Transnational land investment web: land grabs,TNCs, and the challenge of global governance

ABSTRACT

Despite international media’s waning attention, research and political debates on global land grabbing have not subsided. We argue the importance of understanding the ‘transnational land investment web’ of corporate and state actors and institutions, which are not always immediately visible. Focusing on transnational corporations (TNCs) based in the European Union (EU), we examine five sets of actors and institutional spheres through which these actors are able to grab lands beyond Europe. It is crucial to understand these not as individual sets of actors or institutions, but as interconnected sets, comprising a web. These are EU-based: (1) Private companies using regular institutional platforms; (2) Finance capital companies; (3) Public–private partnerships; (4) Development Finance Institutions; and (5) Companies using EU policies to gain control of land through the supply chain. One implication of this complex web is that democratic governance in the context of land grabs becomes an even more daunting challenge.     

The exponentiated exponential–geometric distribution: a distribution with decreasing,increasing and unimodal failure rate

In this paper, we proposed a new family of distributions namely exponentiated exponential–geometric (E2G) distribution. The E2G distribution is a straightforwardly generalization of the exponential–geometric (EG) distribution proposed by Adamidis and Loukas [A lifetime distribution with decreasing failure rate, Statist. Probab. Lett. 39 (1998), pp. 35–42], which accommodates increasing, decreasing and unimodal hazard functions. It arises on a latent competing risk scenarios, where the lifetime associated with a particular risk is not observable but only the minimum lifetime value among all risks. The properties of the proposed distribution are discussed, including a formal proof of its probability density function and explicit algebraic formulas for its survival and hazard functions, moments, rth moment of the ith order statistic, mean residual lifetime and modal value. Maximum-likelihood inference is implemented straightforwardly. From a mis-specification simulation study performed in order to assess the extent of the mis-specification errors when testing the EG distribution against the E2G, and we observed that it is usually possible to discriminate between both distributions even for moderate samples with presence of censoring. The practical importance of the new distribution was demonstrated in three applications where we compare the E2G distribution with several lifetime distributions.     

Testing monotonicity of pricing kernels

The behaviour of market agents has been extensively covered in the literature. Risk averse behaviour, described by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1944) via a concave utility function, is considered to be a cornerstone of classical economics. Agents prefer a fixed profit over an uncertain choice with the same expected value, however, lately there has been a lot of discussion about the empirical evidence of such risk averse behaviour. Some authors have shown that there are regions where market utility functions are locally convex. In this paper we construct a test to verify uncertainty about the concavity of agents’ utility function by testing the monotonicity of empirical pricing kernels (EPKs). A monotonically decreasing EPK corresponds to a concave utility function while a not monotonically decreasing EPK means non-averse pattern on one or more intervals of the utility function. We investigate the EPKs for German DAX data for the years 2000, 2002 and 2004 and find evidence of non-concave utility functions: the null hypothesis of a monotonically decreasing pricing kernel is rejected for the data under consideration. The test is based on approximations of spacings through exponential random variables. In a simulation we investigate its performance and calculate the critical values (surface).     

Trends in Spouses’ Shared Time in the United States, 1965–2012

Despite major demographic changes over the past 50 years and strong evidence that time spent with a spouse is important for marriages, we know very little about how time with a spouse has changed—or not—in the United States. Using time diary data from 1965–2012, we examine trends in couples’ shared time in the United States during a period of major changes in American marriages and families. We find that couples without children spent more total time together and time alone together in 2012 than they did in 1965, with total time and time alone together both peaking in 1975. For parents, time spent together increased between 1965 and 2012, most dramatically for time spent with a spouse and children. Decomposition analyses show that changes in behavior rather than changing demographics explain these trends, and we find that the increases in couples’ shared time are primarily concentrated in leisure activities.     

Race and Gender Differences in Workplace Autonomy: A Research Note

While many studies have focused on race and gender differences in monetary labor market rewards, few studies have used national samples to examine race and gender differences in nonmonetary labor process rewards. Utilizing multivariate analysis on data from the 1993 and 1997 National Employee Survey, the present study examines how race and gender interact in shaping workplace autonomy. We regress an index of autonomy on human capital, structural level variables, and race and gender interaction terms. Findings show that black and white females, relative to white males, fare worse net of controls for human capital and structural level variables. Black males fare worse than white males when controlling for human capital but this disadvantage fails to retain its significant effect when controlling for structural level variables. We conclude that contrary to some beliefs that black females have experienced greater success in the labor market as a result of affirmative action policies, black females remain hindered by the double jeopardy of race and gender.     

Viennese football culture: Some remarks on its History and Sociology

Football is still the most popular sport in Austria; yet its cultural meaning has changed. In this essay it is argued that the specific Viennese football culture of the interwar years (characterized by locality, strong commitment to a particular club, Bohemian elements etc.) has since the sixties been strongly challenged and gradually been replaced by a modernized, internationalized and media‐oriented ‘Austrian ‘ image.     

Problem drinking patterns among African Americans: the impacts of reports of discrimination, perceptions of prejudice, and "risky" coping strategies

This research builds on a series of recent studies that have reported independent effects of personal experiences of racial discrimination on poor mental health outcomes. We suggest that for one mental health outcome, problem drinking, discrimination experiences have an impact not only via abridged socioeconomic attainment and the frustrations associated with institutionally limited opportunity structures, but also by directly increasing the likelihood of problem drinking. Moreover, we argue that personal experiences with discrimination help to foster a set of beliefs about the utility of drinking as a means of reducing stress that in the alcohol literature is referred to as "escapist" drinking. Escapist drinking is proposed as an intervening mechanism that is associated with a higher probability of alcohol-related mental health problems. Using data from the 1999-2000 National Survey of Black Workers, we find that, independent of socioeconomic attainment, personal reports of discriminatory experiences have direct influences on problem drinking. Consistent with our hypotheses, we also find that the effects of personal reports of discrimination are at least partially mediated by the endorsement of beliefs that drinking provides an effective coping mechanism. We conclude that racial impacts on mental health outcomes reflect more than the "simple" effects of constrained socioeconomic attainment.     

Differences in fish harvest,fishing effort,and angling guard activities between urban and natural fishing grounds

Recreational fishing is a very popular outdoor leisure activity. Assessing differences in basic metrics in recreational fishing on different types of fishing grounds is very important for effective fisheries management. This study aimed to discover how basic metrics in recreational fishing (harvest, fishing effort, angling guard activities) differ between urban fishing grounds (located in a densely populated city) and natural fishing grounds (located in the countryside). Data were obtained from individual angling logbooks collected by the Czech Fishing Union on the River Elbe and the River Vltava (Prague and Central Bohemia, Czechia, Central Europe). Study shows that urban and natural fishing grounds showed significant differences in basic metrics in recreational fishing. Urban fishing grounds displayed higher fish harvest in general and higher dominance of intensively stocked fish species in catches of anglers (mainly common carp Cyprinus carpio). High harvest rates of common carp can be mostly explained by intensive fish stocking. The only fish species that showed higher harvest on natural fishing grounds were large-growing piscivorous fish with high ecological demands. However, anglers were harvesting larger fish (average body weight) on natural fishing grounds. In addition, fishing effort was similar on both types of fishing grounds. Inversely, angling guards were more active on natural fishing grounds. In conclusion, differences in basic fisheries metrics between urban and natural fishing grounds seem to be partially driven by intensive fish stocking.