Constructing a city,building a life: Brazilian construction workers’ continuous mobility as a permanent life strategy

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of domestic labor mobility among Brazilian construction workers in the context of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. We start from the premise that mobile laborers are crucial for the physical development and expansion of cities. However, the importance of domestic migrants in this process is insufficiently addressed in mobility studies. Building on existing research on domestic population movements in Brazil, we argue that the current generation of mobile construction workers draws on the intangible and material infrastructure generated by previous generations of migrants to enable novel kinds of (permanent) labor mobilities.     

Change-point detection in a linear model by adaptive fused quantile method

A novel approach to quantile estimation in multivariate linear regression models with change-points is proposed: the change-point detection and the model estimation are both performed automatically, by adopting either the quantile-fused penalty or the adaptive version of the quantile-fused penalty. These two methods combine the idea of the check function used for the quantile estimation and the L₁ penalization principle known from the signal processing and, unlike some standard approaches, the presented methods go beyond typical assumptions usually required for the model errors, such as sub-Gaussian or normal distribution. They can effectively handle heavy-tailed random error distributions, and, in general, they offer a more complex view on the data as one can obtain any conditional quantile of the target distribution, not just the conditional mean. The consistency of detection is proved and proper convergence rates for the parameter estimates are derived. The empirical performance is investigated via an extensive comparative simulation study and practical utilization is demonstrated using a real data example.     

The Elasticity of Demand for Microcredit: Evidence from Latin America

Microcredit demand is frequently assumed to be inelastic, yet understanding the price elasticity of demand for microcredit is highly relevant in designing appropriate microfinance institution (MFI) financial products and policy. This article extracts loan demand schedules and elasticities of MFI borrowers in the Dominican Republic using a unique survey instrument. We analyse the intensive margin of microcredit demand and find that client demand elasticities are not homogeneous and are correlated with certain borrower characteristics. Overall results suggest that these micro‐entrepreneurs, who have already entered the MFI market, have close to unit elastic demand for microcredit. The mean demand elasticity for our sample is ‐1.0.     

Breach of Psychological Contract and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors in Volunteerism: The Mediator Role of Affect and the Moderation of Volunteers’ Age

The breach of psychological contract is the perception by the members of an organization that it has reneged on promises made when they began their relationship with it. This perception generates intense negative emotions and is an effective predictor of future behavior in the work setting. In this investigation, we explore the relations between breach of contract and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) in volunteers. We also explore the mediator role of negative affect in the relationship between breach and citizenship behaviors and the moderator role of age. This study was carried out using a two-wave design, with 419 socio-assistential volunteers. The results support a direct effect of breach of contract on OCB and an indirect effect of breach through negative affect. Moreover, age moderates the relation between breach of psychological contract and negative affect. Lastly, the conditional effect of breach of contract on negative affect is greater in younger volunteers but loses its power in older volunteers. The implications are discussed in order to comprehend volunteers’ activity and design interventions.     

The Political Economy of “Food Security” and Trade: Uneven and Combined Dependency

This article critiques the notion of food security through trade promoted by suprastate organizations like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. We use and refine the food‐regime perspective to contest this unwritten rule of the neoliberal food regime. Rather than “mutual dependency” in food between “North” and “South,” as argued by Philip McMichael, however, we show that food dependency has been stronger on basic foods in developing countries, while advanced capitalist countries' dependency has been mostly on luxury foods. Also, the more that developing countries become dependent on food imports and exports, the more they will be importing the “world food price” for the relevant commodities. Food‐price inflation will more adversely affect their working classes, which spend larger shares of their household budgets on food. Our empirical focus is on food dependency in emerging nations—Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Turkey—in comparison with long‐standing agricultural exporting powerhouses, the United States and Canada. Using longitudinal data from FAOSTAT, we show that food security in the neoliberal food regime can best be characterized as “uneven and combined dependency.”     

Romanian approach to media portrayals of disability

There is a wide range of media representations of disability, but not just because of the societal stigma. They are a function of norms of journalism as well as biases among people with disabilities themselves. This article is a contribution to the issue of social representation of persons with disabilities from a Romanian perspective, which will help to witness the transformation of the general perception of persons with disabilities by seeing the evolution of the terms used to name disability in crucial years of the socio‐political development of Romania (1989, 1990 and 2003). The existence of different categories of representations will reveal the evolution of society, which switched from a culture of protection to a culture of promotion for people with disabilities.