Does studying abroad enhance employability?

Over 200,000 European students study abroad under the Erasmus programme. It appears that studying abroad may impart skills which are helpful for professional careers after graduation. Approximately, 54% of European students report that participation in the Erasmus exchange programme helped them to obtain a first job; however, interestingly, those from Central and Eastern European countries report it much more often—in 73% of cases. The aim of this paper is to find out whether studying abroad enhances the employability of higher education graduates in Poland. Using the propensity score matching method and data from a nationwide tracer survey of Polish graduates, we find that Polish students who completed at least one semester of their studies abroad do not benefit in terms of a higher employment rate after graduation.     

Reinsurance Arrangements Maximizing Insurer's Survival Probability

The article concerns the problem of purchasing a reinsurance policy that maximizes the survival probability of the insurer. Explicit forms of the contracts optimal for the insurer are derived which are stop loss or truncated stop loss depending on the initial surplus, a quota to be spend on reinsurance and pricing rules of both the insurer and the reinsurer.     

Problems of Incentives for Employees in the Quality Management of the Service Sector

The paper presented below concentrate on worker’s motivation problems in quality management of the services sector. The problem with motivation is particularly important in management of services. In our publication, we analyze motivation system in McDonald’s restaurants form quality of services point of view.     

The effect of social media communication on consumer perceptions of brands

Researchers and brand managers have limited understanding of the effects social media communication has on how consumers perceive brands. We investigated 504 Facebook users in order to observe the impact of firm-created and user-generated (UG) social media communication on brand equity (BE), brand attitude (BA) and purchase intention (PI) by using a standardized online survey throughout Poland. To test the conceptual model, we analyzed 60 brands across three different industries: non-alcoholic beverages, clothing and mobile network operators. When analyzing the data, we applied the structural equation modeling technique to both investigate the interplay of firm-created and user-generated social media communication and examine industry-specific differences. The results of the empirical studies showed that user-generated social media communication had a positive influence on both brand equity and brand attitude, whereas firm-created social media communication affected only brand attitude. Both brand equity and brand attitude were shown to have a positive influence on purchase intention. In addition, we assessed measurement invariance using a multi-group structural modeling equation. The findings revealed that the proposed measurement model was invariant across the researched industries. However, structural path differences were detected across the models.     

Urban Geographies of Hesitant Transition: Tracing Socioeconomic Segregation in Post‐Ceauşescu Bucharest

Scholars have raised concerns about the social costs of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and geographers are particularly interested in the spatial expressions and implications of these costs, including apparently increasing residential segregation. Applying a range of segregation measures to 1992 and 2002 census data, this contribution studies socio‐occupational residential segregation in Bucharest. The conclusion is that Bucharest was relatively socio‐spatially mixed at both times; in fact, a modest, yet fully legible, decreasing overall trend is observable. This is at odds with many popular assumptions of the past 20 years.     

Too-Big-To-Fail: Why Megabanks Have Not Become Smaller Since the Global Financial Crisis?

ABSTRACT

More than ten years after the global financial crisis, what has happened to the ‘too-big-to-fail’ (TBTF) banks whose reckless behavior was among its preconditions, but which received public support and guarantees in the midst of that crisis? Insofar as this too-big-to-fail status helped create the crisis and then imposed costs on the rest of society, we would expect these banks to have shrunk. We investigate the evolution of 31 global-TBTF banks and find that their overall size has hardly recorded any substantial change. However, there is no sense of urgency in the flourishing post-crisis literature on TBTF banks about the need to contain their size; the prevalent view therein is that if properly regulated, the risks that arise from a financial system dominated by TBTF banks are manageable. This view rests on the same overly narrow theoretical underpinnings whose flaws were exposed in the crisis. We argue that too-big-to-fail banking is embedded in a set of self-reinforcing policies—consolidation, balance-sheet support through quantitative easing, favorable regulations, bank lobbying, and geo-economic and geo-political considerations—which explain why these banks have not shrunk and why they remain a threat to financial stability, well after the lessons of the crisis should have been learned.     

The Oaxaca–Blinder Unexplained Component as a Treatment Effects Estimator

In this paper I use the National Supported Work (NSW) data to examine the finite‐sample performance of the Oaxaca–Blinder unexplained component as an estimator of the population average treatment effect on the treated (PATT). Precisely, I follow sample and variable selections from Dehejia and Wahba (1999), and conclude that Oaxaca–Blinder performs better than any of the estimators in this influential paper, provided that overlap is imposed. As a robustness check, I consider alternative sample (Smith and Todd, 2005) and variable (Abadie and Imbens, 2011) selections, and present a simulation study which is also based on the NSW data.     

The Small Border Traffic Zone between Poland and Kaliningrad Region (Russia): The Impact of a Local Visa-Free Border Regime

After Poland’s accession to the EU, the Polish-Russian border became the EU external border. This significantly changed its nature and started the new type of cross border relation. Since 2012, when the Small Border Traffic (SBT) zone came into force, the border has changed its blockade function and started instead to be treated as a resource. The fundamental loosening of the border crossing regime reduced the social and functional distance between Poland and Kaliningrad, and in a broader sense between EU and Kaliningrad. This paper will try to show how small but meaningful initiative, the SBT, has had an impact on cross-border region. The present paper will describe the relationship between larger geopolitical actors and how they affect local border relations. The aim of this paper is to present phenomenon of new visa regime at the Polish-Russian border. The paper likewise describes the impact of the SBT on local communities and their economies, as well as national relations between adjacent countries. The analysis is based on the interviews and surveys conducted in the Polish-Russian border region in late 2014.     

Can banks default overnight? Modelling endogenous contagion on the O/N interbank market

We propose a new model of the liquidity-driven banking system focusing on overnight interbank loans. This significant branch of the interbank market is commonly neglected in the banking system modelling and systemic risk analysis. We construct a model where banks are allowed to use both the interbank and the securities markets to manage their liquidity demand and supply as driven by prudential requirements in a volatile environment. The network of interbank loans is dynamic and simulated every day. We show how the intrasystem cash fluctuations alone, without any external shocks, may lead to systemic defaults, and what may be a symptom of the self-organized criticality of the system. We also analyze the impact of different prudential regulations and market conditions on the interbank market resilience. We confirm that the central bank’s asset purchase programmes, limiting the declines in government bond prices, can successfully stabilize banks’ liquidity demands. The model can be used to analyze the interbank market impact of macroprudential tools.     

Narratives of irony and failure in ethnographic work

Organizational ethnography is one of the most valued approaches to qualitative studies of organizations. Much attention has been given to the development of the research process, of which the researcher's identity is an integral part. However, we believe that the analysis of research failures has been much less developed in the discourse of ethnographic methods for the study of organizations. Therefore, we have explored some of the “slips” in ethnographic work, as described in accounts of fellow organizational anthropologists. As the study is qualitative, we have adopted a narrative research method. We have divided the “slips” (i.e., errors) into four categories important for the ethnographer's identity: (a) one's role; (b) one's project, (c) one's relation to “the Other”; and (d) the social context of the slip. Copyright © 2010 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.