Dropping the Books and Working Off the Books

The paper empirically tests the relationship between underground labour and schooling achievement for Italy, a country ranking badly in both respects when compared with other high‐income economies, with a marked duality between North and South. In order to identify underground workers, we exploit the information on individuals' social security positions available from the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth. After controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic and economic variables and addressing potential endogeneity and selection issues, we show that a low level of education sizeably and significantly increases the probability of working underground. Switching from completing compulsory school to graduating at college more than halves this probability for both men and women. The gain is slightly higher for individuals completing the compulsory track with respect to those having no formal education at all. The different probabilities found for self‐employed and dependent workers support the view of a dual informal sector, in which necessity and desirability coexist.     

Women’s career development in an Arab Middle Eastern context

This study examines women’s perspectives on requirements for enabling their access to senior leadership roles in the under-researched context of the Arab Middle East. It draws on an approach that utilizes qualitative, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with academic women working in Saudi Arabia higher education. The findings of this study reveal several culturally responsive strategies for supporting the advancement of women into leading positions within higher education. Also, the study demonstrates how women in Saudi higher education learn to resist patriarchal power structures and gender discrimination, and to develop their own strategies for negotiating those issues. In addition, the results provide evidence of the academy’s importance as an institution that works collaboratively with the government to develop women’s careers. The originality of this paper is its contribution to the limited knowledge that currently exists on women’s career development in the Arab Middle Eastern context. This study also will benefit human resource departments and human resource development practitioners with knowledge regarding the intertwining of social forces with university practices, and gender-related issues, which in turn affect women’s positions in the academy. Additionally, the study suggests that human resource development practitioners should establish policies and practices with respect to gender-related equity issues that could have a positive impact on wider national human resource development systems, and potentially open more opportunities for positive career development for women.     

引入人脸抓拍系统还是升级安检设备？——有限资源下的地铁暴恐防御序贯博弈模型

在有限防御资源约束下,地铁安防部门面临着引进人脸抓拍系统构建二级地铁暴恐防御体系,还是升级原安检系统构建增强型一级地铁暴恐防御系统的选择。本文基于暴恐分子决策的目标价值依赖性和安防部门的接警反应时间不对称性,构建了有限资源下地铁暴恐防御策略选择的序贯博弈模型。得出并分析了双方的四种均衡策略,最后结合北京地铁积水潭站早高峰案例,给出了考虑高峰大客流冲击效应的暴恐防御决策建议。研究发现,当增强型安检系统的准确率过高,或接警反应时间有效率较高时,引进人脸抓拍系统策略占优,且人脸抓拍系统的社会价值对安防部门决策无直接影响。当增强型安检系统的准确率适中,或接警反应时间有效率较低时,第一种情况,在安防部门侧重效率的情况下,人脸抓拍系统的社会价值与安防效率正相关,引进人脸抓拍策略在其社会价值较高时占优;第二种情况,在侧重安全情况下,升级加强原安检系统策略占优,此时,人脸抓拍系统的社会价值对安防部门决策无影响。另外,较高的安检准确率将提升安检厅的乘客淤滞水平、强化高峰大客流对安检厅的冲击效应、削弱高峰大客流对候车厅的冲击效应,并最终拉升暴恐分子直接袭击安检厅的风险。     

Intergenerational Transfers,and Public Pensions in a Non Altuistic Setting: a Public Choice Model

The paper presents a model based on non‐altruistic individuals, where middle aged and old individuals influence the decisions about public social security system. This is an alternative or a complement to private intergenerational transfers. Fertility is endogenous, as children are seen as an assets in the process of transferring resources to old age by the network of intergenerational intrafamily transfers. Expectations about the Government social security budget balance play a crucial role. We also present some empirical estimates of the fertility and pension ‘demand’ function for some developed countries. It emerges that both can be treated as endogenous, and the results are coherent with the theory.     

Potential for Flexibility in EC Countries

Abstract. There are two economic reasons for supporting the Internal Market Programme of the EC by social policies: the fust argument refers to welfare theory, the second to policies of distribution. First, it could be possible that an economic integration without social completion will lead to welfare losses. Therefore, it could be necessary to correct market forces or to support them respectively because, due to market imperfections, they do not provide the best possible use of productive facilities. Second, it cannot be excluded that level and structure of social provisions will not be accepted because of superior aspects of policies of distribution. Market results could miss the aim of adjusting life and working conditions within the EC and developing them further. These two arguments mentioned above should be followed up in the discussion of the pros and cons of a harmonization of social systems in the EC. For the purposes of this paper these. rather fundamental considerations are applied to the following concrete items: dismissal protection, non-standard forms of employment, and working hours. These regulations influence numerical flexibility of enterprises, i.e. the possibilities of quantitative adjustments in staff use. The steadily growing competition in Europe will also increase the importance of flexibility potentials of enterprises in the different countries as a relevant factor for enterprise location. Extensive flexibility restrictions could prove to be competitive disadvantage in view of countries with more possibilities of flexibilization.Therefore, after the comparison of flexibility potentials in the EC-countries the implications for European laws (key-word: Social Charter) are to be discussed.     

Ownership and corporate social responsibility: "The power of the female touch"

Using a sample of 26,029 firm-year observations over the period 2002–2017 from 4,479 firms and 44 countries, we examine the relationship between ownership concentration and corporate social responsibility by focusing on the mediating role of board gender diversity and the moderating role of family shareholding. We find that ownership concentration negatively affects corporate social responsibility, and the board gender diversity partially mediates this negative effect. Our results indicate that the mediating effect of board gender diversity leads to a 10.65 percent decrease in the impact of ownership concentration on corporate social responsibility. Furthermore, moderated path analysis indicates that family shareholding weakens the direct effect of ownership concentration on board gender diversity and its indirect effect on corporate social responsibility. In post hoc analysis, we also document that the effect of gender diversity on the board is more prevalent in high gender-egalitarian societies where women are more involved in decision-making. Our study addresses the strategic role of female board members in increasing firms’ respect for corporate social responsibility, especially in family-controlled firms. Thus, our results may provide insights to regulators and policymakers to enhance firms’ corporate social practices by encouraging women’s participation on corporate boards.     

产权结构、公司治理、社会保障与国企改革——基于Cournot竞争的系统分析

国企改革是我国经济体制改革的核心环节,引起了学界的高度关注,但现有研究基本是着眼于其某个特定侧面,忽略了国企改革系统工程的本质特征。考虑到我国经济转轨时期的特点,本文应用Cournot模型构建了关于国企改革的系统分析框架,使其涵盖了产权结构、公司治理和社会保障等重要影响因素,进而讨论了各种产权形式、公司治理状况及其社会保障建设程度与与混合产权国企的产出、收益、利润以及社会福利之间的关系,并获得了一些有益的结论,最后将其与已有研究成果进行了比对,凸显了这种系统研究的优势。     

An Assessment of the Italian 2007 Complementary Social Security Reform: A Simulation Approach

In this paper we aim at assessing the outcomes of the 2007 Italian reform of the complementary social security scheme and at identifying the determinants behind them. The reform provided workers with relevant incentives to switch the investment of about 7 per cent of their gross yearly wages from a firm‐managed scheme (which took the form of a termination indemnity payment, the Trattamento di Fine Rapporto scheme) to an external pension fund. We provide a theoretical framework to model the workers' problem of choosing between these two different forms of complementary social security schemes and we then perform an agent‐based simulation taking into account all the details of the reform. Differently from previous contributions, we stress the impact that the investment decision has on the financial health of firms and, consequently, on workers' employment stability. Our simulations are able to replicate the Italian data in terms of adhesion rates to complementary social security and also to identify some of the key determinants of that outcome, such as fiscal incentives, individual preferences, the working of both the Italian labour and the financial markets and the productive structure of the Italian economy.     

How a System Backfires: Dynamics of Redundancy Problems in Security

Increasing attention is being paid to reliability, safety, and security issues in social systems. Scott Sagan examined why more security forces (a redundancy solution) may lead to less security.⁽ 1 ⁾ He discussed how such a solution can backfire due to three major issues (i.e., “common‐mode error,”“social shirking,” and “overcompensation”). In this article, using Sagan's hypotheses, we simulate and analyze a simple and generic security system as more guards are added to the system. Simulation results support two of Sagan's hypotheses. More specifically, the results show that “common‐mode error” causes the system to backfire, and “social shirking” leads to an inefficient system while exacerbating the common‐mode error's effect. Simulation results show that “overcompensation” has no effect of backfiring, but it leads the system to a critical state in which it can easily be affected by the common‐mode error. Furthermore, the simulation results make us question the importance of the initial power of adversaries (e.g., terrorists) as the results show that, for any exogenous level of adversary power, the system endogenously overcompensates to a level that makes the system more susceptible to being attacked.     

Die Supervision von Kindertagesstättenleiterinnen in den neuen Bundesländern

Supervision of leaders of kindergartens in East Germany The collapse of the DDR brought up a big change first of all in the social welfare. In social welfare. In social work the traditional models of perception, interpretation and action became widely dysfunctional. The author describes an example of leaders of kindergartens how to work in the two systems, and describes how to try to support the women in the process of transfer by supervision.     

Population Changes in Europe. Demographic and Social Prospects and Problems

Abstract. Over recent years, the European Community has experienced profound demographic changes which, to a large extent, have already determined its demographic future. One of the more significant consequences of demographic and social trends is a marked fragmentation of the family with people giving absolute priority to the individual dimension in their lives and in terms of society as a whole. Legal regulations and administrative practice have not totally–and not everywhere – adapted to the far-reaching changes in the family so as to adequately protect the family and its weaker members in particular: children, the elderly, the disabled, people with mental and social illnesses, the poor. In this field, some measures will be proposed in this paper. The imbalances in demographic-occupational growth in the Euro-Mediterranean area–the area with which the EC is most directly in contact–are and will be of an exceptional amplitude, as has already been shown, to an extent never before experienced in the history of mankind. We must ask ourselves if this very strong differential pressure, which is also of a political and socio-economic nature, will lead to steady and long-lasting migratory flows. Some considerations regarding the future action and intervention of the EC close the paper.     

Separable Preferences,Strategyproofness, and Decomposability

We consider strategyproof social choice functions defined over product domains. If preferences are strict orderings and separable, then strategyproof social choice functions must be decomposable provided that the domain of preferences is rich. We provide several characterization results in the case where preferences are separable only with respect to the elements of some partition of the set of components and these partitions vary across individuals. We characterize the libertarian social choice function and show that no superset of the tops separable domain admits strategyproof nondictatorial social choice functions.     

The female leadership advantage: An evaluation of the evidence

Journalists and authors of trade books increasingly assert a female advantage in leadership, whereby women are more likely than men to lead in a style that is effective under contemporary conditions. Contrasting our analysis of these claims with Vecchio's [Leadersh. Q. 13 (2002) 643] analysis, we show that women have some advantages in typical leadership style but suffer some disadvantages from prejudicial evaluations of their competence as leaders, especially in masculine organizational contexts. Nonetheless, more women are rising into leadership roles at all levels, including elite executive roles. We suggest reasons for this rise and argue that organizations can capture the symbols of progressive social change and modernity by appointments of women in key positions.     

Corporate social responsibility as a source of employee satisfaction

Corporate social responsibility has received an increasing amount of attention from practitioners and scholars alike in recent years. However, very little is known about whether or how corporate social responsibility affects employees. Because employees are primary stakeholders who directly contribute to the success of the company, understanding employee reactions to corporate social responsibility may help answer lingering questions about the potential effects of corporate social responsibility on firms as well as illuminate some of the processes responsible for them. To begin our chapter, we provide a brief history of scholarship on corporate social responsibility and highlight some of the major challenges researchers in this area currently face. We then discuss why corporate social responsibility may represent a special opportunity to influence employees’ general impression of their company. Next, we identify four distinct paths through which corporate social responsibility may affect employees’ relationship with their company that correspond to four universal psychological needs: security, self-esteem, belongingness, and a meaningful existence. Finally, we offer an agenda for micro-level research on corporate social responsibility.     

Women and technology: A review of training initiatives

This paper considers the entry of women into technological areas of work, their subsequent career progression and return to work after a career break. It considers the development of those training programmes and related initiatives which have attempted to encourage girls and young women to enter non-traditional areas of work, and others which help women return to work after a career break. It emphasizes that such training needs to address the psychological and social issues which arise, as well as provide for new technical knowledge and skills. In doing so it reviews some of the courses which are currently available and comments on their apparent success. In its concluding problems it refers to the on-going problem of funding such training and of providing a supportive database.     

Social Security and Demographic Shocks

An overlapping generations model of social security with shocks to the productivity of labor and capital and demographic shocks is studied. We focus attention on stationary long run allocations. An allocation is interim optimal if there does not exist another feasible allocation that improves the expected welfare of all generations, computed conditionally on the state of the world when they are born. We characterize the set of interim optimal allocations and study the equilibria associated with various institutional forms of social security from the point of view of this optimality criterion. We obtain the analogs of the two traditional welfare theorems of microeconomic theory. Assume that there exists a financial asset in fixed quantity, which supports some (non null) intergenerational transfers. Then the rational expectations equilibrium allocation of this economy is interim optimal. Conversely, any stationary interim optimal allocation can be supported by such an equilibrium, with adequate lump sum transfers.     

特殊时期地铁二级分流-联防安检优化模型

恐怖分子经常将安检体系相对薄弱、人流相对密集的地铁站作为攻击的首要目标之一。本文从地铁安检流程优化和跨部门联防协作的角度出发，提出了特殊时期地铁二级分流-联防安检优化模型。结果表明，在特殊时期，通过引入身份证信息库和指纹-人脸识别系统，对乘客进行绿、橙、红三色通道分流安检，能够明显提升普通乘客的社会福利水平；当X光检测系统的准确率越低，被分流到橙色通道乘客比例越大，橙色通道中潜在袭击者比例越高时，社会福利增益越大，暴恐概率越小；在案潜逃人员识别率越高，社会福利增益越大。多部门协防反恐正向反馈越积极，进而可以刺激安防部门优化身份识别系统，直到社会福利增益为零的最优状态。     

Consistent Probabilistic Social Choice

Two fundamental axioms in social choice theory are consistency with respect to a variable electorate and consistency with respect to components of similar alternatives. In the context of traditional non‐probabilistic social choice, these axioms are incompatible with each other. We show that in the context of probabilistic social choice, these axioms uniquely characterize a function proposed by Fishburn (1984). Fishburn's function returns so‐called maximal lotteries, that is, lotteries that correspond to optimal mixed strategies in the symmetric zero‐sum game induced by the pairwise majority margins. Maximal lotteries are guaranteed to exist due to von Neumann's Minimax Theorem, are almost always unique, and can be efficiently computed using linear programming.     

Social Security Wealth and Retirement Decisions in Italy

Abstract. This paper uses administrative data to study the retirement decisions of Italian private‐sector non‐agricultural employees during the period 1977–97. Our analysis tries to assess the importance of the financial incentives built into the social security system. The basic idea is very simple: at any given age, and based on the available information, workers compare the expected present value of two alternatives: retiring today or working one more year, and then choose the best one. A key role in this kind of comparisons is played by social security wealth, whose level and changes reflect the expectations about the profile of future earnings and the institutional features of the social security system. The various incentive measures that we consider differ in the precise weight given to the social security wealth that workers accrue as they continue to work. Our model does not provide a structural representation of the retirement process. A worker's decision is modeled here following a ‘quasi reduced‐form’ approach, with the incentive measures entering as predictors of the worker's choice in addition to standard variables. The estimated models are then used to predict retirement probabilities under alternative policies that change social security wealth and derived incentive measures.     

Attitudes of nurses towards 8-h and 12-h shift systems

Twelve-hour shift schedules are becoming increasingly popular. The present study was designed to investigate the attitudes of nurses, their priorities with respect to working time and other aspects of the working conditions, and to analyse the conditions leading to a diminished satisfaction with the shift schedule and to aspirations for a change of schedule. Questionnaires were returned by 880 nurses (78% return rate) from 12 hospitals. A total of 65% worked 12-h shifts and 35% worked 8-h shifts. A considerable proportion of both groups showed a low satisfaction with their schedule and a desire to change the schedule (44% of those working 12-h shifts, 47% of those working 8-h shifts). Concerning effects of the shift schedule on work strain, continuity of service, health, family and leisure time, 8-h shifts were rated more favourably, especially by those working these shifts, but also by nurses working 12-h systems, with the exception of effects on leisure time and to some extent also on continuity of service and on family. Effects of the shift schedule on social responsibilities and leisure time activities turned out to be a major moderating variable in both groups with respect to schedule satisfaction and attitudes towards a change of schedule. Apparently neither type of shift system, traditional 12-h shift rosters or rotating 8-h shifts, is very appealing to the nurses. A stronger relationship between social consequences and health state in nurses working 12-h shifts indicates that in this group negative effects on family and leisure time might be due to an increased need for recuperation, which reduces effective leisure time.