The perception of risk among unauthorized migrants in Ghana

Abstract

In recent years, the number of unauthorized migrants trying to reach Europe by boat has increased. In an attempt to curtail this trend, European countries have increasingly deployed information campaigns regarding the risks involved in unauthorized migration. The assumption behind these campaigns is that a strong relation exists between the prevalence of high-risk migration and a lack of awareness of the involved dangers, and that the dissemination of ‘objective’ information would cause prospective migrants to refrain from leaving. Although regarded as a crucial tool in the management of migration, there is little evidence on their effectiveness. Based on four weeks of fieldwork in Ghana, this qualitative study has sought to fill this lacuna. By concentrating on both the circulation and perception of the available risk information in Ghana, this article explores the ways in which notions of risk affect the motivation and decision of unauthorized migrants to engage in high-risk behaviour. Thereby, it will be argued that unauthorized migrants are not the ignorant actors they are often portrayed to be, but that they make their decisions carefully and within a particular vulnerable, socioeconomic and cultural context.     

Performance of methods to conduct mediation analysis with time-to-event outcomes

Previous studies have discouraged the use of the Cox proportional hazards (PH) model for traditional mediation analysis as it might provide biased results. Accelerated failure time (AFT) models have been proposed as an alternative for Cox PH models. In addition, the use of the potential outcomes framework has been proposed for mediation models with time-to-event outcomes. The aim of this paper is to investigate the performance of traditional mediation analysis and potential outcomes mediation analysis based on both the Cox PH and the AFT model. This is done by means of a Monte Carlo simulation study and the illustration of the methods using an empirical data set. Both the product-of-coefficients method of the traditional mediation analysis and the potential outcomes framework yield unbiased estimates with respect to their own underlying indirect effect value for simple mediation models with a time-to-event outcome and estimated based on Cox PH or AFT.     

Notes and debate paper: Should merchandising and sourcing be worlds apart? The opportunity for more integrated strategic sourcing research

Whereas retailers are some of the biggest buyers that have some of the highest percentages of external spend as a share of revenue, they are not typically included in strategic sourcing research. Strategic sourcing research originated with a focus on supplies for manufacturing. But the strategic sourcing of merchandise by retailers is not as commonly studied. Merchandise sourcing is often approached very differently from manufacturing sourcing and often different teams of buyers with different roles and responsibilities are involved. Leveraging author industry experience and interviews with strategic sourcing executives in manufacturing and merchandise sourcing this notes and debate paper compares strategic sourcing across these domains and identifies fruitful research opportunities for developing a more comprehensive supply chain approach to strategic sourcing research.     

Labor reallocation and demographics

We explore data from all transition economies over nearly two decades, providing insights on the mechanisms behind labor force reallocation. We show that worker flows between jobs in different industries are rare relative to the demographic flows of youth entry and elderly exit. The same applies to the flows between state-owned enterprises and private firms. In fact, evidence suggest that changes in the demand for labor were accommodated mostly through demographic flows, with a smaller role left for job transitions. We also show that the speed of changing the ownership structure in the economy has driven exits to retirement, in particular the early exits.     

Positioning Strategies for Animal-Friendly Products: A Social Dilemma Approach

Many consumers express concerns about the welfare of animals in agriculture, but often refrain from purchasing animal-friendly alternatives that address their concerns. To support consumers in making choices in line with their values and attitudes, this study approaches consumer animal-friendly product choice as a dilemma between maximizing the buyer's self-interest and maximizing societal interest. To address this social dilemma, we developed and tested positioning strategies that reinforce the animal welfare label with complementary consumption values (functional, emotional, social, and epistemic). The results from a choice experiment with Dutch chicken meat shoppers showed that two strategies—emotional and epistemic—effectively increase consumer value perceptions. These insights imply that animal-friendly products positioned to invoke emotion or curiosity drive consumers towards animal-friendly product choices, and that these strategies are most effective for consumers who base their choice solely on maximizing either self-interest or societal interest.     

Hypothetical extractions from a global perspective

ABSTRACT

The hypothetical extraction method (HEM) has been widely used to measure interindustry linkages and the importance of industries. HEM considers the hypothetical situation in which a certain industry is no longer operational. HEM was developed for national economies, using national input–output tables. When performing HEM, it is assumed (often implicitly) that the input requirements that were originally provided by the extracted industry are met by additional imports in the post-extraction situation. Applying HEM to global multiregional input–output tables then causes serious problems. It is no longer sufficient to assume that the required inputs are imported. Instead, it is necessary to indicate explicitly how much is imported from each origin to replace the original inputs. Our adaptation of HEM is the global extraction method (GEM). As an illustration, GEM is applied to the extraction of the motor vehicle industry in China, the US, and Germany, using the 2014 WIOD input–output table.     

Are All Private Benefits of Control Ineffective? Principal–Principal Benefits,External Governance Quality,and Firm Performance

Private benefits of control (PBC) are benefits that controlling shareholders consume, but that are not shared with minority shareholders. Research focusing on the value protection role of corporate governance typically frames PBC as principal–principal (PP) agency costs, and interprets them as a form of minority shareholder expropriation that decreases firm performance. Taking a value creation perspective of corporate governance, however, we propose a more nuanced role for PBC. Specifically, we see them also as PP agency benefits that compensate controlling shareholders for their monitoring and advisory services, which can increase firm performance. Since both PP costs and benefits affect firm performance, we theorize that PBC enhance firm performance at a diminishing rate. Furthermore, we show that the effect of PBC on firm performance is more positive when country‐level external governance mechanisms are strong.     

Production Period and Cycles: Several Interpretations in a Neo-Austrian Economic Perspective

The aim of this contribution is to study the notion of the period of production by taking into consideration the time-consuming nature of capital. Long delays between investment expenditures and receipts of profits from capital are indeed a remarkable property of the Austrian theory of capital. The study of the great essays of the neo-Austrian capital theory modeling allows us to postulate that there are at least two large contributing groups depending upon whether the production period is endogenous or exogenous. Our work consists in showing the well-founded methodology of the first current by suggesting a neo-Austrian inerpretation of the non-steady state behavior of the standard macroeconomic model. We show that the origin of economic cycles is the potential conflict between the producer's plan of investment through the period of production and the inter-temporal choices of the consumers.     

Canal Interocéanique de Panama. Commission d'études instituéc par le Liquidateur de la Compagnie Universelle. Rapports I-IX.-I. Rapport général

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