Exploring attitudes to edgy urban destinations: the case of Deptford,London

The role of tourists and tourism in urban development is not fully understood. Research has focused on tourism districts within city centres, but less is known about tourism in peripheral, less affluent urban districts. These areas can appeal to visitors as edgy alternatives to mainstream destinations. This study establishes who is interested in visiting and why, and it explores the underlying rationale for negative attitudes. The aims are addressed by an in-depth analysis of Deptford in South East London. This area is a relatively deprived part of a world city, albeit one that has long been earmarked as London's next cool district. The study uses a mix of different sources to analyse the case. Responses to a New York Times article on Deptford are analysed and the attitudes of actual visitors and key stakeholders are explored. The discussion includes an examination of different interpretations and attitudes towards the notion of edginess. Edginess is deemed attractive by certain audiences; something linked to a reverence for working-class life in the arts. The study concludes that, whilst edginess is a noted characteristic, what people appreciate about Deptford is its ‘distinctive ordinariness’ – its contrast with more polished and contrived urban districts.     

Fairness and intentionality in children’s decision-making

Few studies have addressed the role of different aspects of the Theory of Mind (ToM) (intentionality and false belief understanding) in decision-making by adults playing strategic games where the importance of fairness is crucial. Even more interesting, this topic has been less investigated with children. The goal of this research was to explore the development of the decisional behavior along with the understanding of fairness, intentions and first- and second-order false belief understanding in children who are just acquiring those abilities. Multiple rounds of the ultimatum game with a human and a non-human partner (child/roulette wheel) were played by 177 children in the age range of 5–10 years, who also completed classic false belief tasks. Results confirm the key role of fairness sensibility across age groups and different degrees of the relevance of ToM according to the variability of children’s decisional behavior (stable vs. dynamic).     

Growth Effects of Free Trade under Increasing Returns

This paper addresses the long-term sustainability of the growth effects from trade, within the context of a dynamic optimization model where the investment sector exhibits an initial phase of increasing returns. It is proved that the qualitative properties of trade and growth remain valid, even for decreasing, rather than constant, returns to scale in the consumption sector. That is, trade enables an economy to escape a "poverty trap" and enjoy unbounded growth. Moreover, the asymptotic long-run growth rate of the optimal consumption levels with trade is determined, establishing that trade has a beneficial effect on long-run growth.
JEL Classification Numbers: O41, F12.     

RISK MEASURES ON AND VALUE AT RISK WITH PROBABILITY/LOSS FUNCTION

We propose a generalization of the classical notion of the V@R_λ that takes into account not only the probability of the losses, but the balance between such probability and the amount of the loss. This is obtained by defining a new class of law invariant risk measures based on an appropriate family of acceptance sets. The V@R_λ and other known law invariant risk measures turn out to be special cases of our proposal. We further prove the dual representation of Risk Measures on .     

Family ownership and stockholder reactions to environmental performance disclosure: A test of secondary agency relationships

Using the first ever Newsweek “Green Rankings” of the 500 largest U. S. firms in 2009 as a significant historical event, we test for the stockholder reaction to ratings of corporate environmental performance. Both the conventional null hypothesis significance testing and Bayesian approaches show that stockholders react significantly more positively to corporations with higher ratings of corporate environmental performance and that this effect is stronger in family owned firms. Our findings suggest that majority shareholders do not necessarily appropriate minority stockholders' rents when investing in environmental activities, as would be the case in the presence of “Type II” agency conflicts between majority family owners and minority stockholders. The family ownership effect is also found to be stronger in dirty (heavy polluting) industries as well as in more competitive and more opaque industry contexts.     

The propagation of liquidity imbalances in manufacturing supply chains: evidence from a spatial auto-regressive approach

The number of distressed firms increased sharply during the last recessionary phase. The scope of the paper is to analyze determinants of distress by focusing the attention on trade-credit chains as the key source of contagion effects in 2009–2013. Financial and liquidity imbalances propagate along the supply chain: firms respond to late payments from customers by defaulting on payments to suppliers. The novelty of our approach consists of applying spatial econometric techniques to assess spillover effects of trade debt. We employ a representative sample of around 12,000 Italian manufacturing firms that combines balance sheet items with information collected in the Credit Register of the Italian central bank. Our proxy for supply-chain interconnections is a matrix of firm-to firm transactions which mirrors the networked structure of the industrial system. Estimates show that trade debt has been affected by spillover effects during the great crisis of 2009–2013. Moreover, trade debt and financial indebtedness exerted an impact of almost identical magnitude on firms' distress likelihoods. This evidence sheds light on the importance to move away from a static view of the trade-credit phenomenon, and to integrate solvency models with detailed information on firm-to-firm transactions which is increasingly available through big data collection.     

The use of network analysis to handle semantic differential data

The aim of this paper is to propose a method to transform semantic differential data into a network whose graph representation is interpreted as an empirical network of adjectives. The graph is constituted by the adjectives of the semantic differential task. Two adjectives are linked depending on the scoring assigned by a set of respondents. The proposed approach aims at using concepts and methods of Social Network Analysis to explore the network structure and study roles and positions of dominant adjectives. A simulation design has been realized to assess the stability of results under different conditions, i.e. in order to set the optimal threshold in presence of different data generator processes. A case study carried out on real data shows how the emerging network of adjectives can be effectively used to define the concept arising from a semantic differential task.     

How digital user innovators become entrepreneurs: a sociomaterial analysis

ABSTRACT

Digital entrepreneurship has received growing interest from academics and practitioners. Another form of entrepreneurship in which interest has been greatly boosted, thanks to digital technologies, is user entrepreneurship. Drawing on the sociomaterial perspective of digital entrepreneurship, the present article contributes to this body of knowledge by exploring how user entrepreneurs frame and implement the process to create new firms to commercialise their own digital innovations. Our qualitative study reports a single case study about the process of digital entrepreneurship implemented by a patient innovator that launched a new firm to commercialise his healthcare innovative solution. Various theoretical propositions about the sociomateriality of the entrepreneurial process of digital user innovators are offered.     

A turnpike property of optimal programs for a class of simple linear models of production

Summary. This paper establishes a ‘turnpike theorem’ for a closed linear model of production with a primitive input requirement matrix. Optimal programs of resource allocation have a ‘turnpike property’ if the growth factor of every sector in the economy converges, in the long run, to a common value. The usefulness of such a theorem is due to the fact that the input requirement matrix for an economy with a large number of goods may be primitive (some power of the matrix is strictly positive). Received: April 19, 1998; revised version: July 15, 1998