Why do women still earn less than men? Decomposing the Dutch gender pay gap, 1996–2006

Despite major improvements in women's labour market attachment, women still earn considerably less than men. International research shows that the persistence of the gender pay gap may be due to the fact that although the gap in characteristics between men and women is diminishing, changes in the wage structure counteract this change. This article will study whether this ‘swimming upstream’ phenomenon is also playing a role in the rather slow convergence between male and female wages in the Netherlands. Our results indicate that this is not the case; most of the changes in the Dutch wage structure have been rather favourable to women. The lacking convergence in wages has to be explained from the fact that despite the favourable changes, the Dutch wage structure still contains a considerable implicit gender bias.     

LeNS China:A Chinese learning network on sustainability for the development and diffusion of teaching materials and tools on design for sustainability

It is a shared opinion that sustainable development requires a system discontinuity, meaning that radical changes in the way we produce and consume are needed. Within this framework there is an emerging understanding that an important contribution to this change can be directly linked to decisions taken in the design phase of products, services and systems. Design schools have therefore to be able to provide design students with a broad knowledge and effective Design for Sustainability tools, in order to enable a new generation of designers in playing an active role in re-orienting our consumption and production patterns. This paper presents the intermediate results of the LeNS China, the Learning Network on Sustainability of Chinese design Higher Education Institutions aiming at curricula development on Design for Sustainability. The project is a regeneration of the LeNS Asian-European multi-polar network project financed by the European Commission. LeNS China is taking in consideration the local needs, interests and opportunities could represent a significant enabling platform capable to sensitise, support and empower a new generation of Chinese design educators, designers and entrepreneurs to reach design practice throughout an open collaborative learning approach. The paper will firstly introduce the LeNS project and its ethos, and then the LeNS China network will be described in terms of the state of the art of design for sustainability and its education in China, the scope and the objective, the results achieved so far and the next steps.     

A contextual understanding of projects—The importance of space and time

This article analyzes the managing of high-tech projects in complex and dynamic settings. Building on recent developments in organization theory and knowledge management, we focus on the importance of understanding the ways in which project-centered activities are shaped in time and space, both in the organization itself and in a wider context embracing customers, consultants and suppliers. A longitudinal case study including semi-structured interviews, observations and secondary data will substantiate our findings. The study offers both theoretical and practical insights suggesting that projects are exposed to a varying degree of complexity and dynamics, calling for different managerial approaches. The analysis shows that boundary spanning has many dimensions that have to be considered in the management of projects in space and time. The article concludes by suggesting seven analytical categories for analyzing and understanding projects in their spatial and temporal contexts.     

The ‘Whys’ and ‘Hows’ of ethical investment: Understanding an early-stage market through an explorative approach

Over the last decade, markets for investments have changed in Europe. Consumers have become more aware of ethical standards and violations of social values and norms. While in some countries, such as the United States, this change took place decades ago, the market for ethical investment in Europe is still at an early stage. The present study investigates the underlying motives for ethical assets of consumers in early-stage markets. Using seven interviews with financial experts and five focus groups with ethical and conventional investors, we examine how investors view ethical investment, how ethical investors are described in terms of socio-demographics and personality characteristics, and which attitudinal factors are related to ethical investment behaviour. Interviews and focus groups are recorded and qualitatively analysed according to grounded theory. Ethical investment is found to be characterised through negative and positive ethical criteria. Our findings demonstrate how essential it is for ethical investors to lead a certain lifestyle driven by particular ecological and social values. Attitude theory serves to explain ethical investment behaviour. Conclusions for the marketing of ethical investment funds and for future research are drawn.     

Water pricing policies,public decision making and farmers' response: implications for water policy

The problems caused by water scarcity demand important changes in the criteria and objectives of water policies. The agricultural sector in Spain consumes up to 80% of all available hydric resources and the need to increase the efficiency of current uses of water in the agricultural sector is at the core of the country's national water policy. One alternative would be to resort to water pricing policies with the aim of providing incentives to save water consumption although it would inflict a certain degree of income losses to the farmers and raise the revenue collected by the water authorities. The objective of this research is to analyze the effect caused by the application of different water pricing policies on water demand, farmers' income and the revenue collected by the government agency. To undertake this analysis a dynamic mathematical programming model has been built that simulates farmers' behavior and their response to different water pricing scenarios. Empirical application of the model has been carried out in several irrigation districts in Spain covering varied farm regions and river basins. Results show that the effects of alternative pricing policies for irrigation water are strongly dependent on regional, structural and institutional conditions and that changing policies produce distinct consequences within the same region and water district. Thus, equivalent water charges would create widespread effects on water savings, farm income and collected government revenue across regions and districts.     

On Combining Partial and Incompatible Information in E-negotiation and E-arbitration

The complexity of the problems to be addressed in an e-democracy framework and the variety of involved stakeholders, with different backgrounds, views and access to information sources, lead us to consider the case in which an e-negotiation should be performed among subjects who have partial, sometimes incompatible, information and can hardly gather to discuss issues together, under the supervision of a facilitator. We propose a statistical method which addresses the issue of partial and incompatible information, merging it and then using it to get a final decision, possibly in an automatic way, through processes of e-negotiation and e-arbitration.      

Immigrants’ Wage Performance in a Routine Biased Technological Change Era: France 1994–2012

Over the period 1994–2012, immigrants’ wage growth in France outperformed that of natives. We investigate to what extent changes in task‐specific returns to skills contributed to this wage dynamics differential through two channels: changes in the valuation of skills (price effect) and occupational sorting (quantity effect). We find that the wage growth premium of immigrants is mainly explained by the progressive reallocation of immigrants toward tasks whose returns increase over time. Immigrants seem to have taken advantage of labor demand restructuring driven by globalization and technological changes.     

How (Not) to Foster Innovations in Public Infrastructure Projects*

The government wants an infrastructure‐based public service to be provided. First, the infrastructure has to be built; subsequently, it has to be operated. Should the government bundle the building and operating tasks in a public–private partnership? Or should it choose traditional procurement (i.e., delegate the tasks to different firms)? Each task entails unobservable investments to come up with innovations. It turns out that, depending on the nature of the innovations, bundling can either stimulate or discourage investments. Moreover, we find that if renegotiation cannot be prevented, public–private partnerships might lead the government to deliberately opt for technologically inferior projects.     

A Cautionary Tale About Control Variables in IV Estimation

Many instrumental variable (IV) regressions include control variables to justify (conditional) independence of the instrument and the potential outcomes. The plausibility of conditional IV independence crucially depends on the timing when the control variables are determined. This paper works through different IV models and discusses the (conditions for the) satisfaction of conditional IV independence depending on whether the control variables are measured prior to or after instrument assignment. To illustrate the identification issues, we consider the Vietnam War draft risk as instrument either for veteran status or education to evaluate the effects of these variables on labour market and health outcomes. Our empirical analysis based on the ‘Young Men in High School and Beyond’ survey suggests that commonly used conditional IV strategies to estimate the impact of draft induced military service or education may be severely biased due to the use of improper controls.     

Linking people management and extra‐role behaviour: results of a longitudinal study

This article examines the validity of the assumption that employees' perceptions of those people management activities of their supervisor that impact on employees' abilities, motivation and opportunities to perform influence employee extra‐role behaviour. The results of a longitudinal survey with data from 3,368 employees provide support for this assumption. This study's distinctive features – the concept of people management that involves the management of HR implementation, the longitudinal research design, and the use of the AMO framework for specifying the linkages between HRM and performance – make it possible to address the core questions in the HRM‐performance debate that still remain unanswered according to Guest.