Is the Preference for Children so Low,or is the Price of Time so High? A simultaneous model of fertility and participation in Italy with cohort effects

ABSTRACT: This paper presents a simultaneous model of fertility and female participation in Italy, estimated with a sequence of cross-sections of micro data. Cohort dummies are used to capture permanent effects, including cohort changes in preferences. The cohort effects turn out to be not very significant, the point estimates suggesting a decreasing trend in participation and an increasing trend in fertility. The wage effects are instead rather strong and significant. The model produces simulations which are close to actual trends, which would seem largely explained by wage incentives. The explanation for a particularly high elasticity of fertility with respect to female wage should ultimately be searched for in the specific differences which characterize the Italian social and institutional environment.     

Trends in Marital Instability in Italy in the 1980s

ABSTRACT The authors describe the most recent trends in separation and divorce in Italy using ISTAT data for the 1980–1991 period. The analysis shows a rising instability of marriage and thus a lessening of the gap between Italy and other western countries. The total divorce rate rose from three percent in the early 1980s to eight percent at the end of the 1980s. The analysis shows that the increasing breakdown of marriages is not due to “changes in timing” but to a real trend of ending marriages. Older couples have contributed more than younger couples to more unstable marriages over the past decade. Other variables continue today, as in the past, to be closely related to the instability of marriage in Italy.     

DO IMMIGRANTS CAUSE CRIME?

We examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990–2003. Drawing on police administrative records, we first document that the size of the immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of property crimes and with the overall crime rate. Then, we use instrumental variables based on immigration toward destination countries other than Italy to identify the causal impact of exogenous changes in Italy’s immigrant population. According to these estimates, immigration increases only the incidence of robberies, while leaving unaffected all other types of crime. Since robberies represent a very minor fraction of all criminal offenses, the effect on the overall crime rate is not significantly different from zero.     

EVOLVING INTERNATIONAL INFLATION DYNAMICS: WORLD AND COUNTRY‐SPECIFIC FACTORS

The decline in the level and persistence of inflation over the 1980s is a common feature of the most industrialized economies in the world. The rise in inflation volatility of the late 1970s and the subsequent fall of the 1980s is country specific for the UK, Canada, and, to a lesser extent, the United States, Italy, and Japan. Since the late 1980s, inflation predictability has declined significantly across the industrialized world. We link the empirical results to recent theories of international inflation.     

Cash Is King—How OBM Helped a North American Telecommunications Organization Obtain $76 Million in Receivables

Imagine a freshly formed team of people who are new to their jobs, assigned by top leadership to meet very ambitious targets in the mission-critical department that collects aged (past-due) payments from the company's largest accounts … (cue Mission Impossible theme). At a large telecommunications company in North America, the Senior Leadership Team led an effort to increase collections of aged receivables on its top accounts by $50 million from the previous year. Using OBM techniques, they surpassed the $50 million goal, reaching $76 million. The team also lowered the Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) by 8.5 days.     

Framing socioecological complexity: The long-term evolution of multiple dimensions of desertification risk in Italy

Desertification risk depends on the interplay of biophysical and socioeconomic drivers, among which climate change, soil depletion, landscape modifications, and biodiversity decline are key factors of change in Southern Europe. The present study introduces a diachronic analysis of desertification risk in Italy adopting a multidimensional approach based on four dimensions (ecological, economic, demographic, and administrative) assessed at three dates (1961, 1991, and 2011). These risk components were evaluated separately in Southern Italy, a formerly affected region (sensu United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification), and Northern/Central Italy, a nonaffected region in the country. All risk measures document how the divide between affected and nonaffected regions in Italy has gradually reduced. Because of local warming and rising human pressure, Northern Italy has recently displayed a level of desertification risk close to those observed in Southern Italy over the last 30 years. These results suggest a thorough revision of the national classification of risky areas, that may inform more specific mitigation and adaptation policies responding effectively to recent socioenvironmental trends and local (economic) dynamics. The intrinsic system's evolution observed at both regional and national level in Italy may be generalized to a broader European context. Our work finally documents the appropriateness of a multidimensional definition of desertification risk grounded on the joint analysis of ecological, demographic, economic, and administrative indicators. A comprehensive knowledge of socioeconomic patterns and processes of change contributes to more precise scenario modeling and design of integrated strategies mitigating desertification risk.     

Classification Error in Dynamic Discrete Choice Models: Implications for Female Labor Supply Behavior

Two key issues in the literature on female labor supply are (i) whether persistence in employment status is due to unobserved heterogeneity or state dependence, and (ii) whether fertility is exogenous to labor supply. Until recently, the consensus was that unobserved heterogeneity is very important and fertility is endogenous. Hyslop (1999) challenged this. Using a dynamic panel probit model of female labor supply including heterogeneity and state dependence, he found that adding autoregressive errors led to a substantial diminution in the importance of heterogeneity. This, in turn, meant he could not reject that fertility is exogenous. Here, we extend Hyslop (1999) to allow classification error in employment status, using an estimation procedure developed by Keane and Wolpin (2001) and Keane and Sauer (2005). We find that a fairly small amount of classification error is enough to overturn Hyslop's conclusions, leading to overwhelming rejection of the hypothesis of exogenous fertility.     

Developing new avenues for growth: Challenges presented by five trends in the global environment

This paper documents five major trends in the global environment, and examines the impact of each on the corporate strategies of multinational firms striving for higher rates of growth in corporate earnings. The five trends documented are: 1. shifts in economic activity and growth between and within regions of the world; 2. increasing demand for goods and services among the very poor in emerging markets; 3. a faster pace and wider locus of technological innovation; 4. Increasingly global labor markets; and 5. increasingly ubiquitous and inexpensive access to information and knowledge.Each of these trends presents multinational firms with a potentially new avenue for growth, or an avenue down which they should consider moving further and/or faster. These potentially new avenues for growth are encouraging managers of multinational firms to challenge the current corporate strategies of their firms, and examine the need to reorient or renew them. The paper discusses the strategic challenges associated with these new avenues for growth, and the need for more research on the concept of country risk, on the concepts of the transnational strategy and organizational structure, and on the challenges of very limited sustainable capacity to consume among the very poor.     

On self-interest and greed

First the assumption of self-interest as applied in Economics is presented. Here we also discuss areas in which (many) people behave less self- but more other-regarding than traditional economic models assume. Then, greedy behaviour is considered as existing in the political and economic ‘world’. Here we refer to corruption as well as to the role of money as a positional good. We also discuss such behaviour in the academic world, in which money plays a role as well as reputation. Thus, while the assumption of mutually disinterested rationality is a very powerful instrument for analysing individual behaviour, to explain some phenomena we have to recognise that people are not only sometimes other-regarding, but also sometimes greedy, and that they might value money much more than traditional Economics assumes. We conclude with some remarks on what we can learn in this respect from Behavioural Economics.     

Temporary Workers in Italy: Who Are They and Where They End Up

Abstract. Temporary work has been an important component of employment growth in Italy since the early 1990s. This paper focus upon labour market transitions of temporary workers in order to test whether temporary work enhances the subsequent labour market chances. We use propensity score matching to compare subsequent employment outcomes of people who have recently acquired a temporary job with those of people who remained unemployed. Individuals' hetero geneity explains a good amount of the raw differences in the subsequent labour market status of temporary workers and the comparison group. Yet there appears to be a sizable net gain from experiencing a temporary work. Our benchmark average estimate is a 30 percentage points rise in the ‘satisfactory employment’ chances 1 year after the start of the temporary work experience. The net gains are the largest for females and adult people and the areas with low unemployment; moreover, gains are the largest for the most recent years in our sample and for those people who were (according to the propensity score estimates) either least or most likely to exit from unemployment.     

Engineering education on production management. Different levels and degrees in five European countries: a comparison

The paper summarizes the results of the work-session ‘Education on Production Management’, organized during the Workshop and Summer School ‘Advanced Topics in Production Systems Design and Management’, held in Varenna (Lecco, Italy), from 1–4 June 1994. The organization of studies in the production management field in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Norway is outlined. A comparison between them shows a range of different solutions that must be understood to reach the goal of an effective exchange of production management people throughout the European Community.     

DEVELOPING POM FACULTIES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Having added total quality management (tqm), operations strategy, new product development, and many other topics to its repertoire over the past two decades, operations management is being pushed-by practitioners and students alike-to extend its reach both horizontally (to encompass the whole supply chain and the interface with other functions) and internationally. Moreover, the increasing sophistication of computer technology and the growth of the intemet are expanding the teaching and research methodologies that can be used to address these complex issues. Meeting the challenges posed by this ever-broadening conceptualization of our mission and the new tools available to us will require more than simply new knowledge and new courses. It also will require an influx of new people having very different backgrounds than in the past. We have to learn how to attract such people, how to prepare them to be effective teachers and researchers in production and operations management (pom), and how to work effectively with them. The locations of faculty, students, and potential partners in the learning experience also will be transformed, forcing us to reconsider how we organize to do our work and when and where we do it.     

Keeping people alive— The implications for planning

Current and future developments of medical techniques, especially those concerned with resuscitation and intensive care, will result in more people living much longer in the future. Their treatment and care will be very expensive, and this will require consideration of priorities. In this article some ethical attitudes are suggested, and a number of practical planning measures to anticipate some of the inevitable problems are proposed.     

Corporations and economic inequality around the world: The paradox of hierarchy

Using time-series data from the US since 1950 and from 53 countries around the world in 2006, this chapter documents a strong negative relation between an economy's employment concentration (that is, the proportion of the labor force employed by the largest 10, 25, or 50 firms) and its level of income inequality. Within the US, we find that trends in the relative size of the largest employers (up in the 1960s and 1970s, down in the 1980s and 1990s, up in the 2000s) are directly linked to changes in inequality, and that corporate size is a proximal cause of the extravagant increase in social inequality over the past generation. We conclude that organization theory can provide a distinctive contribution to understanding societal outcomes.     

期权契约机制下应急物资储备模型研究

大规模突发灾害发生后,救灾所需物资种类繁多、数量暴增,为了满足受灾人群对应急物资的巨大需求,国家积极践行应急物资储备社会化,发挥社会企业及其资源在物资储备供应上的优势,构建起政府储备和企业储备相结合的应急物资保障机制。然而,现有绝大多数研究都是假设政府与一家企业签订应急物资代储协议,对于如何将更多的企业纳入国家应急物资保障体系的研究甚少,导致现有的研究成果缺少适用性和拓展性。基于此,本研究引入期权契约到政府和多个异质型企业组成的应急物资供应链系统,构建了政企合作模式下基于期权契约的应急物资储备模型,给出了协调应急物资供应链系统、改善供应链成员成本收益的条件,得到了协调企业利润分配的柔性机制。研究表明,一定条件下期权契约机制下的应急物资储备模型缓解了国家储备的压力,在保证企业利润得到改善的同时实现了企业利润的合理分配,极大地提高了政府应急物资保障能力,同时也为强化政企合作关系、落实应急物资储备社会化提供了理论支撑与针对性的管理策略。     

Rethinking Outsourcing in Manufacturing:: A Tale of Two Telecom Firms

Since the early 1990s outsourcing has been a major industrial trend. In the literature the economic advantages of outsourcing are often taken for granted. This article aims to take a detailed look at actual outcomes in terms of costs and competences. The focus is on outsourcing of manufacturing in the telecom equipment industry. The article builds on a comparative study of two leading firms, Ericsson (global leader in digital networks) and Nokia (world leader in cellular phone). The comparison reveals strikingly different strategies for production and outsourcing, which lends support for a critical rethinking of general outsourcing trends.     

Dynamic Female Labor Supply

The increase in female employment and participation rates is one of the most dramatic changes to have taken place in the economy during the last century. However, while the employment rate of married women more than doubled during the last 50 years, that of unmarried women remained almost constant. To empirically analyze these trends, we estimate a female dynamic labor supply model using an extended version of Eckstein and Wolpin (1989) to compare the various explanations in the literature for the observed trends. This dynamic model provides a much better fit to the life‐cycle employment pattern than a static version of the model and a standard static reduced form model (Heckman (1979)). The main finding using the dynamic model is that the rise in education levels accounts for about 33 percent of the increase in female employment, and the rise in wages and narrowing of the gender wage gap account for another 20 percent, while about 40 percent remains unexplained by observed household characteristics. We show that this unexplained portion can be empirically attributed to cohort‐specific changes in preferences or the costs of child‐rearing and household maintenance. Finally, the decline in fertility and the increase in divorce rates account for only a small share of the increase in female employment rates.     

A more radical human resource development: the time is now

The world is changing and so must human resource development (HRD). A cursory review of the scholarship in the four journals sponsored by the Academy of HRD revealed less than 10% of our discipline’s research explicitly focuses on the experiences of women, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) people, millennials, people of colour, or immigrants and expatriates, and yet we know these groups have an increasing presence and impact on our organizations. The purpose of this essay is to amplify a call to action for radical change and to reiterate the imminent need for HRD to shift agendas in order to keep up.     

A comparison of three weight elicitation methods: good, better, and best

This paper compares the properties and performance of three weight elicitation methods. It is in effect a “second round contest” in which the Bottomley et al. (2000) champion, direct rating (DR), locks horns with two new challengers. People using DR rate each attribute in turn on a scale of 0–100, whilst people using Max100 first assign to the most important attribute(s) a rating of 100, and then rate the other attributes relative to it/them. People using Min10 first assign the least important attribute(s) a rating of 10, and then rate the other attributes relative to it/them.The weights produced by Max100 were somewhat more test–retest reliable than DR. Both methods were considerably more reliable than Min10. Using people's test–retest data as attribute weights on simulated alternative values in a multi-attribute choice scenario, the same alternative would be chosen on 91% of occasions using Max100, 87% of occasions using DR, but only 75% of occasions using Min10. Moreover, the three methods are shown to have very distinct “signatures”, that is profiles relating weights to rank position. Finally, people actually preferred using Max100 and DR rather than Min10, an important pragmatic consideration.     

Cognitive Maps in the Analysis of Personal Change During Work Role Transition1

The aim of the paper is to illustrate how personal construct psychology and repertory grids (Kelly, 1955) can be used to produce cognitive maps, and to analyse psychological adjustment during the transition from university to employment. Cognitive maps are based on the principal component analysis of repertory grid data and provide a visual representation of the way in which the subjects see themselves in relation to other people, and in relation to their constructs. The cognitive maps produced by two graduates shortly after entry in employment and 6 months later are analysed and compared in order to identify trends of personal change. The case studies show that the analysis of the cognitive maps provides some valuable insights into the way in which graduates change their construction of themselves and of their work environment during the period of transition. The trends of change highlighted by the cognitive maps are discussed in the light of personal construct psychology concepts such as individuality, invalidation, fragmentation, and the mutual relationships between one's construction of oneself and one's construction of others.