The Cost of War: A Comment and a Reply

Intereconomics - In the July/August issue of Intereconomics, Ilona Sologoub argued that increasing the cost of war would limit the ability of an authoritarian state to wage a war. Here, Charles D....     

公路施工中软土路基的施工技术处理探析

软土路基水分含量高,变形几率较大,因此在对软土路基进行处理时,应当选择合适的施工技术,否则会影响到后续公路的正常使用.基于此,本文对软土路基的相关概念和特点进行了分析,并提出了软土路基的加固特点以及施工技术在公路施工中的具体要点,以期能够为后续公路施工中软土路基的处理提供有效参考意见,促进我国公路建设速度的不断提高.     

Multi-level and mixed-level <Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis>-circulant supersaturated designs

Supersaturated designs (SSDs) constitute an important class of fractional factorial designs that could be extremely useful in factor screening experiments. Most of the existing studies have focused on balanced designs. This paper provides a new lower bound for the \(E(f_{NOD})\)-optimality measure of SSDs with general run sizes. This bound is a generalization of existing bounds since it is applicable to both balanced and unbalanced designs. Optimal multi and mixed-level, balanced and nearly balanced SSDs are constructed by applying a k-circulant type methodology. Necessary and sufficient conditions are introduced for the generator vectors, in order to pre-ensure the optimality of the constructed k-circulant SSDs. The provided lower bounds were used to measure the efficiency of the generated designs. The presented methodology leads to a number of new families of improved SSDs, providing tools for directly constructing optimal or nearly-optimal k-circulant designs by just checking the corresponding generator vector.     

Khat-chewing in liminal leisure spaces: British-Somali youth on the margins

Khat-chewing, a controversial leisure activity within the Somali diaspora in Britain, has received little attention within the academic field of Leisure Studies. This paper reports on ethnographic research to provide insights into the unique locations where young British-Somali men chew khat, exposing the liminal qualities of such localities. The paper begins with an overview of the contentious position khat-chewing occupies within Somali communities in Britain, highlighting reasons why young British-Somali men hide their association with the leisure practice. The discussion that follows considers how young male khat users conceptualise spatial environments, exposing how these locations temporarily produce a dual sense of privacy and sociality. The ambiences of such temporary leisure spaces remain open to the prospect of discovery, resulting in the use of discretionary tactics to maintain a sense of secrecy. In this context, we discuss how khat-chewing offers a sense of cultural identity and belongingness while also marking young British-Somali men as outsiders – even within their own communities.     

From private label to co-branded credit card: an assessment of the impact of a change in value proposition over customer value perception and company value capture

Journal of Financial Services Marketing - Purpose: The aim of this paper is to evaluate the success of a value proposition over time, considering two aspects: customer’s perceived value and...     

Family firm’s management composition: the role played by family members’ age in TMT and supervisor levels

Quality & Quantity - Family firms (FFs) are the backbone of entrepreneurial fabric in many countries. Management of such businesses is complex because of their features: the overlap between...     

城市高房价如何影响农民工的定居意愿

中国城镇化进入了以提升质量为特征的减速阶段,农民工有序完成迁移第二个过程,即在城市定居下来,这是高质量城镇化的重要组成部分,而快速上涨的城市房价对农民工定居意愿的影响日益凸显.本文首先构建中国城乡人口迁移两个过程的理论模型,分析城市住房价格对农民工定居意愿的影响及作用机制;其次将2012-2017年中国流动人口动态监测数据与288个城市数据匹配进行实证检验.研究发现,城市高房价显著降低了农民工的定居意愿,而定居意愿下降将会阻滞城镇化的进程.机制检验发现,城市高房价主要通过提高农民工家庭在城市的预期购房成本进而降低其定居意愿.此外,本文还进行了个体异质性和城市异质性检验.个体异质性检验发现,城市高房价对第二代、低受教育水平和本地无房农民工定居意愿的负向影响更大,对更高收入水平、更大发展空间以及可获得公共服务农民工定居意愿的负向影响更小;城市异质性检验发现,随着城市规模的扩大,城市高房价对农民工定居意愿影响的负向作用逐渐增大.本文的政策含义是抑制城市房价过快上涨、提高农民工收入和福利水平、提供更为平等的公共服务,以及解决好进城农民工"三权"有偿退出问题,可以增强农民工的定居意愿,推动城镇化高质量发展.     

Capability and need: A framework for understanding why states create sovereign wealth funds

Over the past half‐century, roughly one‐quarter of states in the international system have created sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). As a case of sovereign states investing public wealth mostly in private markets across borders, it is not altogether clear why SWFs have proliferated to this extent. What explains their spread in recent decades? In this paper, I build on a multidisciplinary literature that conceives of SWFs as a type of insurance against external risk and argue that middle economic powers that are highly exposed in global trade and capital markets are the states most likely to establish these institutions. Such states possess both the capability to create an SWF of a size sufficient to insure against risk and the need for the insurance function of a SWF by virtue of their relatively vulnerable position in the global economy. To evaluate my argument, I rely on a data set consisting of all states in the international system from 1950 to 2012 including the 48 SWFs created during that period. I find that middle economic powers with high degrees of trade and capital openness are the states most likely to create SWFs.     

Using the Pack‐and‐a‐Half Rule to Eliminate Backroom Inventories in Retail Operations

In the retail industry, backroom inventories are typically associated with higher labor costs and greater operational complexity. Thus, retailers look for ways to eliminate backroom inventories. A heuristic used for this purpose is the pack‐and‐a‐half rule which suggests that the shelf space allocated for a product should be at least 50% larger than the case pack quantity in which the product is delivered. Despite its popularity among retailers, the pack‐and‐a‐half rule has been ignored in the academic literature. We introduce the pack‐and‐a‐half rule, assess its impact on a retailer's profits, identify cost, demand, and product characteristics driving this impact, and propose a modification. Based on an analysis of data obtained from a retailer on 1,986 SKUs in 20 categories, we find that the pack‐and‐a‐half rule decreases a retailer's profits, on average, by 10% when applied uniformly across all SKUs. Further, this decrease is significantly affected by product depth, product width, demand elasticity, case pack quantity, and inventory carrying cost. Finally, we develop a set of modifications based on these variables where the pack‐and‐a‐half rule is applied selectively and in a stepwise fashion. These modifications limit the decrease in a retailer's profits to a range between 6% and 7%.