Getting back into the labor market: the effects of start-up subsidies for unemployed females

Low female labor market participation is a problem many developed countries have to face. Beside activating inactive women, one possible solution is to support the re-integration of unemployed women. Due to female-specific labor market constraints (preferences for flexible working hours, discrimination), this is a difficult task, and the question arises whether active labor market policies (ALMP) are an appropriate tool to help. It has been shown that the effectiveness of traditional (ALMP) programs—which focus on the integration in dependent (potentially inflexible) employment—is positive but limited. At the same time, recent evidence for Austria shows that these programs reduce fertility which might be judged unfavorable from a societal perspective. Promoting self-employment among unemployed women might therefore be a promising alternative. Starting their own business might give women more independence and flexibility to reconcile work and family and increase labor market participation. Based on long-term informative data, we find that start-up programs persistently integrate former unemployed women into the labor market, and the impact on fertility is less detrimental than for traditional ALMP programs.     

Italian Social Enterprises at the Crossroads: Their Role in the Evolution of the Welfare State

This paper investigates the relationship between the emergence of social enterprises (SEs) and the historical development of the Italian welfare state. Our research offers a comprehensive overview of the internal and external influences that shaped the constitutive relations between the welfare state and SEs. A qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups has been adopted. This study suggests that two interconnected dynamics—the emergence of new social needs being answered by private organisations and the increased prominence of third sector actors during the privatisation of the welfare state—shaped the co-evolution of the welfare state and SEs in Italy. The study also suggests that the emergence and evolution of Social Enterprises in the years leading up to 2001 was mainly a bottom-up phenomena stemming from the actions of citizens setting up private organisations (often cooperatives) to answer to social problems created by new social needs and the structural reform of the welfare state. After 2001 especially with the new law on SEs in 2016, the evolution of SEs seems to have been increasingly influenced by the surrounding ecosystem of actors and supranational policy discourses rather than SEs themselves.     

Discriminatory language in the workplace: unmasking prejudices and stereotypes / El lenguaje discriminatorio en contextos laborales: desenmascarando prejuicios y estereotipos

The link between language, communication and open discrimination has been the focus of numerous studies. For many years, language has been a vehicle of prejudice and negative stereotypes. However, in the last few years, overt verbal aggressions have diminished thanks to the implementation of equality policies and awareness-raising initiatives. Despite that, negative attitudes against protected groups might not have disappeared and may instead be transmitted subtly, such as through uncivil language. The goal of this research is to study the relation between language and subtle discrimination against lesbian and gay (LG) workers. With this goal in mind, 39 in-depth interviews were conducted. The analysis showed that LG people are victims of subtle discrimination and that language is one of the most common vehicles of prejudice and negative stereotypes. Jokes, inappropriate comments and questions are the expression of negative attitudes, which are probably present at an implicit level. Due to the ambiguity of these expressions and the settings where they have been studied — the workplace — these acts could be defined as uncivil behaviours. Practical implications, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.     

HERD BEHAVIOR IN FINANCIAL MARKETS: AN EXPERIMENT WITH FINANCIAL MARKET PROFESSIONALS

We study herd behavior in a laboratory financial market with financial market professionals. An important novelty of the experimental design is the use of a strategy‐like method. This allows us to detect herd behavior directly by observing subjects' decisions for all realizations of their private signal. In the paper, we compare two treatments: one in which the price adjusts to the order flow in such a way that herding should never occur, and one inwhich the presence of event uncertainty makes herding possible. In the first treatment, subjects seldom herd, in accordance with both the theory and previous experimental evidence on student subjects. A proportion of subjects, however, engage in contrarianism, something not accounted for by the theory. In the second treatment, the proportion of herding decisions increases, but not as much as the theory would suggest. Moreover, contrarianism disappears altogether. In both treatments, in contrast with what theory predicts, subjects sometimes prefer to abstain from trading, which affects the process of price discovery negatively. (JEL: C92, D82, G14)     

The virtual patient encounter--units of service in the electronic age

A patient, preoperative evaluation center can reduce delays and cancellations, but it's critical to measure staff workload and determine the best ways to coordinate care. See how one clinic in Ohio is succeeding with this effort.     

TRUST,COORDINATION, AND THE INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM

We study political activism by several interest groups with private signals. When their ideological distance to the policymaker is small, a “low‐trust” regime prevails: agents frequently lobby even when it is unwarranted, taking advantage of the confirmation provided by others' activism; conversely, the policymaker responds only to generalized pressure. When ideological distance is large, a “high‐trust” regime prevails: lobbying behavior is disciplined by the potential contradiction from abstainers, and the policymaker's response threshold is correspondingly lower. Within some intermediate range, both equilibria coexist. We then study the optimal organization of influence activities, contrasting welfare levels when interest groups act independently and when they coordinate. (JEL: D72, D78, D82)     

Measuring Organised Crime Presence at the Municipal Level

Social Indicators Research - While indicators assessing the quality of life often comprise measures of crime or fear of crime, these components usually refer to property or violent crimes. More...     

Perceived Corruption and Individuals’ Life Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Institutional Trust

Social Indicators Research - Corruption degrades the quality of institutions, increases economic inequality and limits growth. Recent studies indicate that corruption is also associated with lower...     

The dynamic stochastic topic block model for dynamic networks with textual edges

Statistics and Computing - The present paper develops a probabilistic model to cluster the nodes of a dynamic graph, accounting for the content of textual edges as well as their frequency. Vertices...     

Childhood family structure and schooling outcomes: evidence for Germany

We analyze the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a non-intact family in Germany. We find that this experience is associated with worse outcomes according to estimates from models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and educational performance. Evidence of adverse effects emerges also when endogeneity is accounted for. In such cases, however, the point estimates are typically smaller, and their confidence intervals are large enough to include zero, particularly for individuals who grew up in Western Germany.