The Two Faces of Leisure Activity Engagement: Harmonious and Obsessive Passion in Relation to Intrapersonal Conflict and Life Domain Outcomes

The Dualistic Model of Passion implies that a person can develop either a harmonious or an obsessive passion for a valued activity. This study applied this model to investigate outcomes from leisure activity engagement. A total of 198 subjects responded to a Web-based survey asking undergraduate students to participate in a study on leisure activities. Results showed that harmonious passion for a leisure activity was associated with congruent self-guides related to activity engagement and positive life domain outcomes. Obsessive passion was associated with discrepant self-guides and negative life domain outcomes. Path analyses showed that intrapersonal conflict mediated the outcomes of passion on life domains. The findings support a dynamical approach to leisure activity outcomes.     

A role for a pan-European trade union movement?–possibilities in European IR-regulation

Steps towards internationalisation of the trade union movement are considered in the context of the process of political and economic integration taking place in the EU. The trade unions are trying–partly via the ETUC–to play a role at pan-European level. However, the European trade union movement is not a cohesive entity. Besides, it has no significant transnational power-resources. These factors suggest that any European IR-system will be based primarily on political regulation rather than on a system of collective agreements.     

Attitudes toward foreign assignments among Danish economists

This article addresses attitudinal issues toward foreign assignments and reports on data collected from a distinct sample of respondents—Danish economists. One of the much‐debated questions is whether foreign assignments are becoming less attractive, in particular among the younger employees, who tend to follow more narrow self‐interests and stay home. This is supposed to be reinforced by deteriorating corporate policies (i.e., offers being less attractive). The present study provides the basis for rather significant findings. The economists tend to look quite positively on expatriation (across age, gender, seniority, former foreign assignment, and unemployment), and this finding is supported by the fact that about 25% of the respondents already had experiences with foreign assignment. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Repositioning Global Staff Transfers: A Learning Perspective

In this article, we challenge the prevailing view that global staff transfers are a necessary cost of doing business globally by contending that such deployment is integral to successful strategic implementation. We use three scenarios—learning from failure, failure to learn, and lost opportunities—to illustrate how awareness of the consequences of decisions related to international staffing can facilitate their efficacy. Learning awareness therefore can lead to improved policies and outcomes for the management of global staff transfers and demonstrate the value HRM brings to the implementation process. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Health information and diet choices: Results from a cheese experiment

This study reports results from a choice experiment on semi-hard cheese from Norway. About half of the 408 participants were exposed to diet-related health information before performing either a choice or a ranking task, while a control group did not receive such information. The effects of health information on marginal willingness to pay for low-saturated-fat, low-fat and organic cheese are analyzed using rank-ordered mixed logit models. Cheese preferences are clearly affected by exposure to health information. On average, the health information group is willing to pay a price premium of 27.2% (NOK 24.5 per kg) for low-saturated-fat cheese and 14.4% (NOK 13.0 per kg) for low-fat cheese. This is respectively 1.73 and 2.89 times more than corresponding price premiums in the control group. Non-college, medium–high income, age 50–70 and female participants are more clearly affected by health information than college, low income, age 30–49 and male participants. Subjective statements on diet-health knowledge and awareness are used to discuss these findings. Our results suggest that provision of health information is likely to reduce educational differences in diet-health knowledge and thus dietary behavior. Low income participants seem to be constrained by high food prices, but not by lack of knowledge or awareness. Finally, due to lack of diet-health awareness, reaching out to young people and particularly males through health information policies seems difficult.     

Cost-minimization analysis of sublingual immunotherapy versus subcutaneous immunotherapy for house dust mite respiratory allergic disease in Denmark

Objectives Currently, patients with persistent moderate-to-severe house dust mite (HDM) allergic rhinitis despite use of symptom-relieving medication can be offered subcutaneously administered allergy immunotherapy (SQ SCIT; Alutard SQ) as standard care of treatment in Denmark. Recently, a HDM sublingually administered allergy immunotherapy tablet (SQ SLIT-tablet; ACARIZAX) has been developed for at-home treatment. The purpose of this analysis is to compare the costs related to treatment and administration of SQ SLIT-tablet and SQ SCIT.

Methods Assuming equal efficacy between ther SQ SLIT-tablet and SQ SCIT, the cost-minimization analysis was the most appropriate for the comparison. According to guidelines and Summary of Product Characteristics, the treatment duration of SQ SLIT-tablet is 3 years and 3–5 years for SQ SCIT. The courses of treatment vary among patients and, therefore, the costs of treatment have been calculated for an average patient with HDM respiratory allergic disease (RAD) receiving either SQ SLIT-tablet or SQ SCIT. All costs associated with allergy immunotherapy were collected, i.e., cost of medication, administration and treatment setting, and discounted according to Danish guidelines. Comprehensive univariate sensitivity analyses were carried out.

Results The treatment costs for an average patient with HDM RAD are €3094 for SQ SLIT-tablet and €3799 for SQ SCIT; however, when adding indirect costs to the calculations the total costs of the treatments are €3697 and €6717 for SQ SLIT-tablet and SQ SCIT, respectively. Therefore, if 2500 patients with HDM RAD were treated with SQ SLIT-tablet instead of SQ SCIT, it would elicit a saving to the healthcare system of ～€1.8 million. The conclusion was robust to any changes in the sensitivity analysis.

Conclusion With regards to the cost of treating Danish patients with HDM RAD, it is clearly cost-saving to treat patients with SQ SLIT-tablet compared to SQ SCIT.     

Volatility and Price Jumps in Agricultural Futures Prices—Evidence from Wheat Options

Evidence suggests that agricultural futures price movements have fat-tailed distributions and exhibit sudden and unexpected price jumps. There is also evidence that the volatility of futures prices is time-dependent both as a function of calendar-time (seasonal effect) and time to maturity (maturity effect). This article extends Bates' (1991) jump-diffusion option pricing model by including both seasonal and maturity effects in the volatility specification. Both in-sample and out-of-sample procedures to fit market option prices on wheat futures show that the suggested model outperforms previous published models. A numerical example shows the magnitude of pricing errors for option valuation.     

Linkages among Interest Rates in the United States, Germany and Norway

The Johansen multivariate cointegration methodology is used to analyze relationships among short-term and long-term interest rates in the United States, Germany and Norway. A variance decomposition approach is applied to estimate the proportion of each interest rate's forecast error variance attributable to innovations in the other interest rates. Impulse response functions are plotted to illustrate the speed with which interest rate events are transmitted between capital markets. The analyses illustrate that US interest rates have a significant influence on both German and Norwegian interest rates, while the reverse effect is modest. Norway is also strongly exposed to German interest rate movements, which reflects the consequences of a small country linking its currency to the value of European currencies.