When trade unions turn to litigation: ‘getting all the ducks in a row’

Driven by their members' demands and the need to adopt more combative legal strategies in order to oppose the deterioration of working and employment conditions, British trade unions have developed in‐house legal expertise and supported many individual and multiple claims. This article investigates the variation in unions' legal practices and examines their organisational responses to law and the role of compliance professionals in the regulation of employment litigation. It provides a nuanced account of the influence of legal rationality on the framing of union strategies and shows that, under certain conditions, trade unions are able to build multi‐pronged tactics by using litigation as a complement to other forms of action.     

Approximate maximum likelihood estimation for stochastic differential equations with random effects in the drift and the diffusion

Consider N independent stochastic processes \((X_i(t), t\in [0,T])\), \(i=1,\ldots , N\), defined by a stochastic differential equation with random effects where the drift term depends linearly on a random vector \(\Phi _i\) and the diffusion coefficient depends on another linear random effect \(\Psi _i\). For these effects, we consider a joint parametric distribution. We propose and study two approximate likelihoods for estimating the parameters of this joint distribution based on discrete observations of the processes on a fixed time interval. Consistent and \(\sqrt{N}\)-asymptotically Gaussian estimators are obtained when both the number of individuals and the number of observations per individual tend to infinity. The estimation methods are investigated on simulated data and show good performances.     

Coordination in a skeptical two-group population

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - This paper explores a situation in which a population split into two groups attempts to achieve the socially efficient outcome of a coordination...     

The Dynamics of Self-Esteem and Physical Self: Between Preservation and Adaptation

The aim of this study was to model and characterize the psychologicalprocesses that underlie the dynamics of global self-esteem and physicalself over time. Twice a day for 228 consecutive days, seven participantscompleted a short inventory (PSI-6, Ninot et al., 2001) measuring sixsubjective dimensions: global self-esteem, physical self-worth, physicalcondition, sport competence, physical strength, and attractive body.Each series was modeled by means of ARIMA procedures. The resultsshowed that a simple moving average model provided a satisfactoryaccount for the dynamics of all series. This model suggests that acombination of two opposite processes underlies the dynamics ofself-concept: preservation, which tends to restore the previousvalue after a disturbance, and adaptation, which tends to inflectthe series in the direction of the perturbation.     

Economic mechanisms for environmental protection: Business versus market transaction costs

This study presents theoretical arguments and evidence that attempt to show the contribution of economic mechanisms typical of a business for resolving problems of environmental protection. Firstly, a brief synopsis is given of the classic solutions that environmental economics proposes for correcting environmental externalities. Next, the benefit of expanding these two mechanisms is discussed so that they include those intermediate mechanisms for which it is not possible to clearly establish if they are developed within the domain of the market or the business. The study's focus resides in the fact that the explicit expansion of the range of solutions proposed from a macroeconomic point of view establishes a connecting point between environmental economics and business economics, an area in which academic attention to environmental matters has been significantly less. The present work forms part of research project SEC2002-00835, financed by MCYT-FEDER.     

What Prevents Firms from Advancing in their Environmental Strategy?

The aim of this paper is to analyze the determinants of the strategic environmental behavior of firms and, more specifically, the external and internal barriers that limit and sometimes even prevent the environmental adaptation. The analysis focuses on a sample of industrial firms that have at least three workers and that are located in Aragón, a region situated in the northeast of Spain. In order to achieve this objective, first the theoretical literature on the topic is reviewed. Subsequently, from the firms which were sampled, the existence of an underlying structure among the totality of barriers is studied. Finally, this structure is analyzed in order to determine if it has any influence on the degree of proactivity of the firm’s environmental strategy.

Spatial Regression Analysis vs. Kriging Methods for Spatial Estimation

Due to the rapid development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in recent years, spatial data analysis has received considerable attention and played an important role in social science. Although many standard statistical techniques are attractive in traditional data analysis, they cannot be implemented uncritically for spatial data. Generally, most of the studies in spatial data analysis can be divided into two branches: the model-driven approach and the data-driven approach. The main aim of this paper is the comparison of both approaches. To carry out such a task, crime rate data in Columbus (Ohio), coming from a well-known database, have been used. The main aim of this paper is to illustrate how spatial effects can be viewed as spatial econometric models, which assess the limitations of standard techniques in a spatial context, suggesting alternative methods to deal with this problem. An application to the crime rate in Columbus (Ohio) has been carried out.

Prudent expectations equilibrium in economies with uncertain delivery

In an economy with private information, we introduce the notion of objects of choice as lists of bundles out of which the market selects one for delivery. This leads to an extension of the model of Arrow–Debreu that is used to study trade ex ante with private state verification. Under the assumption that agents are prudent, equilibrium is characterized by the fact that agents consume bundles with the same utility in states that they do not distinguish. This is a weaker condition than the restriction of equal consumption imposed by Radner (Econometrica 36(1), 31–58, 1968), therefore, some no trade situations are avoided and the efficiency of trade increases.     

Returns from social capital in open source software networks

Open Source Software projects base their operation on a collaborative structure for knowledge exchange in the form of provision or reception of information, expertise and feedback on the creation of source code. Here, we address the direction of these knowledge flows among projects throughout social networks and their impact on project success. We identify the roles of membership or contribution that individuals play within projects. We found that connections through contributors who bring their knowledge to the project, improve project success, and that connection through members, who transfer their knowledge towards other projects, enhance project success. Finally, we found that ties through shared membership and contributions hamper project success. The analysis of knowledge flows and their impact on project success imply a translation of returns from investment in social capital, where investment takes the shape of knowledge flows and the returns mean the projects’ diffusion over the network.

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.