Ethnic discrimination in hiring,labour market tightness and the business cycle - evidence from field experiments

Several studies using observational data suggest that ethnic discrimination increases in downturns of the economy. We investigate whether ethnic discrimination depends on labour market tightness using data from correspondence studies. We utilize three correspondence studies of the Swedish labour market and two different measures of labour market tightness. These two measures produce qualitatively similar results, and, opposite to the observational studies, suggest that ethnic discrimination in hiring decreases in downturns of the economy.     

Does e-government performance actually boost citizen use? Evidence from European countries

For many years, it was believed that higher-performing e-government features would boost citizen use of e-services. However, this straightforward proposition had never been tested. Using a survey of over 28,000 citizens across 32 European countries, we examined the effect of e-government performance on citizen use. Theoretically, a better-designed and maintained government website should be used more, but it was reject by multilevel model estimates. We found that performance was negatively related to citizen use of e-information and e-services, while e-participation use was insignificant. The implications of our findings on future efforts to increase the uptake of e-government are also discussed.     

Assessing strategic flight schedules at an airport using machine learning-based flight delay and cancellation predictions

To mitigate air traffic demand-capacity imbalances, large European airports implement strategic flight schedules, where flights are assigned arrival/departure slots several months prior to execution. We propose a generic assessment of such strategic schedules using predictions about arrival/departure flight delays and cancellations. We demonstrate our approach for strategic flight schedules in the period 2013–2018 at London Heathrow Airport. Together with the development of dedicated strategic flight schedule optimization models, our proposed approach supports an integrated strategic flight schedule assessment, where schedules are evaluated with respect to flight delays and cancellations.     

“Reverse” nested lottery contests

This paper proposes a multi-prize “reverse” nested lottery contest model, which can be viewed as the “mirror image” of the conventional nested lottery contest of  Clark and Riis (1996a). The reverse-lottery contest model determines winners by selecting losers based on contestants’ one-shot effort through a hypothetical sequence of lotteries. We provide a microfoundation for the reverse-lottery contest from a perspective of (simultaneous) noisy performance ranking and establish that the model is underpinned by a unique performance evaluation rule. We further demonstrate that the noisy-ranking model can be interpreted intuitively as a “worst-shot” contest, in which contestants’ performances are evaluated based on their most severe mistakes. The reverse-lottery contest model thus depicts a great variety of widely observed competitive activities of this nature. A handy closed-form solution for a symmetric equilibrium of the reverse-lottery contest is obtained. We show that the winner-take-all principle continues to hold in reverse-lottery contests. Moreover, we find that a reverse-lottery contest elicits more effort than a conventional lottery contest whenever the prizes available to contestants are relatively scarce.     

官员排名赛与环境政策执行——基于环境约束性指标绩效的实证研究

以从2006年开始实行的环境约束性指标为研究对象,结合晋升锦标赛和弱排名激励理论,提出了官员排名赛理论,认为约束性指标制度的建立为地方政府提供了环境绩效排名的平台,由此推动了地方政府环境政策执行力度。利用2006—2015年中国省际环境数据,采用动态面板数据估计方法,实证检验了各省环境绩效排名对其未来环境政策执行力度的影响。实证结果表明,环境绩效排名落后的省份在未来1~3年显著提高了节能和减排的政策执行力度。     

Prioritising alternatives for sustainable end-of-life vehicle disassembly in China using AHP methodology

The projection on Chinese increasing end-of-life vehicle (ELV) volumes indicates that the volume in 2020 will be about threefold that in 2015. The issue of scrapping vehicle upsurge relative to capacity crunches and environmental impacts perplexes Chinese dismantlers and it is intractable and urgent to choose an appropriate dismantling mode. The purpose of this study is to prioritise four potential dismantling modes and provide decision-making reference for dismantlers with a view to such criteria as environmentally sustainable considering constraints involving economy, technique, ecology and flexibility over changing condition. The conducted evaluation by the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methodology takes sensitive and problematic aspects into account through questionnaires. The whole evaluation process supported by expert preferences, provides a simple and intuitive knowledge to construct arguments for ELV decision-making process. Results show that disassembly line involves the highest global weight of 0.363 and is concluded to be the best compromised ecological alternative.     

Academic labour,journal ranking lists and the politics of knowledge production in marketing

In this paper, we engage with the rising importance of journal ranking lists. We explore the pressure these place on marketing academics and the politics of knowledge production, stressing academic game-playing, careerism, and paradigmatic homogeneity. We appreciate that scholars are disciplined by these lists, their line managers, and reaffirm list power through their own patterns of self-management. Nonetheless, marketing academics should avoid making the naïve assumption that the appearance of a paper in a highly rated journal necessarily serves as a proxy for ‘quality’. Publication in a particular outlet does not transform the ultimate contribution being made in any substantive fashion. We provide an extensive critique of the function and impact of journal lists. However, it is also recognised that these are very important for members of the marketing community. As such, we explain our reasons for contesting the recent regrading of the Journal of Marketing Management (JMM) by a prominent journal list and underline the changes that have been made to the Journal since the beginning of the current editorial term. Finally, the support of prominent scholars among our thought community for the policies being implemented is highlighted and we underscore the rigour of contributions to the Journal, the review process, the rising citations, downloads and truly global readership of the JMM.     

A Ranking of the Most Productive Business Ethics Scholars: A Five-Year Study

This paper presents the results of a study that counted articles and the number of pages written on business ethics and published during the five-year period 1995–1999. Individual scholars were ranked on the basis of total articles and total pages published. Institutions were also ranked based on the number of pages and articles their scholars published in selected business ethics journals. This article is the first one to rank schools and individual scholars on the basis of research productivity in business ethics.     

“Third World” Multinationals Revisited

Abstract

The notion of “Third World Multinationals” has always been, at least, slightly misleading, and has now also become obsolete, taking into account the dismantlement of most of the ideological divides between different political and economic blocks since the early 1990s, and the new rules of the games imposed by globalization. Furthermore, new multinationals emerging from China, and also from the former Soviet republics, are demanding a new and more flexible taxonomy. The present paper re-defines “Multinationals from Developing Countries” (MEDCs) and it reviews first, the current literature on multinationals, looking at the key factors which may explain the internationalization process of enterprises coming from outside the traditional, developed, and industrialised world, and also whether they may enjoy specific sources of comparative advantages, different from those ascribed to the old, established multinationals. A statistical appendix provides a brief but comprehensive survey of the current status of MEDCs, pointing out that, at the end of the day, there are roughly only four such enterprises in the usual rankings of the first one hundred multinational corporations, worldwide, and that the prospects of a forthcoming, and enhanced upgrading in the global corporate structure are heavily geared towards Asia. The data would also seem to support the argument that sheer “scale”, as such, of the enterprises does not explain a greater or lower degree of “transnationalization,” a conclusion which, added to that of the greater flexibility provided by the new information technologies, could be goods news for small-and medium-sized enterprises coming from the developing world.