Development and validation of an Integrated Organizational Safety Climate Questionnaire with multilevel confirmatory factor analysis

Meta-analytic and traditional reviews on safety climate reveal theoretical and methodological safety climate issues still open. The main aim of this study is to propose a questionnaire which combines recent and different approaches to safety climate, trying to give a contribute about these issues. The present research led to the development of a new questionnaire to measure safety climate, suitable for blue-collar workers, and to the evaluation of its psychometric properties, and usefulness to measure safety climate in the industrial sector. Multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) was used to properly evaluate the factor structure underlying the safety climate questionnaire composed of three scales: organizational safety climate scale, supervisor’s safety climate scale and co-workers’ safety climate scale. The clear distinction, made with the use of three different scales, among safety agents (organization, supervisor, co-workers), allows the assessment of workers’ perceptions focused on each level, and allows to deeply explore, for instance, lateral relationships of supervisor’s safety climate and co-workers’ safety climate, analysing the interactions between the roles of these two safety agents. A two-level design was used, considering the individual level and the work-group level. Data collection involved 1,617 blue-collars from eight Italian manufacturing companies. The MCFA results demonstrated the importance to use proper analysis to study the factor structure of a multilevel construct as safety climate, and confirmed the theoretical structure of safety climate purposed from Griffin and colleagues, using not only psychological climate (i.e., the individual level), but also the group level safety climate.     

Sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement in Spain: Different instruments,different quality

The purpose of this paper is to compare the quality of the sustainability information issued following the three most common reporting models: annual report (addressed to shareholders), sustainability report (addressed to stakeholders), and integrated report (addressed to shareholders). To this aim, we create a quality index based on previous literature, analyzing the content of the sustainability information disclosed by Spanish listed companies during the years 2013 to 2015. We find that companies issuing sustainability reports or integrated reports provide higher quality information than companies including their sustainability information within the annual report. We also find that sustainability reports are issued with higher quality than integrated reports. Both findings indicate that companies in Spain are engaged in a dialogue with all stakeholders, not only shareholders. Our results offer insights on the need to improve the framework of the integrated report in order to achieve the objectives of the International Integrated Reporting Council and to get a speed up in the adoption of this new reporting tool.     

Experiences of Urban Militarism: Spatial Stigma,Ruins and Everyday Life

A key question in urban sociology is how people interpret the urban environment. At a time when cities are increasingly militarized, this question is particularly important for understanding how militarism impacts urban life. However, urban sociologists have not addressed how people experience militarized environments. This article turns to this question by considering the case of Lydda‐Lod, an Israeli city that has been demographically and physically transformed by war, displacement and securitization. Drawing on Wacquant's sociology of spatial stigma and adding insights from works on emotions in (post‐)conflict cities, I examine how poor Palestinians think and feel about the surveilled districts where they live within the city's broader landscape of ruins. I show how the Israeli military, security and policing agencies have collectively produced spatial stigmatization of these districts. I discuss how Palestinians respond to this spatial stigma by attaching a sense of worthlessness to their districts. However, this reproduction of spatial stigma is punctuated by expressions of care for the built environment and by a desire to revalorize collective Palestinian life in the city. I conclude by discussing how a perspective on militarized cities focused on everyday responses to militarism and attentive to marginalities enriches urban sociology and urban studies more generally.     

Regional growth and unemployment in the medium run: asymmetric cointegrated Okun’s Law for UK regions

This article tests for the presence of a medium-run asymmetric Okun’s Law relationship between regional output and regional unemployment rate in UK regions. The test is performed with a panel data version of the hidden cointegration technique suggested by Granger and Yoon. A novelty of the article is to combine the method of hidden cointegration with a panel data method of removing cross-sectional dependence. The medium-run Okun relationship for regions in the UK appears to confirm results found elsewhere in the literature on countries as a whole, although the coefficients tend to be smaller.     

East–West European Integration: A General-Equilibrium Analysis of Alternative Agricultural Policies

This paper studies the budgetary and trade implications of European Union (EU) membership of Eastern European countries under various agricultural policy scenarios. The author uses a six-region, 13-sector general-equilibrium model with many explicitly modeled agricultural and trade policies. It is found that EU membership of Eastern European countries, including their adoption of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), leads to a surge in Eastern Europe's agricultural exports. Moreover, the EU's agricultural expenditure increases by 26%. A reform of the CAP following the Agenda 2000 proposal does not reduce the cost of enlargement if Eastern European farmers receive compensation payments.     

Are yield-curve/monetary cycles’ approaches enough to predict recessions?

Business Economics - This paper proposes a new framework that identifies a threshold between the fed funds rate and the 10-year Treasury yield and, when the threshold is breached, the risk of a...     

The role of social identification and hedonism in affecting tourist re-patronizing behaviours: The case of an Italian festival

Since the 1990s Europe and other continents have been organising a significantly larger number of festivals with the objective of stimulating tourism and exploiting potential economic opportunities. The prominence of these events has led to intense competition between festivals in attracting visitors and it has become important to analyse factors which might influence attendees’ retention. Drawing on existing literature on retail and service sectors, this study aims to identify the role played by emotions, hedonism, satisfaction, and social identification in mediating the effects of environmental factors on attendees’ re-patronizing intention. This study includes an on-site survey of 449 visitors attending an Italian festival gaining in popularity, and analyses data using a structural equations model. Results suggest that hedonism and social identification are key-facilitators between environmental cues and attendees’ re-patronizing intention.     

Effects of Currency Devaluations on the Economic Growth in Developing Countries: The Role of Foreign Currency-Denominated Debt

Assuming that a developing country has to denominate its debts in the currencies of the principal creditor countries, how is the country??s economic performance affected when currency devaluation occurs? The aim of this paper is to prove that devaluation can be contractionary and that its occurrence can be the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Assuming credit constraints on firms?? borrowing capacity and nominal price rigidities, a sharp change in the value of the domestic currency leads to an increase in the real costs of foreign currency-denominated debt. Hence, firms?? profits as well as their borrowing capacity decrease, provoking a drop in future investment and output. Moreover, expectations about future output can alone trigger a currency devaluation, confirming the initial expectations in a self-fulfilling way. Finally, it is discussed in an empirical analysis the impact of devaluation on the economic growth in a sample of five countries.     

Relative Intragenerational Economic Mobility: A Cross-Period Analysis from 1968 to 2009

Recent debate about income inequality has occurred with good reason, as changes in income inequality are critically important for long-term economic prosperity, business profitability, and particularly for the quality and accessibility of labor in the market today. However, what is equally important and less discussed is economic mobility, or the capacity of an individual or a family to improve their financial standing, specifically as it relates to income and wealth. In this paper, we examine statistics on economic mobility in the United States. Our findings suggest that while economic mobility still exists, the likelihood of a household making a large jump out of poverty and into wealth declined from 1999 to 2009. The message of our findings to policymakers is that, rather than a redistribution of wealth from the top of the income distribution to the bottom, what is really needed is broader access to affordable education, better essential nutrition, more stable early childhood development experiences, and basic financial literacy training for all income groups.     

Explaining Consumer Reactions to Corporate Social Responsibility: The Role of Gratitude and Altruistic Values

Although a lot of research establishes consumer reactions to corporate social responsibility (CSR), little is known about the theoretical mechanisms for these reactions. We conduct a field experiment with adult consumers to test the hypothesis that the effects of perceived CSR on consumer reactions are mediated by felt gratitude and moderated by the magnitude of altruistic values held by consumers. Two classes of consumer reactions are considered: intentions to (1) say positive things about the company, and (2) participate in advocacy actions benefiting the company.