Intergenerational cooperation within the household: a Public Good game with three generations

We analyze cooperation of individuals in a family context, using a Public Good game. In a lab experiment, 165 individuals from 55 three-generation families (youth, parent, and grandparent) play a repeated Public Good game in three different treatments: one in which three members of the same family play each other (family), a second with the youth and two non-family members, while preserving the previous generational structure (inter-generational), and a third in which three randomly-selected players play each other (random). We find that all the age groups cooperate more when playing with relatives, indicating that family ties may have a positive relationship to contributions to the Public Good. We also find that this trend is more evident for the youths and the parents than for the grandparents. Furthermore, young individuals tend to cooperate less than older generations, especially in non-family treatments. Our results serve as evidence of the relationship between family ties and inter-generational cooperative behaviors.

     

Marketing as an Investment in Shareholder Value

We present resource‐based and capability‐based arguments of marketing investment intensity to offer a strategic view of marketing as an investment in shareholder value. We find that marketing investment intensity has a U‐shaped quadratic effect on shareholder value creation (Tobin's q) that calls for marketing investment to be protected and increased, not surrendered. We show how marketing investments interact with investments in R&D, human capital and operations to reveal how strategic co‐investments can alter the shareholder value of marketing. Finally, we show how competitive intensity and failings in the firm's investment productivity (its ability to convert investment expenditure into sales) point to malaise in the firm's own strategic architecture as a fault for perceived poor returns from marketing investments. Our findings suggest that marketing investment should not be scapegoated when its contributions to shareholder value are not as expected. When invested in strategically and in combination with other investments, marketing can unlock exciting improvements in shareholder value.     

Town Centre Management: Outlook from Portugal

In the last two decades, the Portuguese Government has responded to the decline of centres of commerce. In this paper, we analyse the three different experiences of town centre management (TCM) schemes developed in Portugal since the turn of the millennium. The first two stages were developed using public sector initiatives and their impacts were limited. The third stage is still under way and is composed of private projects created by local business owners. Taking Lisbon as a case study for this third stage we conclude that these projects have become a pro-active means of intervention in Portuguese town centres.     

New bounds for locally irregular chromatic index of bipartite and subcubic graphs

A graph is locally irregular if the neighbors of every vertex v have degrees distinct from the degree of v. A locally irregular edge-coloring of a graph G is an (improper) edge-coloring such that the graph induced on the edges of any color class is locally irregular. It is conjectured that three colors suffice for a locally irregular edge-coloring. In the paper, we develop a method using which we prove four colors are enough for a locally irregular edge-coloring of any subcubic graph admiting such a coloring. We believe that our method can be further extended to prove the tight bound of three colors for such graphs. Furthermore, using a combination of existing results, we present an improvement of the bounds for bipartite graphs and general graphs, setting the best upper bounds to 7 and 220, respectively.     

Inter‐country wage differences in the European Union

This article investigates the determinants of wage gaps between European Union countries along the wage distribution, applying the methodology proposed by Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (2009) and Fortin, Lemieux and Firpo (2011). The authors conclude that both wage structure and composition effects contribute to explaining wage differentials, but that the wage structure effect is more important. This latter effect would appear to derive from differences between unknown factors, while the composition effect can largely be explained by differences in the following areas: education, proportion of workers with supervisory responsibilities, occupational structure, and, to a lesser extent, industrial structure.     

Keeping in Touch with Context: Non-verbal Behavior as a Manifestation of Communality and Dominance

This research investigated the influence of observed touch on the perceptions of communality and dominance in dyadic interactions. We manipulated four key situational features of haptic behavior in two experiments: the initiation, reciprocity, the degree of formality of touch (Studies 1 and 2), and the context of the interaction (Study 2). The results showed that the default perception of touch, irrespective of whether it is initiated or reciprocated, is the communal intention of the toucher. Furthermore, the initiation of touch was seen as an act of dominance, particularly, when the contact between the actors was primed as being hierarchical. Reciprocation neutralized the perceived asymmetry in dominance, but such inferences seemed to hinge on the fit of the touch with the context: reciprocation of formal touch reduced the asymmetry in the hierarchical context, whereas reciprocation of informal touch reduced the asymmetry in the non-hierarchical context.     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

‘This is Not Just About History…’ Addressing the Disconnect in Historic (Non‐Recent) Child Abuse Investigations

• Historic (non‐recent) child abuse investigations need to consider the effects of investigative processes on victims and survivors.
• Such investigations include those undertaken by the police and by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
• Victim and survivor accounts need to be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly in order for victims/survivors not to feel let down by, and disconnected from, criminal justice and IICSA processes.

‘Historic (non‐recent) child abuse investigations need to consider the effects of investigative processes on victims and survivors’

In response to the then chancellor George Osborne's announcement in 2014 that the UK government would set up an independent inquiry into the handling of historic child abuse cases, then shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper made a statement that highlighted:

‘This is not just about history, this is about the need for proper strong systems of child protection for the future, so that we get both justice for victims in the past but also a system that is strong enough to protect young people going forward.’ (The Guardian, 2014 )

The government held good to its promise and set up the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) ( https://www.iicsa.org.uk ) in 2014, announced by then home secretary Theresa May. Its objectives would not only be to investigate claims of a cover‐up of an alleged paedophile ring said to have operated in Westminster in the 1980s, but also to investigate broader institutional failures. Today, the IICSA aims to ‘examine the extent to which institutions and organisations in England and Wales have taken seriously their responsibility to protect children’, and to examine allegations of child sexual abuse involving ‘well known people’, that is, those in the media, politics and other areas of public life (see https:// www.iicsa.org.uk ). Its remit also includes collating testimonies from child abuse victims and survivors through its Truth Project (via private interviews and in writing) (IICSA, 2017 ). But for the victims/survivors of abuse, it is at this intersection – between holding to account both public and private institutions over child abuse, and listening to and believing victims – where a disconnect occurs, that is, between past and present; between the abuse itself and the reporting process; and between expectation and outcomes of the investigative process.

‘For the victims/survivors of abuse… a disconnect occurs… between the abuse itself and the reporting process’

This short report considers progress to date on the IICSA drawing on evidence from the inquiry itself, from press reports and from the author's personal experience of reporting historic abuse to the police and to the IICSA's Truth Project.

‘Considers progress to date on the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)’

A ‘Legacy’ of Failures

In August 2016, after Theresa May launched the ‘new‐look’ inquiry in 2015 with new statutory powers, its chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, resigned. In her resignation statement, Goddard cited family reasons for going but perhaps more tellingly, the fact that the inquiry was ‘not an easy task, let alone one of the magnitude of this’, she added, ‘Compounding the many difficulties was its legacy of failure which has been very hard to shake off’ (BBC News, 2016a ). And it is some legacy. In its first year, the IICSA saw two of its chairs, Baroness Butler‐Sloss and Dame Fiona Woolf, step down over questions about their links to key establishment figures prominent in the 1980s. Since 2014, a number of lawyers supporting the inquiry have also either resigned or been dismissed. Historic or non‐recent child abuse has been at the centre of public, political and media debate since allegations against TV presenter and DJ Jimmy Savile emerged in 2011. This led to the setting up of Operation Yewtree in 2012 (and, down the line, to the IICSA), now just one of many separate similar operations currently being run by police forces across the country. Indeed, such is the scale of the problem that there is now a central hub – Operation Hydrant – to oversee all of these separate police investigations.

‘[Since Savile] historic or non‐recent child abuse has been at the centre of public, political and media debate’

Without a doubt, some of these have been successful in bringing to justice well known figures and ‘celebrities’ such as Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and Paul Gadd (Gary Glitter). But other investigations have failed to establish the extent of child abuse allegations said to have been committed and subsequently covered up at Westminster, at Dolphin Square in Pimlico (Operation Midland), Elm Guest House in London (Operation Athabasca) and others, some of which have closed and others still being investigated by the police, a number of them linked to prominent public and political figures. At the same time, the police themselves are also under scrutiny as part of the IICSA and the Independent Police Complaints Commission is currently investigating 187 claims of police and establishment cover‐ups involving 18 forces (The Independent, 2016 ).     

A copula-based Markov chain model for the analysis of binary longitudinal data

A fully parametric first-order autoregressive (AR(1)) model is proposed to analyse binary longitudinal data. By using a discretized version of a copula, the modelling approach allows one to construct separate models for the marginal response and for the dependence between adjacent responses. In particular, the transition model that is focused on discretizes the Gaussian copula in such a way that the marginal is a Bernoulli distribution. A probit link is used to take into account concomitant information in the behaviour of the underlying marginal distribution. Fixed and time-varying covariates can be included in the model. The method is simple and is a natural extension of the AR(1) model for Gaussian series. Since the approach put forward is likelihood-based, it allows interpretations and inferences to be made that are not possible with semi-parametric approaches such as those based on generalized estimating equations. Data from a study designed to reduce the exposure of children to the sun are used to illustrate the methods.