There is more to contracts than incompleteness: a review and assessment of empirical research on inter-firm contract design

This paper aims at achieving a greater understanding of how contracts operate in practice through a review of recent empirical literature on inter-firm contract design. Our focus on the structure of contractual agreements differentiates this review from others that dedicated ample coverage also to the antecedents of the decision to contract and of the choice of contracting versus integration. Our framework develops Stinchcombe’s (Organization Theory and Project Management, 1985) hypothesis that contracts are an organizational phenomenon. This allows us to uncover considerable but unevenly distributed evidence on a number of organizational processes formalized in relational contracts, which partially overlap with the processes that are observed in integrated organizations. It also enables us to describe contracts in terms of a larger number of dimensions than is commonly appreciated. The paper summarizes the evidence by proposing a general and tentative framework to guide the design of relational contracts, discusses a number of lingering issues, and outlines directions for further research on contracts as an organizational phenomenon.

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.     

Adaptive choice of scale tests in flexible two-stage designs with applications in experimental ecology and clinical trials

In this paper, the two-sample scale problem is addressed within the rank framework which does not require to specify the underlying continuous distribution. However, since the power of a rank test depends on the underlying distribution, it would be very useful for the researcher to have some information on it in order to use the possibly most suitable test. A two-stage adaptive design is used with adaptive tests where the data from the first stage are used to compute a selector statistic to select the test statistic for stage 2. More precisely, an adaptive scale test due to Hall and Padmanabhan and its components are considered in one-stage and several adaptive and non-adaptive two-stage procedures. A simulation study shows that the two-stage test with the adaptive choice in the second stage and with Liptak combination, when it is not more powerful than the corresponding one-stage test, shows, however, a quite similar power behavior. The test procedures are illustrated using two ecological applications and a clinical trial.     

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.     

Integration,Participation, Identity: Immigrant Associations in the Province of Milan

The paper presents some results from a multi‐year research project on immigrant associations in the province of Milan, Italy. The analysis yields numerous issues for reflection and recurrent features of particular significance. The first is the fact that for all the associations surveyed, their main goal and the essential reason for their existence was the desire to integrate their community of membership into the host society. However, such integration did not consist in a desire to be assimilated into Italian society. Quite the opposite: the majority of the associations studied were wholly committed to maintaining ‐‐ and sometimes rediscovering ‐‐ the identity and culture of their reference community. The second main feature is that immigrant associations are crucial nodes in a dense network of relations involving numerous actors of very different kinds: the immigrants themselves, other immigrant associations, third‐sector organizations, and the local authorities. The third and final important issue concerns the representativeness of immigrant associations: whether, that is, they can be considered the legitimate representatives of the community of membership.     

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.