Transactional Sex: Supply and Demand Among European Men Who have Sex with Men (MSM) in the Context of Local Laws

Objectives: Transactional sex (TS) is generally defined as the trading of sex for material goods. Cast within the broader context of prostitution laws, we examined variations in the sociodemographic profile of men who have sex with men engaging in TS by payment direction (buying/selling). Methods: The data were collected as part of the 38-country European Men who have sex with men Internet Survey project, conducted in 2010. Results: About 12% of respondents reported engaging in TS in the past year. TS was associated with laws, age, education, employment, and residence. Conclusions: The striking sociodemographic differences in TS by payment direction suggest a power differential and a leading role of socioeconomic factors in TS.     

Impaired Metacognitive Capacities in Individuals with Problem Gambling

Impaired insight into behavior may be one of the clinical characteristics of pathological gambling. In the present study, we tested whether the capacity to evaluate accurately the quality of one’s own decisions during a non-gambling task was impaired in problem gamblers. Twenty-five problem gamblers and 25 matched healthy participants performed an artificial grammar-learning paradigm, in which the quality of choice remains uncertain throughout the task. After each trial of this task, participants had to indicate how confident they were in the grammaticality judgements using a scale ranging from 1 (low confidence) to 7 (high confidence). Results showed that (i), problem gamblers’ performance on the grammaticality test was lower than controls’; (ii) there was a significant correlation between grammaticality judgments and confidence for control participants, which indicates metacognitive insight and the presence of conscious knowledge; (iii) this correlation was not significant in problem gamblers, which suggests a disconnection between performance and confidence in this group. These findings suggest that problem gamblers are impaired in their metacognitive abilities on a non-gambling task, which suggests that compulsive gambling is associated with poor insight as a general factor. Clinical interventions tailored to improve metacognition in gambling could be a fruitful avenue of research in order to prevent pathological gambling.     

Labor Market Effects of Population Aging

Abstract. This paper analyses effects of population aging on the labor market and determines their broad implications for public policy. It takes Germany as an example, but it equally applies to the other large economies in Continental Europe. The paper argues that, alongside the amply discussed, demographically‐determined increase in the contribution and tax burden which is responsible for the ever widening gap between gross and disposable earnings, two other important areas of policy deserve greater attention. First, it is unlikely that the decline in the relative size of the economically active population will be offset by higher capital intensity. Labor productivity will need to increase over and above this mechanism in order to compensate for the impact of population aging on domestic production. Hence, we will need more education and training to speed up human capital formation. Second, the shift in the age structure will also change the structure of demand for goods. This, in turn, will have large effects on the pattern of employment across different sectors of the economy and will require a substantial increase in labor mobility in order to accommodate these structural changes.     

Corporate Volunteering: Benefits and Challenges for Nonprofits

In the frame of corporate social responsibility, corporate volunteering is almost exclusively studied from the point of view of companies, while the perspectives of nonprofit organizations are neglected. Hence, this article focuses on the perspective of managers of nonprofit organizations on volunteer partnership projects with for‐profit companies. In the center of this article lie nonprofit managers' strategy and motivation for participating in corporate volunteering, conception of corporate volunteer activities, and the often‐cited win‐win‐win aspect. Key findings suggest that a majority of the questioned nonprofits lack strategic behavior and management tools for undertaking volunteer partnership projects with companies. Nevertheless, corporate volunteering is widely perceived as an opportunity and a promising method of raising donations for nonprofit organizations. This article suggests that the key to successful future cooperation between nonprofits and profit‐oriented organizations lies in the processes of internal evaluation and subsequent strategy development.     

Bridge over Troubled Waters. Die EZB,die Euro-Rettung und die Politisierung der Geldpolitik

On the one hand, the European Central Bank’s (ECB) crisis management has revealed the structural deficits of the monetary union. On the other hand, neither the governments nor the citizens of the Eurozone member states are willing to legalize the ECB’s necessary but extraordinary monetary policies for future scenarios. The paper identifies the unresolved institutional contraction between French and German monetary traditions as one of the main factors underlying this functional as much as legitimatory dilemma.     

INFORMATION TRANSMISSION AND OWNERSHIP CONSOLIDATION IN AID PROGRAMS

We investigate the degree of leeway donors of foreign aid should grant to recipient governments when their preferences over how to implement the aid are different, and both the donor and recipient possess some private information about the most effective policies. Intuitively, our model shows that donors should stay in control of how their aid is spent when their own private information is more important than the private information of the recipient. Less obviously, an increase in the difference of preferences between donors and recipients can increase rather than decrease the leeway that donors should grant the recipients, as the recipients' information gains in importance relative to those of the donors, and recipients become less likely to communicate truthfully. We test the model using dyadic data for 28 bilateral aid donors and 112 recipients, over the 1995–2010 period. Our proxy for “centralized” aid is project aid, while budget aid leaves more leeway to the recipient and thus proxies for “decentralized” aid. In line with the model, misaligned interests and informational asymmetries indeed influence the shares of aid given as budget and project aid. (JEL C23, D82, F33,O1)     

The utility of experimental design short courses?

This paper describes the one‐day introduction to experimental design training course at GlaxoSmithKline. In particular, the use of paper helicopter experiments has been an effective and efficient method for teaching experimental design techniques to scientific and other staff. A good supporting strategy by which the statistics department provides back‐up following the course is essential. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.