Doing More with Less: Women's Leisure During Their Partners’ Military Deployment

Women whose partners have been deployed on military missions during wartime typically experience increased stress as they adjust to maintaining work, family, and household roles. The purpose of this study was to explore leisure in the lives of women during their partners’ deployment. Semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 10 employed mothers whose partners had been deployed for at least a six-month period. Findings indicated that the loss of daily support from partners and concern for partners’ safety contributed to women shifting their focus from individual to family leisure as a means of coping and caring for their children.     

Entwickeln sich wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Forschung und Politikberatung auseinander?

Most German economists show strong patterns of professional specialisation. In their work, they either focus on basic research or on policy consultancy. The evidence provided by Haucap und Mödl has been used to question work incentives in academia. The suggestion to change work incentives, however, is not supported by Richter, who rather calls into question the German tradition of research funding. He argues that Germany should devote more competitive funding to research projects and less to institutions. Schmidt et al. explore the question the other way around: do policy consultants publish in top journals? They conclude that they do. Güth/Kliemt show how precarious and limited our (technologically useful) knowledge is. The discussion of alternative policies among economic experts should be used to tease out the controversial arguments to allow for better informed political judgements. Wagner/Fratzscher take a historical view, showing that when modern economic research (and economic research institutes) apply a more pluralistic paradigm than that which prevailed in Germany for a long period after the Second World War, economic research will automatically have a more significant impact on politics, since policy advisors will produce more varied advice with the potential for realisation. Koll also claims that policy advice must not be based on a single supply-side oriented mainstream point of view. By drawing lessons from the crisis, economics must identify a new mainstream providing reliable guidance and policy advice.     

Kapitalprivatisierung der Deutschen Bahn AG

Die geplante materielle Privatisierung der Deutschen Bahn AG kann als logischer Schritt der formalen Bahnprivatisierung vom 1.1.1994 angesehen werden. Welche Privatisierungsmodelle werden gegenw?rtig diskutiert? Sollte die Deutsche Bahn AG mit oder ohne ihr Betriebsnetz an die B?rse gehen? Ist die Deutsche Bahn AG überhaupt b?rsenf?hig?     

The Liberalisation of Rail Transport in the EU

On 1 January 2007 the European rail freight market, which has long suffered from fragmentation and a declining share of total transport services, will be fully opened to competition. What will be the consequences for the transport sector and the economy as whole? What further measures are needed to stabilise or increase the railways' share in the freight market? * Member and speaker of the EPP-ED Group (Christian Democrats) in the Committee on Transport and Tourism; rapporteur of the European Parliament responsible for railway issues. ** Views expressed here are not those of NDU or Minnesota.     

Decision-making in competitive framings—Strategic behavior of chess players in mini-ultimatum game chess puzzles

We introduce a competitive framing in the mini-ultimatum game utilizing chess puzzles. Therein, our chess playing participants accept low offers significantly more often compared to a neutral framing. We conclude that in familiar competitive surroundings egoistic behavior is more acceptable.     

BUYING VERSUS HIRING—AN INDIRECT EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

On a symmetric homogeneous oligopoly market with stochastic demand, firms can either hire employees or buy their labor input on a competitive labor market. Whereas the wage of hired labor does not depend on the realization of stochastic demand, the price of ‘bought’ labor reacts positively to product demand. We derive the equilibrium price vector to define an evolutionary process, assuming that the number of hiring firms increases when they earn more than buying firms. We then derive and discuss the stationary distribution of this stochastic adaptation process.     

Patientin erstickt – Krankenschwester verurteilt

Ambulante Intensivpflege - Wer die intensivpflegerische ambulante Betreuung eines Patienten ubernimmt, muss jederzeit sicherstellen, das er die Warnsignale lebensnotwendiger Gerate hort. Sonst macht er sich gegebenenfalls der fahrlassigen Totung schuldig.     

Getting the most out of all your customers

Companies spend billions of dollars on direct marketing, targeting individual customers with ever more accuracy. Yet despite the power of the myriad data-collecting and analytical tools at their disposal, they're still having trouble optimizing their direct-marketing investments. Many marketers try to minimize costs by pursuing only those customers who are cheap to find and cheap to keep. Others try to get the most customers they possibly can and keep all of them for as long as they can. But a customer need not be loyal to be highly profitable, and many loyal customers turn out to be highly unprofitable. Companies can get more out of direct marketing if they see it as a single system for generating profits than if they try to maximize performance measures at each stage of the process. This article describes a tool for doing just that. Called ARPRO (Allocating Resources for Profits), the tool is essentially a complex regression analysis that can estimate the impact of a company's direct-marketing investments on the profitability of its customer pool. With data that companies already gather, the tool can show managers how much to spend on acquisition versus retention and even what percentage of their funds they should allocate to the different direct-marketing channels. Using the model, companies can easily see that even small deviations from the optimal levels of customer profitability are expensive. Applying it to one catalog retailer showed, for instance, that a 10% reduction in marketing costs would lead to a 1.8 million dollar drop in long-term customer profits. Conversely, spending 69% less on marketing would actually increase average customer profitability at one B2B service provider by 42%. What's more, the tool can show that finding the optimal balance between investments in acquisition and retention can be more important than finding the optimum amount to invest overall.     

Effects of gender and other factors on rank of law professors in colleges of business: Evidence of a glass ceiling

The matter of salary levels and professional advancement is much discussed and debated today in business and academe. This paper examines the matter of salary determinants for law professors in colleges of management in the U.S. with an emphasis on examining how gender might affect professorial salary and rank. By focusing on one discipline in today's academe and in a college having great student demand (management) coupled with a professed commitment to women's rights and by holding constant variables relevant to salary and rank, this study, addresses the matter of whether gender is a factor in determination of academic rank and salary. This study used correlation and path analysis in arriving at our conclusions. Our sample size meets statistically acceptable parameters. Our results corroborate earlier research which finds significant pay differences between women and men, but they show that at least for the sample of legal studies professors in this study, these pay differences are attributable to the number of years spent in academe. If women have only recently enjoyed opportunities for careers in this discipline, they do not have as much seniority, on average as men. Consequently, if universities pay salaries at least partly according to seniority, women's salaries are likely to be lower than men's salaries, as our study indicates. At the same time, however, even after controlling for seniority and other factors that might affect rank, there are still significantly fewer women in the higher ranks. These results point to the operation of a glass ceiling which restricts promotional opportunities for women in other fields.Prof. Bruce D. Fisher is a Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Formerly an attorney in the Office of General Counsel of the United States Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., Prof. Fisher has published in 42Rutgers Law Review 349 (1991), theCincinnat Law Review, theAdministrative Law Review, and numerous other legal and business publications. His degrees include BBA, '65; JD, '68; LLM, '74.Prof. Steve Motowidlo is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Florida. He has a BA '69 and a Ph.D. '76. He has published numerous articles in theJournal of Applied Psychology and other academic journals. He consults extensively with industry.Mr. Steve Werner is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Human Resources at the University of Florida. He has a BA degree in mathematics '85, an MBA '86, and has worked in industry prior to pursuing his Ph.D. He has published in theColumbia Journal of World Business.