Promoting social Europe? The development of European youth unemployment policies

Since the beginning of the millennium, the institutions of the European Union have intensified their political efforts to combat youth employment. Youth‐specific policy initiatives were launched after the financial and economic crisis of 2008, and the overall subsequent rise of unemployment rates among young people. In this article, we analyse and assess these developments on the basis of an analysis of European policy documents and interviews. Our conclusions are twofold. One, we argue that the Europe 2020 Strategy and its flagship initiatives devoted to youth do not constitute a new policy field or approach, but are rather the outcome of an incrementalist logic of policy development. Two, the European youth strategy is clearly committed to activation, and it pushes policy developments towards a minimalist policy approach of precarious protection. Both developments are explained by the actor constellations and path dependencies of the European policy arena.     

The politics of death: on life after the “end of history”

In this paper, the most recent writings by Giorgio Agamben and Bruno Latour are brought into dialog by examining what light they shed on contemporary debates concerning “end of life” decisions. More specifically, the paper focuses on the debates sparked by Diane Pretty's request for a grant of immunity against legal prosecution if her husband were to assist her to commit suicide and so terminate her increasingly unbearable suffering from motor neurone disease. The aim of this exercise is to articulate the presuppositions informing two influential and radically opposed views on the contemporary reconfiguration of relationships between humans, animals and other non‐humans.     

‘I'm not like all these Ecuadorians’. Promises and dilemmas of immigrants’ selective ethnicity appropriation

This article revisits my translocal ethnography of Ecuadorian immigration to Italy, building on the notions of ethnicization and selective ethnicity appropriation. The salience of an ethnic dimension, in the daily lives of the migrants I met, is explored with regard to collective identification, alignment with co-nationals and interactions with natives. By de-constructing migrants’ ethnicity from within, a range of expectations and strategies towards the receiving society emerges. While processes of ethnicization affect them in cognitive, discursive and practical terms, immigrants selectively draw from their ethnicity patterns, as their previous identities and lifestyles interact with the mainstream overseas. Their ethnicity – as a shared repertoire of habits, ways of life and common sense ideas, supported by a communal identity and background – can be purposefully negotiated in several respects, as they strive to negotiate better life conditions overseas. Why this occurs, under what conditions, and producing what effects, are the questions to be approached in this article. As I shall argue, ethnicity-related attitudes and behaviours raise opportunities and dilemmas both for migrants’ incorporation overseas and for their transnational connections.     

Is corporate governance of private equity targets more effective for risk mitigation?

Journal of Management and Governance - Private equity is a source of finance and a governance device characterised by active monitoring through sponsors that intervene in targets’ corporate...     

EVOLVING INTERNATIONAL INFLATION DYNAMICS: WORLD AND COUNTRY‐SPECIFIC FACTORS

The decline in the level and persistence of inflation over the 1980s is a common feature of the most industrialized economies in the world. The rise in inflation volatility of the late 1970s and the subsequent fall of the 1980s is country specific for the UK, Canada, and, to a lesser extent, the United States, Italy, and Japan. Since the late 1980s, inflation predictability has declined significantly across the industrialized world. We link the empirical results to recent theories of international inflation.     

DO IMMIGRANTS CAUSE CRIME?

We examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990–2003. Drawing on police administrative records, we first document that the size of the immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of property crimes and with the overall crime rate. Then, we use instrumental variables based on immigration toward destination countries other than Italy to identify the causal impact of exogenous changes in Italy’s immigrant population. According to these estimates, immigration increases only the incidence of robberies, while leaving unaffected all other types of crime. Since robberies represent a very minor fraction of all criminal offenses, the effect on the overall crime rate is not significantly different from zero.     

Supply Chain Structure Incentives for Corporate Social Responsibility: An Incomplete Contracting Analysis

Downstream firms increasingly recognize the importance of integrating social and environmental concerns with their businesses. As a consequence, they urge to create incentives for their suppliers to invest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Contracts to provide these incentives are rarely observed in practice. If not totally absent, contracts may be incomplete, in that unforeseen contingencies or some CSR attributes that are difficult to measure may not be included in the contract. We show that incentives for CSR investments can also be provided through the supply chain structure, which consists of the distribution of ownership rights over the firms' assets of production, and involves horizontal and/or vertical alliances among supply chain members. Motivated by examples in agricultural contexts, this study adopts the property rights approach to study the impact of supply chain structures on the adoption of CSR activities. We show that the structure that best incentivizes CSR investments depends on the interaction between CSR vertical synergy, free‐riding, and countervailing power. One of the main findings is that the alliance between suppliers is beneficial only if the revenues generated by a downstream investment are sufficiently high. In fact, only in this case, the suppliers can appropriate a sufficiently large stake of the revenues generated downstream, thanks to their countervailing power. When the upstream investment costs become high, however, the suppliers will invest in CSR only if the downstream distributor is vertically integrated. The resulting structure of a cooperative will best incentivize CSR investments only if the CSR vertical synergy between the two tiers of the supply chain is sufficiently high.     

Job Shop Scheduling With Deadlines

In this paper we deal with a variant of the Job ShopScheduling Problem. We consider the addition of release dates anddeadlines to be met by all jobs. The objective is makespanminimization if there are no tardy jobs, and tardiness minimizationotherwise. The problem is approached by using a Shifting Bottleneckstrategy. The presence of deadlines motivates an iterative use of aparticular one machine problem which is solved optimally. Theoverall procedure is heuristic and exhibits a good trade-off betweencomputing time and solution quality.     

Current Status and Future Agenda for the Theory,Research, and Practice of Childhood Career Development

This article reviews the current status and a future agenda for childhood career development theory, research, and practice. The fragmented nature of the current state of the literature is noted, and a call is made for a reexamination and reconsideration of the childhood developmental pathways of life's work. It is suggested that the study of children's work behavior be rooted in life contexts, most notably, families, communities, and schools.