How do industry and country impact firm performance? A national and supranational analysis

We contribute to the literature of the country, industry and firm effects on performance by developing an autoregressive cross-classified mixed-effect linear model that examines heterogeneity in the profitability of corporations in emerging and developed economies, as well as corporations located in different supranational regions. To this purpose, we simultaneously decompose abnormal returns into permanent and transitory components at the firm, industry, country and industry–country levels. We find that firms in emerging countries have significantly higher rates of performance persistence and different sources of persistence compared to firms located in developed countries. These differences are also evident between different supranational regions and countries at different levels of institutional development.

     

What is a social pattern? Rethinking a central social science term

Theory and Society - The main aim of this article is to start a discussion of social pattern, a term that is commonly used in sociology but not specified or defined. The key question can be phrased...     

NEW FACTS ABOUT FIRM RISK ACROSS COUNTRIES AND OVER THE BUSINESS CYCLE

The characteristics of firm‐level risk over the cycle and across countries are studied in this paper. Low idiosyncratic firm‐level risk is found to be a feature of highly developed, stable economies, whereas the countercyclicality of firm‐level risk is associated with flexible as well as stable economies. These facts are uncovered with the help of a theoretical model where small, risk‐averse firms display procyclical risk, whereas larger, risk‐neutral firms have countercyclical risk patterns that depend on the rigidity of the business environment. The predictions of the model are then confirmed by the data using a large international firm‐level database (ORBIS) together with the World Bank Doing Business Database, during the “Great Recession” across 55 countries. The findings are critical for the growing literature of uncertainty driven business cycles, and show that firm‐level uncertainty cannot be treated as an exogenous parameter. (JEL D21, D22, E32, F44, L11, L25)     

Place attachment,residential satisfaction,and life satisfaction: Traditional and renewed kibbutz

Economic crisis in the early 1980s, followed by heavy debt, challenged the existence of the kibbutz. In order to prevent disintegration, rigorous privatization-related economic and structural reforms were implemented. In this study, we evaluate if these transformational changes affected the perception and emotional ties of kibbutz members. Specifically, we examined differences between traditional and renewed kibbutz in terms of life satisfaction, place attachment, and residential satisfaction. The results indicated that members of the renewed kibbutz reported higher levels of place attachment than those of the traditional kibbutz. However, no significant differences were observed for residential satisfaction and life satisfaction. Moreover, place attachment and residential satisfaction were significantly associated with life satisfaction. Finally, kibbutz type moderated the indirect effect of residential satisfaction on life satisfaction through place attachment.     

Soundtracking Everyday Life: The Use of Music in Redefining Situations*

As a result of technological advances, music is presently widely available as a means of modifying social occasions. As with other artifacts, the use of music requires technical knowledge. Leaving aside the more crystallized segments of this knowledge, such as musical therapy and movie soundtracking, the study sought to explore the functional correlation college students established between types of music and social occasions. The existence of a body of consistent, though uncodified, technical knowledge is confirmed. This knowledge prescribes types of music appropriate for social occasions, and specifies the particular effects that can be obtained and the role played by some of the music's elements.     

On Dutch windows

In The Netherlands, living room windows are big, left uncovered day and night, and elaborately decorated. This pattern, which is widespread in all urban and rural regions in this country, disappears abruptly as soon as the border into Germany is crossed where windows are generally smaller, consistently covered, and more sparsely decorated. Going south into Flanders, the disappearance of open and decorated windows is gradual but noticeable.The cognitive and sensory meaning of a single object in material culture, the Dutch window, is examined as a concrete articulation of the boundary between the public and private realms by thinking it with successive conceptual frames in sociology. Assuming that material objects are embodiments of ideas, the study focuses on (a) the norms for looking and for looking out of the windows, (b) the territorial boundary being established and, (c) the information game played through the windows in a context of the notion of privacy. Photographs of the cultural objects under consideration, i.e., Dutch windows, are presented throughout the text as reminders that the cultural and material realms are sensually linked. The study concludes that objects in material culture must be examined in terms of the active, purposive acts we accomplish by adapting the objects to our practical and expressive needs.The author thanks Frank Bovenkerk, Sjoerd Groenman, Jaber Gubrium, Sidney Homan, Joseph Vandiver, William and Helga Woodruff and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.An earlier version was presented in session a-125 of the XIth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographical Sciences, held in Quebec in August, 1983.An important part of this research was completed while the author was Visiting Senior Lecturer at the State University at Utrecht, The Netherlands in 1978.     

A study of Italian young adults’ transnational mobility to Australia: The reproduction of unequal trajectories in the host society

In this article, we examine the mobility patterns of a group of Italian young adults migrating to Australia in the search of new education, labour and lifestyle opportunities. The article represents a contribution to the study of the link between youth mobility and unequal trajectories through the elaboration of a new conceptual framework based on the theory of epistemological fallacy that points to the growing disjuncture between the expectations of individual autonomy and the unequal distribution of resources to achieve them. This conceptual framework contributes to elucidate the paradox of mobility that drives young people between the aspiration to mobility and the reproduction of the structural factors that influence their success. We draw on data from a mixed methods research project examining the mobility of Italian young adults to Australia. Participants imagined mobility as a way of exiting insecurities and precarities in their local context to a more open and meritocratic society, but the analysis of their trajectories in the host country reflects similar patterns of stratification as experienced in the context of origin.     

Graphon estimation via nearest-neighbour algorithm and two-dimensional fused-lasso denoising

We propose a class of methods for graphon estimation based on exploiting connections with nonparametric regression. The idea is to construct an ordering of the nodes in the network, similar in spirit to Chan & Airoldi (2014). However, rather than considering orderings based only on the empirical degree as in Chan & Airoldi (2014), we use the nearest-neighbour algorithm which is an approximative solution to the travelling salesman problem. This algorithm in turn can handle general distances $\widehat{d}$ between the nodes, allowing us to incorporate rich information from the network. Once an ordering is constructed, we formulate a two-dimensional-grid graph-denoising problem that we solve through fused-lasso regularization. For particular choices of the metric $\widehat{d}$, we show that the corresponding two-step estimator can attain competitive rates when the true model is the stochastic block model, and when the underlying graphon is piecewise Hölder or has bounded variation.