US Families 2025: In search of future families

Parenting defines and cultivates gender roles for men and women, from both biological and cultural angles. From scanning the latest trends, issues, and social pulses on parenting, families and the gender roles encapsulated, it is evident that changes are taking place: dual-income families, a health insurance crisis, family-work conflicts, bioengineering, same-sex marriage, and increasing health concerns — just some of the issues — are changing in the US, while families and gender roles are being shaped and reshaped in the process. In this article, four alternative future scenarios generate implications that challenge mainstream assumptions about the future of parenting and reveal possibilities for future male and female roles. Four scenarios (Mr. & Mrs. Right Now, Marriage Marketplace, The New Waltons for the 21st Century, and Desperate Housewives) emerged from an informal workshop held at the University of Houston, Clear Lake (UHCL) February 19, 2005.     

Electrification of a city bus network—An optimization model for cost-effective placing of charging infrastructure and battery sizing of fast-charging electric bus systems

The deployment of battery-powered electric bus systems within the public transportation sector plays an important role in increasing energy efficiency and abating emissions. Rising attention is given to bus systems using fast charging technology. This concept requires a comprehensive infrastructure to equip bus routes with charging stations. The combination of charging infrastructure and bus batteries needs a reliable energy supply to maintain a stable bus operation even under demanding conditions. An efficient layout of the charging infrastructure and an appropriate dimensioning of battery capacity are crucial to minimize the total cost of ownership and to enable an energetically feasible bus operation. In this work, the central issue of jointly optimizing the charging infrastructure and battery capacity is described by a capacitated set covering problem. A mixed-integer linear optimization model is developed to determine the minimum number and location of required charging stations for a bus network as well as the adequate battery capacity for each bus line. The bus energy consumption for each route segment is determined based on individual route, bus type, traffic, and other information. Different scenarios are examined in order to assess the influence of charging power, climate, and changing operating conditions. The findings reveal significant differences in terms of required infrastructure. Moreover, the results highlight a trade-off between battery capacity and charging infrastructure under different operational and infrastructure conditions. This paper addresses upcoming challenges for transport authorities during the electrification process of the bus fleets and sharpens the focus on infrastructural issues related to the fast charging concept.     

Individual and place-based drivers of self-employment in Chile

This paper analyzes the importance of individual and place characteristics on the selection into self-employment in Chile. Following a structural and multilevel empirical approach, we test whether both sets of variables explain the variation of individual wages, self-employed earnings, and the propensity of being in independent work. The results indicate that while most of the variation in these three outcomes is explained by individuals’ traits, place-related variables account for a non-negligible share of spatial variation. Second, as suggested by occupational choice theories, the propensity of being in self-employment positively correlates with larger expected earning differentials, but only in the case of employers. This, along with other results, suggests that while employers seem to choose their occupational status, own accounts in Chile seem to respond to factors pushing them into self-employment.     

Green decisions: demographics and consumer understanding of environmental labels

This research examined the demographic profiles of Australian green consumers in relation to their satisfaction of environmental labelling. It examined consumers’ understanding of labelling and empirically investigated the association of demographic profile of consumers with their attitudes towards such labels. The results indicated that some of the demographic variables were significant, which is largely consistent with earlier findings by other researchers in this area. Label dissatisfaction was higher in the older and middle age respondents. However, some respondents disagreed that labels were accurate while commenting that labels were easy to understand. The key issue arising from the findings is that in order to provide perception of accuracy in labels, it is an option to use Type I or Type III labelling on products. These labels are, arguably, more credible because they are endorsed by third party labelling experts. This would come at a cost and for green products that use third party labelling, they will also have to bear in mind to keep the prices competitive.     

EEG 2017 — Mehr Markt bei der Erneuerbare-Energien-Förderung?

Within four years now, the German Renewable Energy Resources Act (EEG) has been amended in 2016 for the third time. The main point of the current reform is the extension of bidding schemes to determine the remuneration of renewable power generation. The articles analyses whether or not the expected decrease in costs and improvement of deployment control could ever occur, and considers the critique of thwarting the energy transition and jeopardising the diversity of actors involved in the industry.     

Metropolitan innovation,firm size,and business survival in a high-tech industry

This paper contributes to the growing body of business survival literature that focuses on regional determinants of the hazard faced by firms. Using parametric survival analysis, we test the effects of regional innovation on exit likelihood in the US computer and electronic product manufacturing during the 1992–2008 period. The novelty of our approach is in conditioning the effects of metropolitan innovation on firm size. Estimation results suggest a negative relationship between metropolitan patenting activity and survival of firms that started with 1–3 employees. This effect decreases if companies grow. Establishments with more than 4 employees at start-up are insensitive to metropolitan innovation, although size of firms that started with 4–9 employees improves their survival chances. These findings indicate that local knowledge spillovers do not translate into lower hazard. The negative relationship indicates either a creative destruction regime or decisions of entrepreneurs to shut down existing ventures in order to pursue other opportunities.     

Framing Sustainable Consumption in Different Ways: Policy Lessons from Two Participatory Systems Mapping Exercises in Hungary

Sustainable consumption as a complex phenomenon at the boundaries of different (ecological, economic, social) systems requires theoretical approaches that do justice to its complex causality and dynamism. Participatory systems mapping offers a tool to achieve this purpose. Its policy relevance lies in its ability to include diverse views, multiple actors, and offer options for policy intervention. The research reported here applied participatory systems mapping in order to define and identify system boundaries for sustainable consumption and uncover perceived causal relationships among the determining factors of sustainable consumption. By revealing the mental models of an expert and a conscious consumer panel on sustainable consumption in general, we can shed light on the cognitive constructions of sustainable consumption and identify most important boundaries that were chosen and their implications on policy-making. The expert panel framed the boundaries as lack of sustainable consumption, while the conscious consumer panel employed a positive framing as strong communities in sustainable consumption. The two panels also differed in their focus on scale: Experts targeted the national scale, while conscious consumers concentrated at the local scale.     

Selection of a Representative Value Function for Robust Ordinal Regression in Group Decision Making

In this paper, we introduce the concept of a representative value function in a group decision context. We extend recently proposed methods UTA^GMS-GROUP and UTADIS^GMS-GROUP with selection of a compromise and collective preference model which aggregates preferences of several decision makers (DMs) and represents all instances of preference models compatible with preference information elicited from DMs. The representative value function is built on results of robust ordinal regression, so its representativeness can be interpreted in terms of robustness concern. We propose a few procedures designed for multiple criteria ranking, choice, and sorting problems. The use of these procedures is conditioned by both satisfying different degrees of consistency of the preference information provided by all DMs, as well as by some properties of particular decision making situations. The representative value function is intended to help the DMs to understand the robust results, and to provide them with a compromise result in case of conflict between the DMs.