The impact of color palettes on the prices of paintings

We emphasize that color composition is an important characteristic of a painting. It impacts the auction price of a painting, but it has never been conside     

Instagram and body image: Motivation to conform to the “Instabod” and consequences on young male wellbeing

The current paper explores how male Instagram users' (MIU) perceptions of body image and behavior are affected by the exposure to fitness hashtags, and the consequences on their wellbeing. For this purpose, in-depth interviews were conducted with #fitfam MIU with different levels of engagement. Low-engagement MIU with low body-esteem long for the “instabod” and engage in body transformation efforts to follow the fitness trend popularized by Instagram, to emulate peers and Instagram celebrities, to gain popularity and to appear successful. Instagram community members use positive and negative reinforcements to strengthen body internalization. The body transformation effort motivates low-engagement MIU to engage more, which has various effects on wellbeing: on one side, they feel anxious and in competition with other peers which often leads to muscle dysmorphia symptoms; on the other side, they feel more masculine with higher self-confidence, they have higher motivation to stay fit and to eat healthily.     

Homelessness in the Russian Federation: Regional and Local Context

The problem of homelessness in the Russian Federation has deep roots in history. Throughout much of the past century, it was a result of displacement of children during revolution, civil war, and wars with foreign powers. Even now, many of the economic problems that cause homelessness in Russia result from sanctions imposed by foreign governments. This article explains the roles of the state and charities in ameliorating the contemporary situation of people without housing. One of the most important programs of one charity involves providing some form of paid work to everyone in the shelters, so that residents can feel a sense of self-worth often lacking in purely charitable ventures. In the long run, no specialized programs that target the homeless can make a dent in the problem unless the state, civil society, and housing developers work together to produce more decent housing in cities and create more jobs in rural areas that are currently facing depopulation. The recent introduction of escrow accounts to reduce fraud in housing finance is already making a difference in promoting increased housing construction.     

The effects of offshoring on wages: a meta-analysis

Review of World Economics - Offshoring, either as FDI or offshore outsourcing, is a phenomenon of increasing importance that has been widely studied in the economics literature. Studies analysing...     

Do strained bilateral relations affect tourists’ desire to visit a country that is a target of animosity?

ABSTRACT

This study examines the attractiveness of destination tourism offerings when the destination country and the source market country are engaged in ongoing political and economic conflict. The study is set in the Russia–United States (US) context, where Russia is the tourism-generating region and the US are the vacation destination. Specifically, the study investigates how the desire of Russian tourists to vacation in the US is affected by perceptions of the US as a country and as a vacation destination, animosity toward the US, and Russian tourists? level of national attachment and ethnocentric tendencies. The study found that country image, destination image, and general animosity have a direct effect on intention to visit. The effects of consumer ethnocentrism and national situational animosity on intention to visit are mediated by destination image and country image respectively.     

General consumption constraints and regular economies

In the spirit of Smale’s work, we consider pure exchange economies with general consumption sets. In this paper, the consumption set of each household is described in terms of a function called possibility function. The main innovation comes from the dependency of each possibility function with respect to the individual endowments. We prove that, generically in the space of endowments and possibility functions, economies are regular. A regular economy has a finite number of equilibria, which locally depend on endowments and possibility functions in a continuous manner.     

Quality control for structural credit risk models

Over the last four decades, a large number of structural models have been developed to estimate and price credit risk. The focus of the paper is on a neglected issue pertaining to fundamental shifts in the structural parameters governing default. We propose formal quality control procedures that allow risk managers to monitor fundamental shifts in the structural parameters of credit risk models. The procedures are sequential — hence apply in real time. The basic ingredients are the key processes used in credit risk analysis, such as most prominently the Merton distance to default process as well as financial returns. Moreover, while we propose different monitoring processes, we also show that one particular process is optimal in terms of minimal detection time of a break in the drift process and relates to the Radon–Nikodym derivative for a change of measure.     

Dynamic auction environment with subcontracting

This article provides evidence on the role of subcontracting in the auction‐based procurement setting with private cost variability and capacity constraints. We demonstrate that subcontracting allows bidders to modify their costs realizations in a given auction as well as to control their future costs by reducing backlog accumulation. Restricting access to subcontracting raises procurement costs for an individual project by 12% and reduces the number of projects completed in equilibrium by 20%. The article explains methodological and market design implications of subcontracting availability.     

The Role of Roles in Risk Management Change: The Case of an Italian Bank

This paper explores the role of roles (i.e. groups of actors characterised by the same functional tasks within an organisation), and of their interactions, within processes of change in risk management (RM). By combining insights from the literature on RM and from institutional studies, this paper suggests that change in RM can be interpreted as a process that involves both enabling and precipitating dynamics [Greenwood, R., & Hinings, C. R. (1996). Understanding radical organizational change: Bringing together the old and the new institutionalism. The Academy of Management Review, 21, 1022–1054. doi:10.5465/AMR.1996.9704071862] between different roles. Aiming to address these dynamics empirically, we rely on a longitudinal case study of an Italian bank. The study shows that the interactions between roles were dependent on their respective specific interests, the different institutional templates they supported, and the shifts in power for control over relevant information. These dynamics both affected and were affected by the change in the template-in-use within the bank and allowed a sort of RM ideal (i.e. the search for more RM) to persist over evolving templates.