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Quality & Quantity - The study based on an online survey covering 655 researchers from hard and soft sciences addresses the influence of different conditions on academic publishing. Results...     

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ACTIVE LABOR MARKET POLICIES: A META‐ANALYSIS

This paper provides a meta‐analysis of microeconometric evaluation studies on the effectiveness of active labor market policies. The analysis is built upon a systematically assembled data set of causal impact estimates from 57 experimental and quasi‐experimental studies, providing 654 estimates published between January 1990 and December 2017. We distinguish between the short and longer term impacts in our analysis; at 6, 12, 24, and 36 months after program start. After correcting for publication bias and country‐specific macroeconomic characteristics, subsidized labor and public employment programs have negative short‐term impacts, which gradually turn positive in the longer run. Schemes with enhanced services including job‐search assistance and training programs do not have these negative short‐term effects, and stay positive from 6 until 36 months after program start.     

Business service networks and their process of emergence: The case of the Health Cluster Portugal

Business services have been receiving increasing attention from academics, practitioners and policy-makers. Despite the growing interest, this field of research suffers from several limitations: it draws mostly on services marketing theory, and it is grounded mostly in monadic and dyadic studies. This paper contributes to the advance of business services research by addressing these limitations with regard to a specific service-related issue. We carry out an interdisciplinary study by integrating among others an industrial network approach (INA) into the services area, and we thus develop the research at a network level by adopting a services network perspective; furthermore, the study is carried out in a business-to-business context by looking into a health cluster: the Health Cluster Portugal. The article addresses one particular aspect of business services networks: their emergence. We propose a conceptual framework that draws on process-based research and integrates theories from other bodies of research, allowing a rich understanding of how a business service network is created. Our findings point to discontinuities along the emergence of such networks, showing that there is an iterative process underlying their formation, with different theories playing a predominant explanatory role at different stages. This paper contributes to the wider body of literature on services research by promoting the integration of the INA and other process-related approaches in the area of business services networks, and also provides practitioners and policy-makers with a structured framework to understand how an intentional ‘bottom–up’ business service network may be created or orchestrated.     

Does Rising Income Inequality Reduce Life Expectancy? New Evidence for 26 European Countries (1995–2014)

An open debate these days is about how national income inequality could affect individuals’ health outcomes. Therefore, the present study aims to provide new evidence regarding life expectancy determinants and how they are related to the income inequality hypothesis. Precisely, it is provided new evidence on this relationship for 26 European countries during the period 1995–2014. The analysis is based on panel data techniques, with the latest data from both Eurostat and the OECD Health Statistics. Furthermore, data from the World Bank is also applied. Besides, we have tested the sensitivity of the estimates in our empirical analysis using three clusters of countries. Our results suggest that income inequality does not significantly reduce health in developed societies, like the European ones. Notwithstanding, as income inequality can be sometimes harmful for population health, these issues must be taken into account in order to improve health care policies.     

The determinants of Italian domestic tourism: A panel data analysis

In this study, a GMM panel data estimation is used to investigate the main determinants of Italian domestic tourism demand as measured by regional bilateral tourism flows. The analysis is developed both at aggregate level and for the two traditional macro-areas of the country, namely Centre-North and South. For the whole nation, the importance of traditional economic variables in determining domestic tourism flows is confirmed. However tourist actual choices appear also to be influenced by past experiences and by regional differences in the quality of the wider environment. Additionally it appears that, for Italian tourists, domestic and international destinations behave as substitutable goods. The sub-sample analysis highlights some interesting differences between macro-areas. In particular, southern tourists appear more responsive to income variations, and less sensitive to prices differentials than their northern counterparts. Moreover, the degree of competition between domestic and outbound trips is higher in the South. Finally, southern tourists seem to be more influenced by environmental attributes while northern tourists are more sensitive to cultural activities.     

Representations of slavery

Adopting collective memory as the conceptual framework, this study sought to explore dominant narratives of a publicly owned former slave plantation opened to tourists. Textual analysis of promotional material revealed prominent frames through which tourists are invited to perceive the contemporary rearticulation of the plantation. The findings revealed a process of textual semantic prosody wherein the dominant narratives enacted a rhetoric of distance from the institution of slavery and achieved a discourse of proximity to a progressive account. The plantation is viewed as a mnemonic device endowed with political dimensions that reinforce hegemonic ideologies and engender remembering while concurrently inducing forgetting.     

Welfare Effects of Price Integration in Local Public Transport

Abstract ** :  In metropolitan areas collective transport is often supplied by many firms and in many modes. The paper focusses on the merging of decisions about prices in two market regimes: monopoly and benevolent regulation through Ramsey pricing. The results confirm that centralization entails efficiency gains under monopoly whenever a unique supplier substitutes many firms serving each link of a network. Under benevolent regulation, instead, centralization entails efficiency gains only under certain conditions. Moreover, efficiency improvements under Ramsey pricing involve the introduction of cross subsidies among previous regulatory jurisdictions. Hence some users gain while others lose. Both the theoretical and empirical literature suggest that periphery residents are the main beneficiaries of centralization .     

Operational models for epidemics of problematic drug use: the Mover-Stayer approach to heterogeneity

A modified version of a susceptibles-infectives-removed (S-I-R) model for the HIV/AIDS epidemic, proposed at the beginning of the 1990s and recently generalized, is presented to mirror the epidemics of problematic drug use. The generalized model, which belongs to the susceptibles-infectives-susceptibles (S-I-S) class of epidemic models, can be used both to estimate interesting epidemic macro-parameters and to make scenario analyses. The model is a compartmental Mover-Stayer-type structure (Soc. Methods Res. 11 (1983) 345; Bull. Narcotics LIII (1-2) (2001) 39; Biometrics 55(4) (1999) 1252; Math. Biosci. 107 (1991) 521) and allows taking into account possible heterogeneous behaviours of the susceptibles. Such models, in fact, consider the susceptible population as subdivided into two main groups: the group of stayers, that is, the group of individuals who are considered not at risk of “infection”, and the group of movers (possibly divided into sub-groups with different risk behaviour) who are at risk of infection. Due to the interactions between infectious individuals and the susceptibles, some of these may pass to the drug user compartments and begin a “drug user career”. The model is presented and studied from a qualitative point of view using a Markov hybrid approximation. Some qualitative evaluation of the possible impact of interventions directed both towards susceptibles (primary prevention) and towards users (secondary prevention and/or law enforcement) are presented. Specific “what if” scenario analyses are obtained by simulation. Possible future developments are outlined.     

A methodological approach to the marketing process in the biotechnology-based companies

The article addresses the commercialization activities of biotechnology-based companies in a European context and discusses whether these companies are able to gain adequate market perceptions and set adequate marketing processes, taking into account three analytical steps: strategic marketing definition, marketing implementation, and evolution of strategy and implementation. A methodological approach was developed, considering the specific nature of the technology and the companies. The case of Portuguese companies was used to test this methodology.The findings support the hypothesis that marketing issues constitute a problem for these companies, since most of them had serious difficulties in going through the marketing process. Marketing deficiencies were largely connected to the access to human resources with relevant management and marketing capabilities and were particularly felt by companies introducing discontinuous innovations.The research confirms that this methodology is useful in the assessment of the marketing management process in biotechnology-based companies.