The Price of Alcohol,Wife Abuse,and Husband Abuse

Alcohol consumption has been frequently linked to violence. This paper examines the direct relationship between the price of alcohol, which determines consumption, and violence toward husbands and wives. The data come from the 1985 cross section and the 1985-1987 panel of the National Family Violence Survey. A reduced form violence equation is estimated, and individual-level fixed effects are used to control for unobserved characteristics in the panel. Results indicate that an increase in the price of pure alcohol, as measured by a weighted average of the price of alcohol from beer, wine, and liquor, will reduce violence aimed at wives. The evidence on the propensity of an increase in the price of alcohol to lower violence toward husbands is mixed.     

Lease Financing and Corporate Governance

Lease financing is a well‐recognized mechanism for reducing the agency costs of debt. This study examines whether firms that attempt to control the agency costs of equity through strong governance structures, including Chief Executive Officer compensation alignment and board structure, are more likely to use an agency cost reducing debt structure, such as leasing. For a sample of large firms, we find that firms who use more incentive compensation and have more outside directors also tend to use more lease financing, suggesting these agency cost reducing measures are complements.     

Factors influencing repeat visits to a destination: The influence of group composition

This paper is an analysis of the likelihood for repeat visits to a sun and sand destination by tourists. For this purpose, an empirical study was conducted using tourists who had visited the destination. The analysis took into account the travelling group composition. The results showed that, for the total tourist sample, overall satisfaction had the biggest influence on the decision of whether to revisit a destination, while the least important influence was the tourist's perceived image. These influences varied, however, when different travelling group compositions were considered. The results are of vital importance in tourism management policies, because they can contribute to the better design and development of tourism promotion strategies.     

Is tourism just another staple? A new perspective on tourism in remote regions

According to recent research, countries may have a positive image from a tourism perspective, but they may be seen as lacking from an economic or political viewpoint. As governments and destination management organisations spend large sums of money in promoting tourist attractions, the question of whether these activities also influence other aspects of a country's image becomes relevant. The objective of the research is to determine the effect of tourism promotions on the image of the country and that of the destination as two separate concepts, in the case of Israel, a country subject to continuous conflicts. A 2?×?2 quasi-experimental design is utilised to investigate the influence of tourism promotional brochures. Additionally, a comparative perspective is used to determine whether people from diverse countries and backgrounds may be affected differently by the same information. The findings confirm that tourism brochures influence not only the image of the destination, but also that of the country. These effects are found to be different for respondents from the two different countries compared. The article focuses on understanding how tourism communication strategies may also be used to improve the image of a country, with potential benefits for international marketing and international relations.     

A methodology based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process for the quantitative assessment of emergency preparedness and response in road tunnels

The paper presents and discusses a methodology to judge the effectiveness of the preparedness activities in case of accidents in road tunnels by considering the system from several points of view (i.e. structural/technical, organizational/human, and contextual). Due to the different nature of the criteria involved in the assessment activity, we chose to apply the Analytic Hierarchy Process methodology (Saaty, T.L. (2006). Fundamentals of Decision Making and Priority Theory with the Analytic Hierarchy Process, RWS Publications, Pittsburgh) that allows comparing and appraising quantitatively variables that are incommensurable and that may originate from distinct and separate areas. The paper identifies the hierarchic structure necessary to measure both the performance of the emergency response system for road tunnel accidents and the weights for assessing their relative importance. Finally, the methodology is applied to a case study on a transnational road tunnel between Italy and France to show a feasible evaluation of the sensitivity of the structure to the input variables in order to find the most valuable enhancing and improving actions.     

Under the AEGIS of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship: employment growth and gender of founders among European firms

An increasing number of theoretical and empirical analyses address the role of innovation as one of the main sources of firm growth. More recently, studies have looked at the role of gender diversity as a possible determinant of innovation and entrepreneurial performance. However, the relationship between gender and employment growth—a dimension of entrepreneurial performance—still remains unexplored to a large degree. This paper contributes to the empirical literature on gender and entrepreneurial performance in several ways. First, it examines the role played by both innovation and gender ownership as determinants of employment growth rates of young, knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms. Second, it investigates the indirect impact of contributing factors—such as the characteristics of the market, knowledge-based capital, and human capital—on employment growth. And third, it relies on a rich new cross-sectional data set on young, KIE firms across European Union (EU) countries. The data set contains information not only on the gender of the firm’s founders but also on the market environment, business strategy, and innovative and economic performance of firms.     

Instructional Manipulation Checks: A longitudinal analysis with implications for MTurk

Instructional Manipulation Checks (IMCs) assess respondent behavior by, for example, asking participants not to answer a trick question. We find IMCs can be used to detect problematic response behavior in longitudinal surveys. This is important because a Latent Class Analysis based on IMC-failure in the two reported studies reveals that between 9% and 12% of respondents can be labelled Inattentive Stayers at the first survey-wave and between 13% and 17% at the third wave. The tendency of Inattentive Stayers to remain in the panel is particularly relevant for online panel services such as MTurk, with workers participating in many surveys over longer time-periods. We find IMC-failure to be mitigated by a warning to respondents that their attention will be checked early in the survey, but not by repeated exposure to IMCs, or a timer leaving questions on the screen longer. Respondent personality also plays a role in IMC-failure, which implies persistency of undesirable respondent behavior.