Traffic fatalities: does income inequality create an externality?

Abstract .  Responsible for 20 million severe injuries and/or deaths annually, few epidemics receive less attention than traffic accidents. Going beyond confirming an inverted U-shaped relationship between mean income and fatalities, we show theoretically that income inequality can positively affect fatalities in two ways. Each operates through heterogeneity between road users, and while the direct effect can be expected to evaporate with rising income, the indirect effect may prove to be an externality in that the relationship remains regardless of the level of income. Our model is supported by evidence from 79 countries between 1970 and 2000.     

Dramaturgical performances and work-leisure dynamics in rural-to-urban domestic migrations

Situated against the backdrop of the dramatic socio-economic transformation of the Chinese society that propelled mass rural-to-urban migrations, this study focused on a group of female migrant workers who worked in the city as paid live-in-caregivers. The research explored how their work and leisure lives were related to their self-perceptions, self-expressions and social interactions. A total of 18 in-depth semi-structured interviews with female migrant workers who had moved from rural areas of China to the capital city of Beijing and worked as home caregivers were conducted. By adopting Goffman’s front stage and back stage model and bridging the literature in the fields of migration, caregiving, and leisure, the study examined the experiences and personal meanings of being a migrant caregiver and the strategies and practices migrant caregivers used to present and assert themselves in the everyday life of migration.     

Are (active) entrepreneurs a different breed?

We present data from an incentivized online experiment and responses from a set of validated psychological questionnaires to measure entrepreneurs' risk and time preferences and to identify entrepreneurs' personality characteristics. The analyses of the data suggest that intrinsic motivation positively relates to the likelihood of owning a business (i.e., being an active entrepreneur). We also found that subjects who scored higher on drive were relatively more risk seeking while those who scored higher on pessimism were more patient. The results of our study highlight the importance of studying personality traits to better understand what drives people to own a business.     

Reflection and professional identity development in design education

Design thinking positions designers as the drivers of the design space yet academic discourse is largely silent on the topic of professional identity development in design. Professional identity, or the dynamic narratives that individuals construct and maintain to integrate their personal qualities with professional responsibilities, has not been widely addressed in design education either. The study investigated the use of reflective writing in an introductory design course to help students explore and interpret their design beliefs, experiences, and self-awareness in support of professional identity development work. The results indicate that authorial presence, analysis, and narrative quality are common qualities in reflective responses, but emotion is notably lacking from student writing. Students were highly reflective in relation to a general experience with uncertainty and were least reflective when discussing ideation processes. Implications for design education and related research are analysed and discussed.     

Tourism in multi-ethnic districts: the case of Porta Palazzo market in Torino

More and more often, cities compete with each other focusing on tourist attractions based on multi-ethnicity. Some of them, with a growing success, are street and food markets. This paper is focused on Porta Palazzo, the largest existing street market in Europe, located in Torino (Italy), which is becoming, from 2006 on, a tourist attraction, without losing its popular character. Our goal is to identify the characteristics of this touristification process and show how it has averted those aspects of ‘retail gentrification’ which often affect street and food markets: it has happened thanks to the role played not only by the economic stakeholders of the market but also by social and religious stakeholders, that everyday work in order to integrate the different social components of the area concomitant with new waves of migrants.     

Inequalities in Children's Experiences of Home Learning during the COVID-19 Lockdown in England*

This paper combines novel data on the time use, home-learning practices and economic circumstances of families with children during the COVID-19 lockdown with pre-lockdown data from the UK Time Use Survey to characterise the time use of children and how it changed during lockdown, and to gauge the extent to which changes in time use and learning practices during this period are likely to reinforce the already large gaps in educational attainment between children from poorer and better-off families. We find considerable heterogeneity in children's learning experiences – amount of time spent learning, activities undertaken during this time and availability of resources to support learning. Concerningly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this heterogeneity is strongly associated with family income and in some instances more so than before lockdown. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that any impacts of inequalities in time spent learning between poorer and richer children are likely to be compounded by inequalities not only in learning resources available at home, but also in those provided by schools.     

Free Trade Agreements Between Peru,Colombia, and the United States

This article evaluates the process of negotiating and implementing the U.S.-Peru and U.S.-Colombia free trade agreements (FTAs) and analyzes the impact of these agreements on foreign direct investment (FDI) and export diversification in Peru and Colombia. The main finding is that institutional elements in each country uniquely impacted the process of negotiation, implementation, and the outcomes of these FTAs. Colombia benefited from the initial advantage of better institutional capacity and negotiating expertise, while Peru benefited from stronger political leadership and commitment to a bilateral trade agreement with the United States. Both Peru and Colombia have benefited from structured consultation mechanisms with the private sector and non-government agents, continuity in trade policies throughout different political administrations, and strong political commitment to develop the institutional capacity needed to take full advantage of these FTAs. Furthermore, the implementation of these FTAs has coincided with an expansion of non-traditional exports from Peru and Colombia, and an increase in FDI into sectors other than commodities such as oil, natural gas, and minerals.     

COVID-19 and Inequalities*

This paper brings together evidence from various data sources and the most recent studies to describe what we know so far about the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on inequalities across several key domains of life, including employment and ability to earn, family life and health. We show how these new fissures interact with existing inequalities along various key dimensions, including socio-economic status, education, age, gender, ethnicity and geography. We find that the deep underlying inequalities and policy challenges that we already had are crucial in understanding the complex impacts of the pandemic itself and our response to it, and that the crisis does in itself have the potential to exacerbate some of these pre-existing inequalities fairly directly. Moreover, it seems likely that the current crisis will leave legacies that will impact inequalities in the long term. These possibilities are not all disequalising, but many are.     

The Response of Corporate Strategy to Competitive Challenges: The Predicament of Australian Mutual Insurers 1970–2000

The internal struggles faced by insurers as they adjusted their organisational structures to cope with new competitive challenges that emerged in the 1980s provide insights into the organisational learning process. Progression was not smooth or linear. It included a degree of experimentation and introspection. A dynamic capabilities framework is used to analyse the ability of a large long-established insurer to adapt to the emerging financial market environment. Internal change routines were not capable of achieving the degree of reorganisation needed. The disruption to business that followed contributed to poor performance outcomes throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.