The employment environment for youth in rural South Africa: A mixed-methods study

South Africa has high youth unemployment. This article examines the predictors of youth employment in rural Agincourt, Mpumalanga Province. A survey of 187 out-of-school 18 to 24 year olds found that only 12% of women and 38% of men were currently employed. Men with skills/training were significantly more likely to report employment, mostly physical labour (adjusted odds ratio: 4.5; confidence interval: 1.3, 15.3). In-depth interviews with 14 of the youth revealed that women are perceived more suitable for formal employment, which is scarce, informing why women were more likely to pursue further education and yet less likely to be employed. Ten key informants from local organisations highlighted numerous local youth employment resources while, in contrast, all youth in the sample said no resources were available, highlighting a need for the organisations to extend their services into rural areas. Because these services are focused on entrepreneurship, programmes to increase financial literacy and formal employment opportunities are also needed.     

Posting,quoting, and replying: a comparison of methodological approaches to measure communication ties in web forums

Active involvement in discussion-based communities is nowadays a firm part of people’s online activities. The measurement of communication ties and networks between contributors to such domains is thus becoming a relevant research question in social sciences. However, especially in web forums, very often almost no direct relational information exists that would indicate the presence of communication ties among contributors. In contrast with the reply-to structure of Usenet newsgroup or mailing list conversations that contain explicit relational information created by the contributors, some web forums only enable participants to add new posts to threads or to quote preceding posts in threads. When discussions emerge, it is difficult to identify who is replying to whom. Drawing on the social network studies dealing with the conversational patterns in Usenet and web forums, this paper presents an alternative approach to identifying the ties between authors of posts. Several assumptions are discussed, and different measures are developed and empirically evaluated. The findings provide a starting point for the development of a standardized methodology for studying social networks in online communities where only limited direct information about communication ties is available.     

What’s wrong with Pittsburgh? Delegated investors and liquidity concentration

What makes an asset institutional quality? This paper proposes that one reason is the existing concentration of delegated investors in a market through a liquidity channel. Consistent with this intuition, it documents differences in investor composition across US cities and shows that delegated investors concentrate their investments in cities with higher turnover. It then estimates a search model showing how heterogeneity in liquidity preferences makes some markets more liquid, even when assets have identical cash flows. The paper provides evidence for clientele equilibria arising in frictional asset markets and suggests that a liquidity channel may explain divergent paths in city development.     

Entrepreneurs Use a Balanced Scorecard to Translate Strategy into Performance Measures

Although 50 percent of Fortune 1000 companies currently use a balanced scorecard (BSC), few small businesses are using a BSC. A review of the literature finds no BSC papers in leading small business/entrepreneurship journals. This article begins with a discussion of the BSC and why a small business should use it. Three small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) case studies are presented, with a copy of their BSC, to illustrate how Hyde Park Electronics, Futura Industries, and Southern Gardens Citrus use a BSC to set strategy and align operations to achieve breakthrough results. Implications are, that like large businesses, SMEs can also benefit from using a BSC. Entrepreneurs of SMEs can use the case studies to develop their own BSC to improve performance. Implications for practice and research are discussed.     

Pension Plan Choice among University Faculty

A pension plan is an important component of lifetime earnings, and thus the decision between a defined benefit pension and a defined contribution pension is an important one. This study uses data from annual faculty censuses of the University of North Carolina system, where new hires are given a choice between a state defined benefit pension and a defined contribution plan. Newly hired faculty members who are older, female, and nonwhite are found to be more likely to choose the defined benefit plan. Some differences across university Carnegie classification are also seen. In addition, a declining trend in defined benefit participation is shown.     

Lessons from Nominal Convergence in Slovenia

Two years after joining the ERM2 mechanism Slovenia had fulfilled the legal requirements for joining EMU as well as the Maastricht criteria. This article analyses how the path to EMU affected Slovenian nominal convergence, more specifically yield spread movements for standardised maturities. For that purpose daily Slovenian yield curves were estimated in the period after introduction of the OTC–DVP market. The results show that yield spreads between the Slovenian and the generic EMU government yield curves decreased significantly at the beginning of March 2006 when Slovenia requested individual appraisal of EMU criteria fulfilment. Yield spreads decreased further in July 2006 when the definite fixed exchange rate was set.     

Obtaining indirect internet access: An examination how reasons for internet non-use relate to proxy internet use

Internet non-use is increasingly concentrated in vulnerable groups of people, especially among ageing populations and those with low socio-economic status. As participation in society becomes largely dependent on use of internet-enabled technologies, internet non-users may seek alternative ways of using the internet. Proxy internet use (PIU), where internet non-users ask internet users to perform online activities on their behalf, is a strategy for obtaining (indirect) internet access. This study examines factors for engagement in PIU, focusing specifically on how non-users’ reasons for disengagement relate to their engagement in PIU. The results from multivariate analyses of survey data from a nation-wide representative sample show that 47% of internet non-users in Slovenia who report having someone available for PIU in fact engage in PIU. In analysing four types of reasons for internet non-use—those related to interest, access, costs and skills—the results show that access issues are negatively related to engagement in PIU. Conversely, reasons related to skills issues are positively related to engagement in PIU. Considering that access to online services through PIU offers an important degree of digital inclusion, the results of this study have important policy implications. Policy initiatives tackling digital inequalities should be sensible to access and skills issues resulting in disengagement. For example, policies directed at providing and maintaining internet access at a household level may result in non-users’ increased opportunities for PIU. In contrast, skills policies should be directed at creating opportunities for informal and person-centred learning of digital skills, considering that non-users who are more aware of their deficiency in skills might be more aware of online opportunities.     

Did Affordable Housing Legislation Contribute to the Subprime Securities Boom?

We use a regression discontinuity approach and present new institutional evidence to investigate whether affordable housing policies influenced the market for securitized subprime mortgages. We use merged loan‐level data on nonprime mortgages with individual‐ and neighborhood‐level data for California and Florida. We find no evidence that lenders increased subprime originations or altered loan pricing around the discrete eligibility cutoffs for the Government‐Sponsored Enterprises' (GSEs) affordable housing goals or the Community Reinvestment Act. Although we find evidence that the GSEs bought significant quantities of subprime securities, our results indicate that these purchases were not directly related to affordable housing mandates.