Mobility in different generations of older persons: The development of daily travel in different cohorts in Denmark,Norway and Sweden

In the Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the proportion of older people in the total population is expected to reach about 25% in 2060. The ageing of the population has a variety of social implications. One aspect of population ageing that has relatively little attention in the Scandinavian countries is the question of everyday mobility. The purpose of this paper is to get a better understanding of the activity and travel patterns of different groups of older people, examine how travel- and activity patterns are developing during the life course, study the changes over time and how the “new” generations of older people behave compared to the older ones. The method used is cohort analysis of National Travel Surveys from the three countries in a 20 years perspective. Results show a significant period effect in car ownership and use among older people in Denmark, Norway and Sweden with a clear increase during the past 20 years. This is especially true for women. The increase in the number of driver’s licence-holders and car availability is reflected in travel mode choice among older people: both men and women maintain their car-use habits at old age. Another clear finding is that older people today travel more than the comparable age groups 20–25 years ago: everyday trip rates are higher and activities outside home are more common. While commuting and work-related trips decline after retirement, shopping and leisure trips do not start to decline before high age. From the cohort analysis we see that leisure and shopping trips are maintained in the period after retirement, and the car is important to reach shopping malls, health service, leisure activities, visit relatives and other social company.     

Sex and the City

Throughout the industrialized world, young women outnumber young men in urban areas. This paper proposes that such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas. The argument is that urban areas offer skilled workers better labor markets. Assuming that there are more skilled males than females, this alone would predict a surplus of males. However, the presence of males with high incomes may attract not only skilled females but also unskilled females. Thus, a surplus of women in urban areas may result from a combination of better labor and marriage markets. Swedish municipality data support the results.     

Consumer Heterogeneity in the Willingness to Pay for Local and Organic Food

Due to growth and changing distribution channels for organic food in Germany, there is some concern that organic food is losing authenticity. Contrarily, local food production is seen as a new trend and is gaining market share. This article analyzes whether those alternative concepts of organic and local food production rather support or threaten each other in consumers’ choice. Results of a Bavarian survey, including a choice experiment for bread, beer, and milk on the attributes price, brand, local, and organic, are analyzed using a mixed logit model. Willingness-to-pay estimations confirm the importance of local production to the surveyed consumers, especially in interaction with organic production, leading to the conclusion that the two production methods can support each other in achieving price premiums. The estimated standard deviations show significant heterogeneity of the parameters for all three products for most attributes.     

Partnering relationships in construction: A literature review

There is no unified view as to what partnering relationships are in the construction industry. The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature in order to identify the main assumptions about partnering relationships in construction research and practice. The literature is compared to the Construction Industry Institute’s (CII, 1991) frequently cited definition of partnering as a long-term commitment between two or more parties in which shared understanding and trust develop for the benefits of improving construction. The literature review reveals a tendency to focus on project partnering in dyads between clients and contractors and there is also an emphasis on formal tools to develop these relationships, even if social aspects and relationship dynamics are recognised. The paper discusses these findings and suggests that, in order to increase the understanding of the substance and function of partnering relationships, it could be useful to incorporate knowledge from theoretical perspectives that are more in line with the CII definition. Two perspectives that seem particularly interesting in this respect are Supply Chain Management (SCM) and the Industrial Network Approach (INA), both of which focus on long-term relationships between actors beyond the dyad. INA also emphasises the informal aspects of relationship development. Incorporating these dimensions of partnering relationships requires processual and longitudinal studies, which are relatively rare in the contemporary partnering literature.     

Entrepreneurial intentions: The influence of organizational and individual factors

An individual's intent to pursue an entrepreneurial career can result from the work environment and from personal factors. Drawing on the entrepreneurial intentions and the person-environment (P-E) fit literatures, and applying a multilevel perspective, we examine why individuals intend to leave their jobs to start business ventures. Findings, using a sample of 4192 IT professionals in Singapore, suggest that work environments with an unfavorable innovation climate and/or lack of technical excellence incentives influence entrepreneurial intentions, through low job satisfaction. Moderating effects suggest that an individual's innovation orientation strengthens the work-environment to job-satisfaction relationship; self-efficacy strengthens the job-satisfaction to entrepreneurial intentions relationship.     

Participation in Micro Life Insurance and the Use of Other Financial Services in Ghana

This article investigates households’ decisions to take up micro life insurance and to use other financial services. It estimates a multivariate probit model based on Ghanaian household survey data. The results suggest a mutually reinforcing relationship between the use of insurance and the use of other formal financial services. Risk‐averse households and households who consider themselves more exposed to risk than others are found to be less likely to participate in insurance. This suggests that insurance is considered to be risky. There is indicative evidence for adverse selection and a life‐cycle effect in the uptake of insurance.     

A Reexamination of the Costs of Firm Commitment and Best Efforts IPOs

Ritter [14] documents that best efforts IPOs are, on average, more costly to issue than firm commitment IPOs. This paper explains the phenomenon. Two component costs of going public are analyzed: underpricing and underwriter compensation. The model, based on a disagreement about firm value between underwriters and issuers, shows that underpricing is higher for firms using best efforts contracts as these firms, on average, are more speculative. Underwriter compensation is hypothesized to be higher for firms using best efforts contracts because of the high costs of market making for these firms in the aftermarket and the high distribution costs associated with the high risk of a failed offer. Empirical tests strongly support the propositions.     

Competing orders of worth in extraordinary consumption community

This article argues that tension and conflicts during consumption can be analysed through the lens of convention theory, which is preoccupied with the justification of action under the condition of fragmented institutional environments. Central to the perspective is the co-presence of consumption regimes with incompatible orders of worth which result in disagreements about the legitimacy of modes of justification in consumption communities. Whereas prior research tends to focus on protagonist–antagonist tensions or disputes over how to consume, our results from studying an extraordinary consumption community contribute to an understanding of how heterogeneity emerges when consumers dispute over multiple criteria for justification. We discuss how the order of worth perspective contributes with mundane controversies to a research field that tends to focus on “grand” conflicts and, as such, extend what it might mean to understand consumption communities and their tensions and conflicts.     

The impact of innovation training on successful outcomes in public–private partnerships

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly seen as a way of innovating the production and management of public services. However, the question of what drives innovation in partnerships has so far received only limited attention. Drawing on network governance and collaborative innovation literature, this article presents the findings from a survey among 260 Danish PPPs. The study shows that while innovation training has a significant effect on achieving innovation in PPPs, factors such as trust and institutional support only affect some innovation types. The findings demonstrate the importance of individual innovation skills and a differentiated understanding of innovation outcomes in PPPs.