Total factor productivity and shareholder returns in banking

This paper examines shareholder value drivers in European banking focusing on the efficiency and productivity features of individual banks. In particular, we analyse the value relevance of bank cost efficiency and total factor productivity (TFP) (in all its components, including technological change, pure technical efficiency change and scale efficiency change) to see how these influence shareholder value creation in European banking. The paper focuses on the French, German, Italian and U.K. banking systems over the period 1995–2002 and includes both listed and non-listed banks. We find that TFP changes best explain variations in shareholder value (measured by market-adjusted returns, MAR, for listed banks and by the ratio of EVA_bkg to invested capital at time t−1 for non-listed banks). In both samples, we also find that technological change seems to be the most important component of TFP influencing shareholder value creation in European banking.     

Labor‐Environmental Coalition Formation: Framing and the Right to Know1

This article examines the formation of a cross‐movement coalition between elements of the labor and environmental movements in New Jersey. We explain the successful formation and initial political campaign of the New Jersey Work Environment Council with an expansion of the theoretical perspective of frame analysis. We propose a model of a coalition collective action frame that offers several important insights into the active role coalition actors play in the construction of a common frame uniting union and environmental activists. Using qualitative data gathered from interviews, observations, and document analyses of two major campaigns, we argue that the coalition frame allowed new political opportunities to be created, leading to the establishment of the most sweeping right‐to‐know laws in the United States. We conclude the discussion of coalition framing by examining political constraints on the framing possibilities of coalitions, specifically by exploring how the discursive shift from the right to know to the right to act failed to expand the influence of the cross‐movement coalition as originally expected by its members.     

A Talent for Living: Exploring Ghana’s ‘New’ Urban Childhood

This paper considers the lives of children living in a large informal settlement in central Accra, Ghana. Its contention is that children remain largely absent from the renewal of interest in slums and that where they do feature it is largely as objects of risk and vulnerability. Such an exclusive focus, it is argued, risks effacing the ways in which children are capable of actively confronting the terrible constraints posed by slum environments and the ‘talent for living’ that this involves. Drawing upon the findings of a small qualitative exploratory research project, the paper examines sources of support and cooperation between children and how their decisions to work are perceived as a strategy to actively support mothers and families struggling for a subsistence.     

Subnational migration in the United Kingdom: producing a consistent time series using a combination of available data and estimates

There is no single framework in place in the United Kingdom for collating and harmonizing the data on migration taking place between the subnational administrative units that constitute the home nations, together with the flows of international migration between these areas and the ‘rest of the world’. This paper proposes the construction of complete matrices of subnational migration statistics on an annual basis which can then be used to monitor migration trends throughout the UK in a comprehensive manner. The paper reviews how various ‘known’ flows are estimated by the national statistics agencies and develops estimates to fill in the gaps in the matrices. It then looks at changing patterns of migration in the UK between 2001/2002 and 2010/2011, showing that migration exhibits most activity in the middle of the decade. Flows within the home nations are the most consistent over time, while the patterns of international migration and migration across the borders of the home nations exhibit more substantial change. The latter flows, although relatively small in magnitude, have not previously been studied at the subnational level in any detail. Patterns of subnational internal and international net migration are found to be negatively correlated.     

Positivism: paradigm or culture?

Much post-positivist policy theory implies that positivism exists as a self-protecting paradigm. Inspired by a one-sided reading of Kuhn, this understanding suggests that policy positivism must be overcome as a whole. This approach is problematic. In particular, there are important contradictions between various elements commonly said to be part of the positivist paradigm, contradictions that make it difficult to believe that the paradigm can be embraced as a whole. An alternative approach views positivism as a culture. Since components of any culture can evolve independently of each other, a cultural approach would focus its critique on specific dimensions of positivism. This approach would provide more rigor to policy critique, and push post-positivists to overcome weaknesses in their own theories, in particular those concerning the question of truth.