The Guernsey Literary and Potato PeelPie Society [Random House Reader＇s Circle [Paperback]]

The letters comprising this small charming novel begin in 1946, when single, 30-something author Juliet Ashton （nom de plume Izzy Bickerstaff） writes to her publisher to say she is tired of covering the sunny side of war and its aftermath. When Guernsey farmer Dawsey Adams finds Juliet＇s name in a used book and invites articulate -- and not-so-articulate -- neighbors to write Juliet with their occasionally contrived letters jump from incident to incident -- including the formation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society while Guernsey was under German occupa- tion -- and person to person in a manner that feels disjointed. But Juliet＇s quips are so clever, the Guernsey inhabitants so enchanting and the small acts of heroism so vivid and moving that one forgives the authors （Shaffer died earlier this year） for not being able to settle on a single person or plot.     

Manual and Automated Procedures for Compiling a Very Large Sample of Centenarian Pedigrees

A large portion of the baby boomer population will live beyond the age of 90 years, and entitlement programs and various insurance products have thus become interested in longevity risk. Beyond cohort life table predictions, actuaries have little to go on in determining which individuals or portions of populations are at increased risk of living to 90 or 100 or even older. We and others have noted strong familial risk for living beyond the oldest one percentile of survival, and we developed an algorithm that uses information about relatives’ longevity to compute the chance of an individual surviving to extreme old age. An important step of this work is to compile large samples of pedigrees with and without long-lived family members. Here we describe our process of hand curation of centenarian pedigrees and software that we have developed for the automated construction of such pedigrees using internet-based resources that can support the manual process.     

Transaction costs in milk marketing: a comparison between Canada and Great Britain

This study measures the magnitude of transaction costs incurred by milk producers in their contractual relations with dairy processors in two different coordination mechanisms: centralized contracting through a marketing board and decentralized bilateral contracting. Interviews and surveys were conducted to estimate transaction costs faced by producers marketing through the Québec milk marketing board in Canada and bilateral contracts in England and Wales in the United Kingdom using the measurement methodology of the cost of exchange. Our results show that the relative magnitude of transaction costs incurred by producers across both settings is quite low, which indicates that both hybrid coordination mechanisms minimize transaction costs in the dairy sector. However, results from the bilateral contracting setting indicate a strong heterogeneity of transaction costs levels among farmers. In that respect, the milk marketing board and its institutional setting would act as a collective insurance, pooling transaction costs and sharing them among producers. Our analysis leads to recommendations on bilateral contracting.     

What makes a brand manager effective?

Brands have become increasingly important as a foundation for competitive strategy. Unfortunately, although brand managers are responsible for brand strategy development and execution, little is known about what makes a brand manager effective. A model is developed to understand what intangible capital embodied by brand managers influences brand management capabilities and resultant brand performance. Measures of brand manager intangible capital and brand management capabilities are developed through an iterative scale development process. Hypothesis testing, derived from a survey of brand managers, indicates that brand manager human, relational and informational capital influences brand management capabilities and resultant brand performance, and brand manager intangible capital has an indirect effect on brand performance via brand management capabilities. By delineating and operationalizing the intangible capital and capabilities of brand managers, this study provides a theoretical and empirical foundation for future research on brand managers, tools for assessing current brand manager capital and capabilities, and guidance in relation to intangible capital and capabilities needed by brand managers.     

Cultural Corridors: An Analysis of Persistence in Impacts on Local Development — A Neo-Weberian Perspective on South-East Europe

Culture matters for economic development. This postulate has been a main conceptual concern for “old” institutional economics (OIE) and has lately also been tested through neoclassically inspired econometric techniques. This conceptual foundation has been confirmed in several quantitative studies on developed countries, in particular cases from the USA, Germany, and Italy. In less developed regions with a wealth of cultural heritage, particularly in South-East Europe, this postulate is still an underexplored issue from the perspective of advanced econometric approaches. Our goal is to examine the impact of the so-called South-East European cultural corridors on welfare — and especially on total employment — at the local or regional level. Accounting for gross value added and sectoral specialization, we examine the effect of such corridors by considering the distance to a cultural corridor: namely, the East Trans-Balkan Road (crossing Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece) as an explanatory factor for regional development, particularly employment. Using the European University Institute (EUI) European Regional Dataset (ERD), as well as the geo-data from the Cultural Corridors of the South-East Europe website, we estimate a regression model using a 2SLS instrumental variable (IV) approach, with a pooled dataset at the NUTS 3 level (Eurostat) from 1980 to 2011. We then triangulate the results by using the distance to the cultural corridor concerned as a treatment effect in a propensity-score-matching and difference-in-differences exploratory analysis. The findings confirm the importance of distance to the cultural corridor under investigation as a strong predictor for local socio-economic development. The results further suggest that the slow evolution of culture over time is likely to lead to the gradual emergence of new geographical cultural centers and a new cultural path-dependence build-up of persistence chains.     

Embeddedness in context: understanding gender in a female entrepreneurship network

ABSTRACT

In this paper I argue that through a process of embeddedness in context, a female entrepreneurship network is able to challenge gender structures. I investigate how a female entrepreneurship network is constructed and how they reinforce and possibly challenge existing gender structures. From an ethnographic study, three processes in the female entrepreneurship network were identified: making proper entrepreneurs, building relationships and engaging in change. In the different processes the women involved in the network reinforced gender structures through compliance with a masculine discourse of entrepreneurship, but also challenged gender structures through questioning this discourse. Through becoming embedded in their local community, the women entrepreneurs were able to take charge of the development of the network and challenge gender structures as a result of questioning the masculine discourse of entrepreneurship. This implies an interplay between embeddedness and gender as two separate but dependent processes. Linking together gender and embeddedness elicits a new take on the way female entrepreneurship networks are constructed and how they could advance gender equality within entrepreneurship. Consequently, this paper emphasises a need for further examination of embeddedness within gender and entrepreneurship research.     

Migration,remittances and human capital investment in Kenya

This paper investigates the relationship between international migration, remittances, and human capital investment in Kenya. We use household‐level data from the 2009 Kenya Migration Household Survey (which was part of the Africa Migration Project) to test our hypothesis and uncover a positive and significant relationship between the amount of international remittances a household receives and the amount of expenditures allocated to education (for all levels of education). We consider various robustness checks and find that our results hold up to various specifications, including an instrumental variable approach.     

Kuznets’ swings and intangible investments in forecast: the case of Greece

This article offers an analysis of the relationship between intangible investments and the pattern of local economic productivity in Greece. There are two main objectives in the article: (i) to explore the pattern of economic development in the country; (ii) to find evidence whether this pattern – and its trend – can be better predicted through a forecasting model including intangible investments (next to other relevant factors). To operationalize our study, we use the World Bank Development Indicators database which offers a time-series for Greece for the period from 1981 till date. This data set has two alternative relevant measures for intangible investments: knowledge- and health-related investments. In our analysis we employ first, a centred moving average with a stochastic estimation of the trend, and second a double exponential smoothing, as two alternative (‘deductive’ and next ‘inductive’) approaches to identifying a trend in our data for Greece. We find evidence for a Kuznets swing type of cyclical pattern for Greece – confirmed by triangulation. Most significantly, we also find a relationship between local economic development and intangible investments. These results prompt an evidence-based query about underlying Myrdalian and Tieboutian foundations of wave theory for understanding local economic crises.