A double‐edged sword?: a critical evaluation of the mobile phone in creating work–life balance

This article provides a critical review of the literature on the impact of mobile telephony on work–life balance (WLB). In particular, it focuses on their theoretical frameworks, the nature of the research questions, the methodological choices adopted and the research findings of empirical articles published internationally between 1998 and 2014. This research field is at the crossroads of two theoretical and empirical traditions, and can be characterised by diversity in terms of conceptualisation and operationalisation of measures, which burdens comparisons between findings. Four problems arise with the literature: (1) the consistency and transparency of the theoretical bases they employ; (2) a tendency to technological determinism and to diminish the impact of human choices; (3) difficulty with handling the complexity of factors; and (4) issues with finding sampling strategies that do not restrict the ability to generalise and/or result in omission of specific populations.     

Dependent self-employment as a way to evade employment protection legislation

This paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self-employment, while making transitions to independent self-employment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried work and self-employment in favour of the former. In conducting this analysis, discrete choice models are applied to data drawn from the European Community Household Panel from 1994 to 2001. To test the hypotheses, a tentative individual measure of the potential severance payment that a worker would receive in the case of dismissal is included as well as aggregated variables that try to capture differences in labour market institutions and macroeconomic conditions. Evidence for a positive impact of the strictness of employment protection legislation and the potential severance payment on transitions to dependent self-employment is found. The opposite effects, however, are detected for individuals becoming independent self-employed.     

Survey of Teaching,Training, and Research in the field of Economic and Business Ethics in Latin America

Theories of business ethics or corporate responsibility tend to focus on justifying obligations that go above and beyond what is required by law. This article examines the curious fact that most business ethics scholars use concepts, principles, and normative methods for identifying and justifying these beyond-compliance obligations that are very different from the ones that are used to set the levels of regulations themselves. Its modest proposal—a plea for a research agenda, really—is that we could reduce this normative asymmetry by borrowing from the normative framework of “regulation” to identify and justify an important range of beyond-compliance obligations. In short, we might think of “self-regulation” as a language and a normative framework with some distinct advantages over other frameworks like stakeholder theory, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, and the like. These other frameworks have been under attack in the business ethics literature of late, primarily for their vagueness and their disappointing inability to distinguish clearly between genuine beyond-compliance moral obligations, on the one hand, and charitable acts that are laudable but not morally obligatory, on the other.     

Environmental factors affecting European and Central Asian health-systems’ bias-corrected efficiency

Health expenditures comprise a large part of national incomes, which explains the growing interest of government agencies in establishing efficient control and management policies in the current context of economic difficulties. One of the main problems in efficiency analysis is to determine the environmental variables that have an impact on the production process. In particular, employing data on the European and Central Asian health systems, the article demonstrates that bias corrected Data Envelopment Analysis is most appropriate measuring efficiency than traditional Data Envelopment Analysis. Bias correction, implies a higher potential resources reduction, affects the ranking of health systems and allows variables influencing efficiency which would be undiscovered with non-corrected estimation. The second stage determines that lifestyle factors, policy organization and location of countries affect the efficiency results and cause differences among the countries. The contribution of these results is particularly useful facing the decision making by governments. Their strategies should be oriented to implementing active policies to struggle against smoking and promoting health policies aimed at increasing the level of immunization in order to be more effective improving management efficiency.     

MARKET MAKING AS STATE MAKING: Constitutions and Economic Development in Post-communist Eastern Europe

After nearly a decade of struggle to liberate economic activity from the state, many of the post-communist countries now face the question of how to liberate the state captured by economic groups. This paper argues that the creation of a market order is about the parallel constitution of a specific structure of rights and of a state with a specific structure of representation allowing for the capacity to uphold these rights and prevent the capturing of the state by particularistic interests. The constitutional sources of such state capacities have to do with a specific representation of social diversity within the state based on the principles of distributed authority and distributed intelligence. Based on the analysis of two periods of state (re)making in the United States, described as key conjunctures in market making, the paper offers a framework to understand the constitutional sources of diversity in post-communist market making.     

Does timing of decisions in a mixed duopoly matter?

We determine the endogenous order of moves in a mixed price-setting duopoly. In contrast to the existing literature on mixed oligopolies we establish the payoff equivalence of the games with an exogenously given order of moves if the most plausible equilibrium is realized in the market. Hence, in this case it does not matter whether one becomes a leader or a follower. We also establish that replacing a private firm by a public firm in the standard Bertrand?CEdgeworth game with capacity constraints increases social welfare and that a pure-strategy equilibrium always exists.     

Using panel data dea to measure CEOs' focus of attention: An application to the study of cognitive group membership and performance

In this study, we examine the existence and performance of cognitive groups. In accordance with the attention‐based view of managerial cognition, cognitive groups are defined as groups of firms in which the CEOs focus their attention on similar strategic elements when seeking to maximize their firm's competitive advantage. We developed a panel data extension of the original Data Envelopment Analysis to gauge CEOs' focus of attention and then clustered firms into groups. We compared our approach with other approaches that use content analysis of CEOs' letters to shareholders and CEOs' demographic characteristics to measure CEOs' attention. Although the different approaches are related, indicating the existence of a common underlying construct (i.e., mental models), our approach explains a higher proportion of the variation in organizational performance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Estimating a socially optimal water price for irrigation versus an environmentally optimal water price through the use of Geographical Information Systems and Social Accounting Matrices

This article develops a method for establishing water prices and their effects in order to provide policy makers an environmentally and socially optimal range of regional prices for irrigation water. Two prices are determined. The “environmentally optimal price” of water is defined as the one that internalizes the environmental costs generated by agricultural consumption. The “social optimally price” of water is defined as the one that maximizes levies on water for agriculture without affecting the regional economy. The environmentally optimal price is calculated with an economic model built over a Geographical Information System (GIS) that allows the economic quantification and valuation of the environmental cost of water in different basins. The optimal price is calculated with a demand curve for irrigation water introduced into a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) to observe if the regional economy can accept higher prices without affecting the regional GDP. Potential water prices are established, ranging from prices that minimize the negative impact in the regional economy to those that totally internalize the environmental cost of water.