Poverty in the European Community: Trends and debates

Economic insecurity and poverty represent a growing problem in the European Community today, with the re-emergence of absolute poverty on a scale unknown since the 1940's. Are we creating a new “underclass” in the midst of our still prosperous societies?     

From Experience: Linking Projects to Strategy

There is a dramatic rise in the use of project management as organizations shift to provide customer-driven results and systems solutions. Some implementations of project management have been successful, whereas others are spectacular failures. A common occurrence in many organizations is too many projects being attempted by too few people with no apparent link to strategy or organizational goals. Research and experience indicate that the support of upper management is critical to project success. This article reviews actions that upper managers can take to create an environment for more successful projects in their organizations. Specifically, the authors discuss practices for upper manager teamwork and offer a complete model for selecting projects that support a strategic emphasis. The article includes experiences from within Hewlett-Packard Company. © 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.     

Behavioral Finance and Efficient Markets: What does the Euro Crisis Tell us?

The crisis in the Eurozone between 2009 and 2015 provides an opportunity to test whether financial markets fully display the characteristics associated with the efficient market hypothesis or whether behavioral approaches which focus on excessive pessimism and confirmation bias also offer insights into the performance of markets. In this paper we test several important aspects of market behavior. Specifically we examine the extent to which large changes in risk premia amongst the countries that encountered crises were related to news. We also investigate whether the impact of good and bad news was symmetrical. Finally we explore whether changes in risk premia in Greece affected risk premia in other countries in an asymmetrical and biased way. We discover that while there is considerable evidence that financial markets often performed in an efficient way during the crisis, there are also important departures from this pattern that are consistent with the behavioral approach. Our findings imply that both the efficient and behavioral approaches are helpful when trying to understand how markets perform.     

Investigating the failure to best respond in experimental games

Experimental Economics - We examine strategic sophistication using eight two-person 3?×?3 one-shot games. To facilitate strategic thinking, we design a ‘structured’...     

An inspector calls: farm accommodation providers' attitudes to quality assurance schemes in the county of Devon

Estimates suggest that 10 000 farms in the UK offer bed and breakfast (B and B) serviced accommodation. A thorough review of the existing literature indicates over 50% of Devon and Cornwall's farmhouse B and B sector operate without participating in any form of quality assurance inspection scheme. This research executes a stratified postal survey to gain a comprehensive understanding of Devon's farmhouse B and B product, with particular interest in extracting providers' attitudes towards quality assurance inspection schemes. The very representative results suggest a divergence of attitudes towards the notion of quality inspections for all farmhouse B and B providers. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The economics of drought: A review of impacts and costs

Although a growing body of literature studies drought impacts, papers providing a comprehensive review of drought's social and economic impacts are scarce. This paper fills this gap by exploring the consequences of drought on societies based on research findings in Australia—a large country used to experiencing severe droughts. To do this, we propose a framework to categorise drought impacts in three dimensions: individuals/households (including health), productive sectors and system (including economic and ecosystem) impacts. The framework then guides a systematic literature review and discussion of studies looking at diverse drought impacts and their related costs. By analysing and discussing the findings from this literature, we emphasise different policy considerations, empirical challenges and research needs to support robust analysis and estimates of the true cost of droughts. We conclude by proposing an expanded framework to identify drought impacts and a discussion of the implications of the review for policy development.