ELECTORAL CONTRIBUTIONS AND THE COST OF UNPOPULARITY

When considering electoral campaigns, candidates receiving contributions from relatively unpopular industries should be regarded less favorably by voters that have information on the sources of funding. To offset this unpopularity effect, politicians may either demand more money for campaign advertising from these industries in order to persuade less informed voters, or shy away from unpopular contributors to avoid losing the support of the informed electorate. Our model predicts that the first effect dominates, and electoral contributions are increasing in industry unpopularity. By using U.S. House elections data and different identification strategies, we provide robust evidence in favor of our predictions. (JEL D72, P16)     

Regional foods and rural development: The role of product qualification

Qualification schemes have become popular tools for supporting regional foods, yet little is understood about the impacts they have on the rural development contribution of such foods. Qualification processes may stimulate new networks and community actions, but they may also be incompatible with strategies of extended territorial development because of their foundation in theories of competitive advantage. To explore these issues, the evolution is traced of three cases of regional food production, where local actors pursue the opportunity to qualify products under EEC Regulation 2081/92. The results reveal, in practice, the different experiences that can evolve under the same qualification mechanism, and also how the consequences for rural development can vary. The paper concludes with analysis of factors influencing the involvement and behaviour of actors in regional food qualification, and what these infer for the rural development approach pursued.     

Disability activism in the new media ecology: campaigning strategies in the digital era

This article examines the changing nature of disability activism through the influence of social media. As disabled people in the United Kingdom have been subjected to acute austerity, this has coincided with a new era of disability activism channelled through increased social media participation. Drawing on the analysis of one group’s online activities and a qualitative content analysis of disability protest coverage in traditional news media during the 2012 Paralympic Games, this article positions this shift in the broader framework of ‘new media ecology’. We explore how emerging structures of disability activism have begun to offer a more visible profile to challenge government policy and negative stereotypes of disabled people. This highlights the usefulness of campaigning strategies for generating favourable news coverage for disability protest.     

Development and Validation of a Democratic System Justification Scale

Social Indicators Research - Social psychologists have explored the multiple forms of status quo legitimization mainly in regard to the social and economic system. This study aimed to explore the...     

Development and implementation of an operating room scheduling tool: an action research study

In this study, we report the results of an action research project whose aim was to develop and implement an operating room scheduler at the Meyer University Children’s Hospital. The study offers insights into the features that make an MSS optimisation model and scheduler effective and easy to implement, and shed light on those actions facilitating their introduction and use. Specifically, it suggests that creating an effective operating room scheduler requires clustering patients in homogeneous surgery groups and developing a flexible tool that allows: scheduling surgery groups instead of actual patients, easily adding/removing constraints, changing the objective function(s) and adjusting the planning horizon. In addition, it posits that gaining the commitment of top management by showing credible preliminary results, inferring stakeholder preferences by letting them comment on tentative schedules, introducing changes gradually and involving staff at lower levels of the hospital hierarchy can significantly facilitate the scheduler development and implementation.     

Dynamic factor analysis with non-linear temporal aggregation constraints

Summary.  The paper estimates an index of coincident economic indicators for the US economy by using time series with different frequencies of observation (monthly and quarterly, possibly with missing values). The model that is considered is the dynamic factor model that was proposed by Stock and Watson, specified in the logarithms of the original variables and at the monthly frequency, which poses a problem of temporal aggregation with a non-linear observational constraint when quarterly time series are included. Our main methodological contribution is to provide an exact solution to this problem that hinges on conditional mode estimation by iteration of the extended Kalman filtering and smoothing equations. On the empirical side the contribution of the paper is to provide monthly estimates of quarterly indicators, among which is the gross domestic product, that are consistent with the quarterly totals. Two applications are considered: the first dealing with the construction of a coincident index for the US economy, whereas the second does the same with reference to the euro area.     

Implementing lean information management: the case study of an automotive company

Worldwide modern organisation is continuously crossed by a great number of information but frequently information is not accurate, the needed information is not generated or it cannot be easily identified and, more, the information cannot flow through the whole organisation. This paper proposes the application of lean thinking in the field of information management. In the areas of manufacturing and production, the lean thinking is well known but usually the importance of a holistic approach is neglected and the improvement involves only the production and logistic areas and there is not a specific focus on the lean information management. We applied lean thinking to information management in order to improve the performance of an automotive company. We analysed the as-is company condition, we identified the present muda and we introduced the necessary changes. Then, we verified the modification efficiency through the calculation of a performance index. The paper proposes an interesting and exhaustive case of lean information management application and it highlights the possible improvement of such approach. The results of this study are not sector specific: they are not only applicable by other automotive industries, but they can also be extended to many other sectors.     

Active Employment Policies in Europe

In this paper the authors examine the theoretical framework of the set of laws, provisions, regulations, recommendations and pronouncements that embody the active employment policies in Europe. They illustrate that the theoretical framework is influenced in its attribution of meaning and significance to its subject matter by its relationship with the definitions of employment. To do this they provide an analysis of: the collective agencies, the courses of action, the recipient groups, the relations between the collective agencies, the courses of action decided upon and their recipient subjects, the supporting measures by which these courses of action will be implemented.     

A copula-based approach to account for dependence in stress-strength models

The focus of stress-strength models is on the evaluation of the probability R = P(Y < X) that stress Y experienced by a component does not exceed strength X required to overcome it. In reliability studies, X and Y are typically modeled as independent. Nevertheless, in many applications such an assumption may be unrealistic. This is an interesting methodological issue, especially as the estimation of R for dependent stress and strength has received only limited attention to date. This paper aims to fill this gap by evaluating R taking into account the association between X and Y via a copula-based approach. We calculate a closed-form expression for R by modeling the dependence through a Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern copula and one of its extensions, numerical solutions for R are, instead, provided when members of Frank’s copula family are employed. The marginal distributions are assumed to belong to the Burr system (i.e. Burr III, Dagum or Singh-Maddala type). In all the cases, we prove that neglect of the existing dependence leads to higher or lower values of R than is the case.