LGBT Neighbourhoods and ‘New Mobilities’: Towards Understanding Transformations in Sexual and Gendered Urban Landscapes

In this article we apply insights from ‘new mobilities’ approaches to understand the shifting sexual and gendered landscapes of major cities in the global North. The empirical context is the purported ‘demise’ of traditional gay villages in Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia, and the emergence of ‘LGBT neighbourhoods’ elsewhere in the inner city. We reinterpret the historical geography of twentieth century LGBT lives and the associated ‘rise and fall’ of gay enclaves through the lens of the ‘politics of mobility’. In this reading, it is apparent that multifaceted movements — migration, physical and social mobility, and motility — underpin the formation of gay enclaves and recent transformations in sexual and gendered landscapes. After the second world war, LGBT communities in the global North were embedded in specific historical geographies of mobility and we trace these in the Canadian and Australian contexts. The ‘great gay migration’ from the 1960s to the 1980s has been joined by new LGBT constellations of mobility in the 2000s, and these have imprinted upon the sexual and gendered landscapes of Toronto and Sydney.     

Life‐Cycle Consumption and Children: Evidence from a Structural Estimation

I estimate by maximum likelihood a dynamic model of optimal intertemporal allocation of consumption in the presence of children using high‐quality Danish longitudinal data. The number and age of all children can affect the marginal utility of consumption while income uncertainty, credit constraints and postretirement motives also influence household behaviour. While I estimate that children have a surprisingly small effect on the marginal utility of non‐durable consumption, data simulated from the estimated model replicates similar correlations between log consumption growth and changing household composition as found in the Danish data and typically found in UK and US data. To reconcile the results with existing studies, I illustrate how ignoring precautionary motives increases the estimated importance of children. The results indicate that precautionary motives might play a larger role than children in explaining the observed consumption age profile.     

The Adjusted Big Mac Methodology: A Clarification

The Economist's adjusted Big Mac index takes GDP into account in currency valuation, but the methodology is not explained. We show that the key to understanding the methodology is to distinguish between a currency's bilateral valuation (versus a specific currency) and the currency's overall valuation (versus a “basket” of a large number of currencies). Also, the adjusted Big Mac estimates of intrinsic foreign exchange (FX) rates have been better forecasts of actual FX changes than those of the original “raw” Big Mac index.     

Key institutions in business and management education research

The authors investigate institutional productivity in business and management education (BME) research based on the analysis of 4,464 articles published by 7,210 authors across 17 BME journals over a 10-year period, involving approximately 1,900 schools worldwide. Departing from traditional disciplinary silos, they examine the BME research field as a whole by including all traditional business disciplinary areas and producing two top 100 rankings, one based on raw number of author publications and the other based on weighted scores reflecting journal quality and coauthorship.     

Secured debt and managerial incentives

Financial theory holds that firms can control agency costs through the use of short-term and secured debt. We examine the relation between the use of secured debt and the incentive of the manager to increase the risk of the firm, as measured by vega. We find that firms utilize secured debt to a lesser extent when managerial volatility sensitivity is higher. Our results suggest that these same firms employ short-term debt as the primary tool to control risk-shifting. Managers with a high risk appetite avoid secured debt, but appear to do so without compromising the interests of the shareholders.     

Rivaroxaban for non-valvular atrial fibrillation and venous thromboembolism in the Netherlands: a real-world data based cost-effectiveness analysis

Background: Non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs) have been included in international guidelines as important alternatives to vitamin K antagonists (VKAs) for the treatment of venous thromboembolism (VTE) and stroke prevention in non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF). Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, NOACs are widely used next to VKAs. The objective of this study is to estimate the cost-effectiveness of treatment with rivaroxaban compared to VKAs in NVAF and VTE patients in the Netherlands, using data from international prospective observational phase IV studies.

Methods: Two models were developed to represent NVAF and VTE patients, populated with patients from the XANTUS (NCT01606995) and XALIA (NCT01619007) international prospective observational studies. The 1-year cost-effectiveness of rivaroxaban use, compared to VKAs, was explored in a population consisting of NVAF and VTE patients (base case) as well as for four scenarios with sub-populations: NVAF patients only, VTE patients only, NVAF patients with unstable international normalized ratio (INR), and NVAF patients using an INR self-measuring device.

Results: In the base case, rivaroxaban saved €72,350 and gained 21 quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) in a simulation of 2,000 patients over the use of VKAs. Ergo, rivaroxaban was dominant over VKAs. The probabilistic sensitivity analysis showed a probability of 85% for rivaroxaban being dominant and 100% at a willingness-to-pay threshold of €20,000/QALY. Rivaroxaban appeared to be dominant in all scenarios as well, except for the NVAF-patients-only scenario where the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) was €157/QALY.

Conclusions: In patients with NVAF or VTE, rivaroxaban treatment is likely to be cost-effective and a potentially cost-saving alternative to VKA in the Netherlands.