Informal employment in Poland: an empirical spatial analysis

The main goal of our article is to bridge the gap in the regional analysis of informal employment in Poland and in particular to indicate the propensity for informal work in the working-age population, to test if informal activities are typical for marginalized people (less educated, unemployed, older) and to identify the regional and spatial heterogeneity in the propensity. We use data from the ‘Human Capital Balance 2010–2014’ survey. Results indicate a strong relationship between the probability of informal work and age, sex and labour force status. Moreover, a strong spatial dependency can be observed.     

Using online data for offline decisions: A geostatistical approach for evaluating the patronage potential of a baby-care retailer

Even though the online channel is generally not bounded by space, much insight can be derived from examining the variation in online patronage across retail space. In this paper, we propose the use of a Bayesian approach utilising the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) within its framework to estimate the risk ratios as well as probabilities of online patronage. To this end, we used publicly available data (such as household access to broadband connection, population figures and business location data) in combination with online transaction data from a focal retailer to estimate and identify which locations (i.e., postcodes) have the highest probabilities of patronage from online customers of the retailer. The three covariates adjusted for were presence of a competitor, average income at the postcode level and internet access at the postcode level; of these, internet access was found to be the most significant influencing factor on online patronage of the retailer. Overall, the resultant spatial maps provide useful predictions of how the estimated risk ratios and exceedance probabilities vary across the geographic market and the implication on opening a new offline outlet and targeting customers are discussed.