Integrating Results from Children's Television Advertising Research

Children's television advertising is rapidly becoming a major concern to government agencies, citizens' groups and researchers in many areas of the social sciences. To this point there has been little integration of research efforts. This article presents a model of the processing of television advertising by children in order to organize and integrate previous research results and to act as the basis for suggesting future directions for research. The authors indicate that more involvement by advertisers is needed.     

Exports,imports and growth: New evidence on Italy: 1863–2004

The nexus between trade and economic growth in Italy has been widely debated by historiography. However, there are no long run analyses on this topic that cover the whole span from Unification to present days. This paper contributes to fill this gap by investigating the relationship between real exports, imports and GDP in Italy from 1863 to 2004 by using cointegration analysis and causality tests. The outcome suggests that these variables comove in the long run but the direction of causality varies across time. In the period prior to the First World War import growth led GDP growth that in turn led export growth. Conversely, in the post-Second World War period we have a strong bidirectionality between imports and exports consequent on the increase in intra-industry trade. We also find a weak support for export-led growth and growth-led imports. This suggests that exports were not the only or the main driver of economic growth. There was probably a multiplicity of factors at work, among which high rates of capital formation and the expansion of internal demand probably stood out.     

The Evolving Global Wine Market

Fifty years ago, a few countries in Western Europe accounted for virtually all world exports of wine and most of its production and consumption. This has changed dramatically: now every continent has major producing and/or consuming countries. Much of this change has been driven by technology and science, resulting in increasing quality, bringing new countries into the ranks of global winemakers, and increasing the productivity of traditional countries. Much of it has also been driven by economics, in particular the rising income and changing tastes of consumers throughout the world, and by public policy that has created surpluses in Europe. This paper shows the magnitudes of the shifts in consumption and production and discusses the economic and social factors that drive them.     

Lone Mothers: What is to be done?

This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal labor market exacerbates the problem, causing material hardship for many lone mothers and their families. The policy solutions proposed lie along a spectrum, ranging from those that seek to enable all lone mothers to take employment to those that aim to let mothers choose whether to take employment or care for their children themselves. Other policies discussed concern ways to value and support caregiving, improve the low-wage labor market for women, and provide a set of income supports that would both boost income and provide time to care for children.     

Insulin-Pens: Können sie mehrfach verwendet werden?

Pen-Papier der DGKH - Der korrekte Umgang mit Insulin-Pens ist offensichtlich nicht ganz einfach. Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Krankenhaushygiene (DGKH) erh?lt immer wieder Anfragen, ob die Hautantiseptik vorab notwendig sei oder ob Pen-Nadeln mehrfach verwendet werden dürfen. Deshalb aktualisierte die DGKH jetzt ihr Konsensuspapier und bündelt darin die Empfehlungen der Experten.     

Messie oder Diogenes?

Typen der Wohnungsdesorganisation - Für den ungeschulten Betrachter ist eine verwahrloste Wohnung eine verwahrloste Wohnung. Doch auch die dort lebenden Menschen unterscheiden sich betr?chtlich in der Art und Weise, wie sie leben.     

The value of extended delegation in dynamic agency

One of the main advantages of delegation is that specific department level information is used. Its main disadvantage is probably that central management looses direct control over certain actions. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted trade-off. We show that delegation might be favorable even if specific knowledge is completely absent. We consider a firm that lives for two periods. Due to its organizational structure part of the tasks and decision rights is inevitably delegated to a subordinate (agent). The agent performs the tasks assigned to him, tantamount to personal effort, in each of the two periods. Besides this effort the decision to implement a particular project has to be made at the beginning of period two. With regard to the project choice, central management can decide to delegate it to the agent (decentralization). Alternatively it can make it personally (centralization). If the project choice is decentralized it remains unobservable for central management. Along with second period effort it must be motivated via an incentive contract written on period output.We analyze two different contracting regimes: long-term commitment and long-term renegotiation-proof contracts. With full commitment we find that centralization is indeed favorable as compared to delegation if no informational advantage exists. This confirms conventional wisdom. However, the result does not necessarily hold with renegotiation-proof contracts. Renegotiation-proofness may force central management to set too low second-period incentives. Delegation counteracts this effect as it allows central management to implicitly commit to a higher second-period incentive rate. This arises as both, personal effort and the project choice, rather than effort alone need to be motivated. A necessary condition for too low second-period incentives, and thus for delegation to be favorable, is a negative intertemporal correlation of output.     

Writing the differences: Poststructural ist pluralism,retextualization, and the construction of reflexive ethnographic narratives in consumption and market research

Representing social realities in a narrative form is central to the interpretive processes by which market‐oriented ethnographies are constructed. In recent years, the process of textualization has shifted from a taken‐for‐granted aspect of the ethnographic enterprise to a central focus of ethnographers’ reflexive considerations. This shift reflects the realization that textualization poses dilemmas of representation that can not be resolved through additional fieldwork or other methodological procedures. This paper addresses these workbench problems by devising an alternative narrative formretextualization‐based on a poststructuralist version of critical pluralistic analysis. We first discuss how non‐realist genres of ethnographic writing have emerged in response to a heightened sensitivity toward ideological positions embedded in research narratives. We then discuss how the use of retextualization can facilitate the development of reflexivity in consumption research by destabilizing the representational authority of the ethnographic text through expressions of divergence, dissensus, and contested interpretations.