The Determinants of Retail Productivity: A Critical Review of the Evidence

This paper discusses the literature on the established determinants of productivity in the retail sector. It also draws attention to some neglected strands of research which provide useful insights into strategies that could allow productivity enhancements in this area of the economy. To date, very few attempts have been made to integrate different specialisms in order to explain what drives productivity in retail. Here this paper rectifies this omission by putting together studies from economics, geography, knowledge management and employment studies. It is the authors’ view that quantitative studies of retail productivity should focus on total factor productivity in retailing as the result of competition/composition effects, planning regulations, information and communications technology, the multinational operation element and workforce skills. Further, the fact that retail firms possess advantages that are transferable between locations suggests that investment in strategies enhancing the transfer of explicit and tacit knowledge between and within businesses are crucial to achieve productivity gains.     

The mutual benefit movement in Chile from its origins to the present time (1853-1992)

The mutual benefit movement in Chile first appeared with the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization from the 1830s onwards. The first associations of urban workers emerged in 1853: this was followed by an initial period of expansion of mutual benefit activities until 1890. Almost all the urban trades were represented. During this period the mutual benefit movement was the principal organizing force for popular demands. From the 1890s onwards mutual benefit — linked with the workers'movement — grew rapidly and entered on a process of unification. Encouraging the development of the trade union movement, it took a leading part in determining the shape of the people's movements and maintained this role until 1924: this period marked the high point of mutual benefit activities in Chile. Mutual benefit organizations defended workers'demands and the boundaries between mutual benefit and trade union organizations were quite fluid. But the adoption of the social legislation and the support offered by certain leaders of the mutual benefit movement to the military dictatorship marked the beginning of the movement's decline. Efforts were then made to extend its scope of activities and unify the mutual benefit movement in Chile and in Latin America as a whole. The results of this were limited and the crisis continued after the Second World War. The 1973 coup d'état aggravated the situation still further. Today, with the virtual destruction of social security and its replacement by a system of private insurance schemes, one needs to ask whether the Chilean mutual benefit movement, which at one time was the principal form of popular organization, has a future.     

Stages of change and engagement in a family intervention

Prochaska and DiClemente's stages of change model facilitate understanding of engagement difficulties in psychosocial intervention processes. We assessed the link between stages of family change and intervention dropout in a sample of 141 families with relational conflicts between parents and adolescent children. Each family member's stage of change was defined according to three criteria: seeing the conflict as a relational problem, assuming part of the responsibility for the dysfunctional relationship, and understanding one's own mental and emotional states and those of the other family members involved in the conflict (mentalization). Our dropout rate for the sample was 41.8% and was higher for immigrant families. We found a strong association between engagement and the contemplation stage of change, particularly the mother's. In family conflict interventions, participation of all the family members is essential so as raise awareness of the relational aspects of the conflict and the shared responsibility for the conflict and its resolution.     

An Economic Model of Friendship: Homophily,Minorities, and Segregation

We develop a model of friendship formation that sheds light on segregation patterns observed in social and economic networks. Individuals have types and see type‐dependent benefits from friendships. We examine the properties of a steady‐state equilibrium of a matching process of friendship formation. We use the model to understand three empirical patterns of friendship formation: (i) larger groups tend to form more same‐type ties and fewer other‐type ties than small groups, (ii) larger groups form more ties per capita, and (iii) all groups are biased towards same‐type relative to demographics, with the most extreme bias coming from middle‐sized groups. We show how these empirical observations can be generated by biases in preferences and biases in meetings. We also illustrate some welfare implications of the model.     

Unconditional Quantile Regressions

We propose a new regression method to evaluate the impact of changes in the distribution of the explanatory variables on quantiles of the unconditional (marginal) distribution of an outcome variable. The proposed method consists of running a regression of the (recentered) influence function (RIF) of the unconditional quantile on the explanatory variables. The influence function, a widely used tool in robust estimation, is easily computed for quantiles, as well as for other distributional statistics. Our approach, thus, can be readily generalized to other distributional statistics.     

生态文明的未来:马克思和无为生态

工业革命以来,自然生态遭受巨大破坏,各种环境问题大量出现.西方传统经济学思想对此负有不可推卸的责任.与之相反,中国传统文化中主张无为而治的无为思想,更能与马克思的思想相契合,因为,它有利于保持生态系统的平衡,促进人与自然的和谐共处以及经济的可持续发展.     

The Role of Community in Migration Dynamics

Abstract. In this paper, I have presented a theoretical model that investigates the observable hysteresis process in migration dynamics. In the model the migration choice depends not only on wage differential, but also on a U‐shaped benefit function of a community of homogenous ethnic individuals, according to the ‘theory of clubs’. The results, based on real option theory, explain that observable ‘jumps’ in migration flows could depend not only on exogenous shocks, but also on two endogenous variables: the number of coordinated immigrants and the dimension of the community. Indeed, migration choice is delayed until a critical mass of immigrants is reached and possible rigidities of optimal district size could magnify this hysteresis process.