You do not have to succeed,just do not fail: When do soccer coaches get fired?

This article deals with circumstances leading to the dismissal of a soccer coach. The article is based on results from the Premier League in England over 12 consecutive years. In this paper, we converted the scores of matches (win, draw, and loss) into an index based upon how results were perceived by club owners—those empowered with the decision as to whether or not to fire the coach. The index is based on the difference between the actual and expected results reflected by betting odds. We conclude that to ensure job preservation, the manager does not have to succeed—he just must not fail.     

Preventing wildlife crime with a focus on orangutans: Applying social influence techniques to public education efforts

Orangutans are projected to become critically endangered or extinct this century if humans continue to destroy their habitat. Threats include legal and illegal clearcutting of rain forests to establish palm oil plantations, climate change, and transnational organized crime. This study examines how self-benefit and other benefit appeals, knowledge of threats, concern about habitat loss, and liking orangutans are associated with (a) intent to protect habitat due to licit threats and crimes against wildlife, and (b) seeking information to save habitat. Upon entry to a zoo, 251 (118 men, 128 women, and 5 unknown) persons viewed posters highlighting the benefits of habitat conservation to self or others and completed a survey. Concern, threat knowledge, liking, and self-benefit and other benefit appeals accounted for 28% of the variance associated with intent to take action to protect the habitat. Integrating social influence principles into zoo displays and addressing barriers that prevent conservation behavior are discussed. The ideas in this paper are relevant to many primates and endangered species.     

Unemployment insurance benefits and income smoothing

Labor unemployment insurance reduces unemployment concerns. We argue that these benefits moderate incentives to smooth earnings to reduce employees’ concerns about unemployment risk. Using exogenous variations in unemployment insurance benefits, we find evidence consistent with this argument. We also find that the link between unemployment insurance benefits and income smoothing is stronger when there is higher unemployment risk and when the firm is likely to employ more low-wage workers, who find unemployment insurance benefits especially useful. Our paper contributes to the literature by showing that public policy decisions such as unemployment insurance have significant, albeit probably unintended, externalities on corporate financial reporting.     

Improving the speed of adoption of agricultural technologies and farm performance through farmer groups: evidence from the Great Lakes region of Africa

The article examines the effect of membership in farmer groups (MFG) on adoption lag of agricultural technologies and farm performance in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. We use duration and stochastic production frontier models on farm household data. We find that the longer the duration of MFG, the shorter the adoption lag and much more so if combined with extension service delivery. Farmer groups function as an important mechanism for improving farm productivity through reduced technical inefficiency in input use. We discuss policy implications under which farmer groups are a useful channel to reduce adoption lag, and the means through which improved farm performance can be achieved.     

Financing constraints and US cross‐listing

This study investigates whether relaxation of firms' financial constraints is an important outcome of the US cross‐listing mechanism. We use the association between investment spending and cash flow to test for the presence and importance of firms' financing constraints. Consistent with the bonding hypothesis, the results suggest that US exchange and private placement cross‐listings significantly alleviate firms' financing constraints. In addition, the financial benefits associated with exchange listings are larger than those associated with private listings, while on the other hand, over‐the‐counter programs do not improve capital allocation. The study also shows that US exchange cross‐listing benefits have not been eroded by the enactment of the Sarbanes‐Oxley (SOX) Act in 2002. Copyright © 2014 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

IDENTIFYING THE RESPONSE OF FERTILITY TO FINANCIAL INCENTIVES

While using financial incentives to increase fertility has become relatively common, the effects of such policies are difficult to assess. We propose an identification strategy that relies on the fact that the variation in wages induces variation in benefits and tax credits among ‘comparable’ households. We implement our approach by estimating a discrete‐choice model of female participation and fertility using individual data from the French Labor Force Survey and a detailed representation of the French tax–benefit system. Our results suggest that financial incentives have had a significant effect on fertility decisions in France. As an example, we simulate the effects of an additional, unconditional child credit of 150 euros per month. The effects are strongest for the third child. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ecotourism as a conservation tool and its adoption by private protected areas in Brazil

Ecotourism in private reserves combines the establishment of protected areas with an incentive mechanism to conserve biodiversity. Brazil's private reserve system is well-established but little is known about its links to tourism. This study puts the global private protected area into context and quantifies the extent to which ecotourism has been adopted as a sustainable land-use practice on private reserves in Brazil. Our findings demonstrate that small reserves do contribute to conservation and are used for ecotourism. The belief that large reserves are necessary for ecotourism and conservation is challenged. Only 4% (n = 45) of the 1182 reserves are engaged in ecotourism, mainly those within the Atlantic Forest biome and these are generally small in size (<50 ha). Reserves provide modest to basic accommodation as well as education and economic opportunities that include adjacent communities. Hiking and bird watching are the most popular activities but many reserves are threatened by poaching and invasive species. The low adoption of ecotourism appears due to a combination of factors, including lack of landowner interest, constraints imposed by regulations, logistics and anthropogenic threats. Nonetheless, there is potential to expand ecotourism within private reserves as 143 further private reserves are located near those already engaged in ecotourism.     

Beyond a Liberal Critique of ‘Trickle Down': Urban Planning in the City of Malmö

This article scrutinizes the much used, but less examined, concept of ‘trickle down' in an urban setting. We make a distinction between the production of and distribution in the city, and argue that trickle down in contemporary urban policy could be regarded as the liberal link between production and distribution. Based on interviews with key figures and document analyses, we look at the transformation of the Swedish city of Malmö from an industrial to a post‐industrial city, where, during the last two decades, we have found three concurrent components: the ideology of trickle down; several urban policy programs and governmental policies to ‘make' money and resources trickle down; as well as increased economic polarization and segregation. A liberal critique of trickle down would argue that market mechanisms cannot by themselves solve distribution, and that government policies therefore are needed. We argue for the need to go beyond a liberal critique of trickle down and stress how unequal distribution is built into the unequal production of the city.     

Feminism and the Physical Cultural Studies Assemblage: Revisiting Debates and Imagining New Directions

Abstract

The relationship between feminism and PCS is complex and an exemplar of the politics of knowledge production. We begin this paper by detailing the evolving relationship between feminism and PCS, and identify two key ways that feminist sport scholars have responded to PCS. Whereas one group has rejected PCS outright, another is reappropriating PCS for their own purposes. Aligning with the latter, in the remainder of the paper we offer one of many possible imaginings of a feminist interpretation of the PCS assemblage. More specifically, we briefly outline how a feminist engagement with some of the key tenets of PCS facilitated new understandings of New Zealand women’s embodied experiences of netball, includingMāori women.In so doing, we reveal what a FPCS approach might look like in practice and highlight ways that feminist scholars have, and can continue to, contribute to the PCS agenda through embodied, theoretical, reflexive, political, contextual and culturally-specific research.     

"Marie Howland—19th‐Century Leader for Women's Economic Independence

Marie Howland (1836–1921) was an important working‐class figure in the early U.S. women's movement who mounted an inspired challenge to separate spheres and the prevailing domestic ideology. Well before Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she called for domestic work to be respected, paid, and collectively organized. Howland made it her life's work to remove barriers to economic independence for women through the overhaul of social and economic institutions that posited the home as the center of female existence and exploited workers. She wanted women to have the economic freedom to marry for love, not economic necessity, leave a bad marriage, survive widowhood, or not marry at all. By delving into Howland's early years in rural New Hampshire and the Lowell textile mills, her close association with radical bohemians in New York City, and her later participation in experimental communities, the following treatise provides a long overdue, comprehensive account of her life and work. My inquiry reveals how Marie Howland promoted women's freedom within a class analysis, rejecting Marxism and embracing the utopian socialist theory of Charles Fourier. It also offers an in‐depth look at her popular utopian novel, Papa's Own Girl, where a cooperative community of economically independent women and enlightened men replace the patriarchy and individual competitiveness of the emerging, but by no means entrenched, industrial order. In addition, my treatise focuses on Howland's efforts to put ideas into practice. Unwilling to limit her activism to intellectual discussions, she lived in a Fourierist household in New York City, a cooperative settlement in western Mexico, and the single‐tax community of Fairhope, Alabama. She pushed the Grange and the International Workingman's Association to focus on women's issues. She also made sure that her personal relationships with men were based on free love and mutual respect, not economic necessity and legal contract. I also examine how Howland dedicated her life to changing gender and class relations, but made little effort to improve conditions for African Americans. Like many white reformers, she drew on popular scientific theories of biological difference to justify the unequal treatment of African Americans. Besides shedding light on important intellectual and social developments, like phrenology, free love, Fourierism, the Grange, and theosophy, this examination of Marie Howland reveals the complexities, possibilities, and limitations of the women's rights movement before the passage of the 19^th Amendment.