Die Regulation der ?kologischen Krise

There is a growing discrepancy between the knowledge about the ecological crisis and the effectiveness to deal with this crisis politically. Just in a time of increasing environmental problems the institutions of international environmental politics are in a crisis of legitimation and functioning. This contrasts with the broadly acknowledged anthropogenic character of climate change and the respective politicisation of this crisis phenomenon. The article firstly develops a theoretical framework which aims to contribute to explaining the growing discrepancy between crisis consciousness and crisis politics. For this purpose, the concept of societal relationships with nature is linked to insights of critical geography, regulation theory and critical state theory. Thereafter, the empirical analysis identifies the fossilist production and consumption patterns as principal cause for the mentioned discrepancy. Its deeply rootedness and global outreach supersede the ecological crisis consciousness and the negotiations on the existing terrains of environmental politics. At the same time, they contribute to intensifying the contradictions in societal relationships with nature. The (possible) processing of these contradictions and their democratically motivated politicisation will be analysed in the last section of the paper.     

Coordination of legislative speech in times of crisis: Youth unemployment and debates on redistributive policies in the Swedish Riksdag, 1994–2014

Parliamentary debates and the discussion on different law proposals are a key part of the process of policy making. We argue in this article that a high economic problem pressure in the region an MP represents will affect the MP’s legislative speechmaking. We also hypothesise that parties tend to coordinate their speakers in parliament to display a cohesive profile in the domain of labour, employment and immigration issues, i.e., in issue areas which reflect redistributive policies that are highly salient for almost all parties. We evaluate our expectations based on an analysis of Swedish parliamentary debates on labour, employment and immigration policy during the period between 1994 and 2014. The findings show that parliamentary parties coordinate speechmaking: Those MPs who represent economically troubled districts are less likely to appear in plenary debates, as well as MPs who deviate programmatically from the party line.     

Unconditional Quantile Treatment Effects Under Endogeneity

This article develops estimators for unconditional quantile treatment effects when the treatment selection is endogenous. We use an instrumental variable (IV) to solve for the endogeneity of the binary treatment variable. Identification is based on a monotonicity assumption in the treatment choice equation and is achieved without any functional form restriction. We propose a weighting estimator that is extremely simple to implement. This estimator is root n consistent, asymptotically normally distributed, and its variance attains the semiparametric efficiency bound. We also show that including covariates in the estimation is not only necessary for consistency when the IV is itself confounded but also for efficiency when the instrument is valid unconditionally. An application of the suggested methods to the effects of fertility on the family income distribution illustrates their usefulness. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

IMMIGRANTS' GENES: GENETIC DIVERSITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

This paper examines the relationship between immigrants' genetic diversity and economic development in the United States during the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a period commonly referred to as the age of mass migration from Europe to the New World. Our panel model estimates show that during this period, immigrants' genetic diversity is significantly positively correlated with measures of U.S. counties' economic development. There exists also a significant positive relationship between immigrants' genetic diversity in 1870 and contemporaneous measures of U.S. counties' average income. (JEL J11, O51, Z13)     

Anticipating acceptance of emerging technologies using twitter: the case of self-driving cars

In an early stage of developing emerging technologies, there is often great uncertainty regarding their future success. Companies can reduce this uncertainty by listening to the voice of customers as the customer eventually decides to accept an emerging technology or not. We show that risk and benefit perceptions are central determinants of acceptance of emerging technologies. We present an analysis of risk and benefit perception of self-driving cars from March 2015 until October 2016. In this period, we analyzed 1,963,905 tweets using supervised machine learning for text classification. Furthermore, we developed two new metrics, risk rate (RR) and benefit rate (BR), which allow analyzing risk and benefit perceptions on social media quantitatively. With our results, we provide impetus for further research on acceptance of self-driving cars and a methodological contribution to acceptance of emerging technologies research. Furthermore, we identify crucial issues in the public perception of self-driving cars and provide guidance for the management of emerging technologies to increase the likelihood of their acceptance.     

Changes at Corporate Headquarters: Review,Integration and Future Research

In modern corporations, the corporate headquarters (CHQ) unit is considered central to the fortunes of the overall firm. In light of ever‐changing environments, changes at the CHQ have become a crucial concern in management research and practice, and scholars have studied a variety of changes at the CHQ. Despite the common focus on the CHQ entity and the potential for cross‐fertilization across several research tracks, a coherent picture of this dispersed body of knowledge is lacking. This paper reviews 25 years of research on changes at the CHQ. In so doing, it advances a common language and an overarching framework that integrates the existing knowledge in the intellectual domains of strategy, organizational design and international business research. On this basis, the authors suggest directions for future research to advance knowledge of: (1) the pressure for and resistance to changes at the CHQ; (2) interrelationships among changes at the CHQ; (3) change processes at the CHQ; (4) agents involved in changes at the CHQ; and (5) adaptive and disruptive effects of changes at the CHQ. Overall, the study provides a conceptual basis for combining the existing knowledge of changes at the CHQ and serves as a guide for future research.     

Determinants of Volunteering Within a Social Housing Community

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In general, research demonstrates that deprivation, education, health, and well-being are determinants of volunteering,...     

Bootstrapping and permuting paired t-test type statistics

We study various bootstrap and permutation methods for matched pairs, whose distributions can have different shapes even under the null hypothesis of no treatment effect. Although the data may not be exchangeable under the null, we investigate different permutation approaches as valid procedures for finite sample sizes. It will be shown that permutation or bootstrap schemes, which neglect the dependency structure in the data, are asymptotically valid. Simulation studies show that these new tests improve the power of the t-test under non-normality.     

Danger and Dementia: Caregiver Experiences and Shifting Social Roles During a Highly Active Hurricane Season

This study examined disaster preparedness and decision-making by caregivers of community-dwelling persons diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or a related dementia (ADRD). Interviews were conducted with 20 caregivers in South Florida. Twelve of these interviews include caregiving experiences during the highly active 2004–2005 hurricane seasons. Results indicate that persons in earlier stages of ADRD can, and often do, remain engaged in the disaster preparation and planning process. However, during the early stages, persons may also resist evacuation, even if the caregiver felt it was necessary. During later stages of the disease, caregivers reported less resistance to disaster-related decisions, however, with the tradeoff of less ability to assist with preparation.