Harnessing the power of social incentives to curb shirking in teams

We study several solutions to shirking in teams, each of which triggers social incentives by reshaping the workplace social context. Using an experimental design, we manipulate social pressure at work by varying the type of workplace monitoring and the extent to which employees are allowed to engage in social interaction. This design allows us to assess the effectiveness as well as the appeal of each solution. Despite similar effectiveness in boosting productivity, only organizational systems involving social interaction (via chat) were comparably appealing to a baseline treatment. This suggests that solutions involving social interaction are more likely to be effective in the long‐run than solutions involving monitoring alone.     

Notes on the Desecuritisation of the Rhineland Frontier

During the first half of the twentieth century, the river Rhine constituted the key source of insecurity between France and Germany. Contemporary observers have claimed that the river lost this role in the 1950s due to the dynamics of Franco-German rapprochement and the emergence of the European Coal and Steel Community. This article tries to complicate this story in three steps. First, it shifts attention from early European integration to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its role in the desecuritisation of the Rhine. Subsequently, it discusses the river’s loss of strategic significance in West Germany due to the particularities of post-war statehood and the country’s idiosyncratic geopolitics. Finally, the article argues that it was only the development of an independent French nuclear deterrent capacity between 1966 and 1972 that ultimately took the boundary from France’s geopolitical map.     

Income distributions and decomposable divergence measures

Inequality indices evaluate the divergence between the income distribution and the hypothetical situation where all individuals receive the mean income, and are unambiguously reduced by a Pigou–Dalton progressive transfer. This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate the divergence between any two income distributions, where the latter can be a reference distribution for the former. In the case where the reference distribution is perfectly egalitarian – and uniquely in this case – we assume that any progressive transfer reduces the divergence, and that the divergence can be additively separated into inequality and efficiency loss. We characterize the unique class of decomposable divergence measures consistent with these views. We derive the associated relative and absolute subclasses, and we illustrate the applicability of our results. This approach extends the generalized entropy studied in inequality measurement.     

The “greening” of trade unions and the demand for eco-taxes

By embedding labour market bargaining considerations in an influence-seeking framework, we show how a union's stance on environmental policy depends on the exposure of their members to the risk of job loss. With a risk of unemployment, unions lobby with employers to resist stricter environmental policies. When employment is secure, unions may support policies that reduce employment opportunities for nonunion workers. “Environmentalism” can therefore arise without explicit environmental concerns among workers. Consequently, pollution taxes may yield a negative welfare dividend in the form of inefficiently high unemployment.     

The importance of selecting appropriate adjective pairs for measuring attitude based on the semantic differential method

The aim of this study is to verify whether a given semantic differential scale is appropriate for measuring attitudes toward four health-related behaviors: smoking cigarettes; using oral contraceptives; breast self-examination; and using dental floss. 193 undergraduate university women completed an attitudinal questionnaire concerning these behaviors and three months later the corresponding behaviors were self-reported. Internal consistency values varied from 0.49 to 0.83 and the attitude-behavior correlations fluctuated between 0.12 and 0.64. The lowest alpha value was associated with the lowest attitude-behavior correlation. The results are discussed in terms of the relevance and the semantic stability of the pair of adjectives used to assess the attitude construct.     

The effect of decoupling on marginal agricultural systems: Implications for farm incomes,land use and upland ecology

In many parts of Europe, decades of production subsidies led to the steady intensification of agriculture in marginal areas. The recent decoupling of subsidies from production decisions means that the future of farming in these areas is uncertain. For example, in the uplands of the United Kingdom, an area important both for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision, hill farmers steadily increased stocking densities in response to headage payments but must now reconfigure farm businesses to account for the shift to the Single Farm Payment scheme. We examined hill farming in the Peak District National Park as a case study into the future of marginal agriculture after decoupling. We surveyed 44 farm businesses and from this identified six representative farm types based on enterprise mix and land holdings. We developed linear programming models of production decisions for each farm type to examine the impacts of policy changes, comparing the effects of decoupling with and without agri-environment and hill farm support, and evaluating the effects of removal of the Single Farm Payment. The main effects of decoupling are to reduce stocking rates, and to change the mix of livestock activities. Agri-environmental schemes mediate the income losses from decoupling, and farmers are predicted to maximise take up of new Environmental Stewardship programmes, which have both positive and negative feedback effects on livestock numbers. Finally, removal of the Single Farm Payment leads to negative net farm incomes, and some land abandonment. These changes have important implications for ongoing debates about how ecological service flows can be maintained from upland areas, and how marginal upland farming communities can be sustained.     

Parameter estimation for the drift of a time inhomogeneous jump diffusion process

This work deals with parameter estimation for the drift of jump diffusion processes which are driven by a Lévy process and whose drift term is linear in the parameter. In contrast to the commonly used maximum likelihood estimator, our proposed estimator has the practical advantage that its calculation does not require the evaluation of the continuous part of the sample path. In the important case of an Ornstein‐Uhlenbeck‐type jump diffusion, which is a widely used model, we prove consistency and asymptotic normality.