The Transition from Temporary to Permanent Employment: Evidence from Tuscany

Abstract. In this paper, by distinguishing between the decisions made by the workers and those made by the firms, we provide a probabilistic evaluation of the transition from temporary to permanent employment in a regional context. Specifically, by exploiting a multinomial nested logit strategy of estimation, we find that the transition to a permanent job is far from certain, especially for women and older workers.     

Medicine as a human science between the singularity of the patient and technical scientific reproducibility

Poiesis &; Praxis - The often-emphasized tension between the singularity of the patient and technical–scientific reproducibility in medicine cannot be resolved without a discussion of the...     

Within-Animal Variation as an Indication of the Minimal Magnitude of the Critical Effect Size for Continuous Toxicological Parameters Applicable in the Benchmark Dose Approach

In this study, the within-animal variation in routinely studied continuous toxicological parameters was estimated from temporal fluctuations in individual healthy nonexposed animals. Assuming that these fluctuations are nonadverse, this within-animal variation may be indicative of the minimal magnitude of the critical effect size (CES). The CES is defined as the breaking point between adverse and nonadverse changes in a continuous toxicological parameter, at the level of the individual organism. The total variation in the data from individual nonexposed animals was divided in variation parts due to known factors (differences in sex, animal, and day) and a residual variation, by means of analysis of variance. Using the residual variation and the estimated analytical measurement error of a toxicological parameter, the within-animal variation can be estimated. The data showed within-animal variations ranging between 0.6% and 34% for different clinical chemistry and hematological parameters in 90-day rat studies. This indicates that different (minimal) CES values may be applicable for different parameters.     

Changes in Management Ownership and the Valuation Effects of Equity Offerings

Seasoned equity issues trigger share price declines, and this is usually interpreted as evidence of signalling. We find that seasoned equity issues also typically result in much lower managerial ownership in U.S. firms. Jensen and Meckling (1976) predict a stock price decline when managerial ownership falls. We conduct several tests to distinguish agency explanations form signalling explanations, and conclude that both effects are present.     

The Increasing Complexity of Family Relationships: Lifetime Experience of Lone Motherhood and Stepfamilies in Great Britain

We investigate the lifetime incidence and duration oflone motherhood and stepfamilies in Great Britainusing both retrospective and panel informationcontained in the British Household Panel Survey,1991–1995. We find that about 40 per cent of motherswill spend some time as a lone-parent. The duration oflone parenthood is often short, one-half remaininglone-mothers for 4.6 years or less. Aboutthree-fourths of these lone-mothers will form astepfamily, with 80 per cent of these stepfamiliesbeing started by cohabitation and 85 percent followingthe dissolution of a union. Stepfamilies are not verystable: over one-quarter dissolve within one year.Thus, an increasing proportion of today's youngchildren in Britain are likely to experience thechanges, tensions and strains which life inlone-parent families and stepfamilies often entails.The increasing complexity of inter-householdrelationships between children and parents hasimportant implications for the relevance oftheoretical views of the operation of the family putforward by social researchers.     

Pre-commitment and flexibility in a time decision experiment

An agent with dynamically inconsistent preferences may deviate from her plan of action as the future draws near. An exponential discounter may do exactly the same when facing an uncertain future. Through an experiment we compare preference-based vs. uncertainty-based explanations for choice reversal over time by eliciting choices for pre-commitment and flexibility. Evidence of widespread commitment favors a preference-based explanation.

NGOs and international business research: Progress,prospects and problems

Civil society, and non‐government organizations (NGOs) in particular, have become a research interest in international business (IB). The purpose of this paper is to review scholarly understandings of the nature and significance of NGOs in IB. Contributions from complementary research domains are also explored with a view to encouraging greater interdisciplinary integration in analysing the NGO sector and in particular its relations with multinational enterprises (MNEs). These domains are: strategic alliances and resource dependency; global governance and multilateralism; public management; and regulation theory. The primary argument is that such interdisciplinarity may facilitate more innovative IB treatments of the role of NGOs, reflecting more adequately their strategic environment and motivations. Moreover, including a multitude of perspectives helps to address broader issues identified by scholars as pivotal to the future standing of the field: the nature of strategic agency among organizations other than MNEs; the interpretation of globalization and its implications for organizations; and whether IB is too isolated from the other social sciences.     

A “maximum node clustering” problem

In this note we introduce a graph problem, called Maximum Node Clustering (MNC). We prove that the problem (which is easily shown to be strongly NP-complete) can be approximated in polynomial time within a ratio arbitrarily close to 2. For the special case where the graph is a tree, the problem is NP-complete in the ordinary sense; for this case we present a pseudopolynomial algorithm based on dynamic programming, and a related Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (FPTAS). Also, the tree case is shown to be exactly solvable in time, where n is the number of nodes.