland planting project by up to 44%.     

The BoP business paradigm: what it promotes and what it conceals

The Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) is a popular paradigm within management circles concerning those in poverty. In this paper, we develop a critical analysis of BoP discourse and practice, drawing particularly on the works of Laclau and Mouffe, and enriched by post-development thinking as expressed in the works of Esteva and Escobar, among others. We argue that the BoP paradigm functions to reinforce market capitalist hegemony and – vitally – to conceal economic alternatives. Using the concepts of ‘discourse’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘performativity’, we analyse the politics of language and representation in the BoP discourse. Finally, we point to modes of scholarship that contribute to the nurturing and performance of diverse, non-capitalist economic worlds.     

One village,one product: Agro‐industrial village corporatism in contemporary China

This paper investigates the implementation of “one village, one product” (OVOP) in four peri‐urban villages in China's Yangtze River Delta. China's agricultural transformation, including the introduction of new corporate actors and the growing pressure of market discipline, has challenged the relevance of villages in the organization of agricultural production. In response, village cadres in thousands of Chinese villages have used OVOP to transform their villages into agro‐industrial firms and re‐exert their control over the agricultural surplus, echoing earlier examples of village corporatism. Rooted in agricultural specialization, OVOP encompasses a diversity of strategies for the production of locality‐based value. I disaggregate these strategies into four sociospatial dimensions that comprise locality—place, network, territory, and scale. Place‐based branding is the dominant strategy, but village cadres also pursue complementary sociospatial strategies to ensure their control over the realization of the brand's value and reconstitute their redistributive and administrative powers.     

Rent Premiums and Vertical Sorting in Amsterdam’s Multi-Tenant Office Buildings

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - This paper investigates the impact of vertical location and tenant sorting on commercial office rents within the tall office towers of Amsterdam....