Surveillances,Social Management,and Architectural Morphologies: An approach to the Prison and the Hospital in 19th Century Spain

Surveillance is one of the key aspects of the economic and social system in which we live. Its relevance is growing, due in part to technical advances and in part to complex social dynamics and the magnitude of certain conflicts. In this article we discuss the analytical framework formulated by Bauman, in which he contrasts the concepts of liquid and solid surveillance, and we introduce the concepts of inquisitive and coercive surveillance. We examine the genesis and evolution of both types of surveillance by analyzing public health and penitentiary strategies, particularly in 19th century Spain, as well as those of their respective institutions—the hospital and the prison—with special focus on their spatial manifestations and the divergence between the paths taken in the health‐care and penitentiary spheres.     

Sexual Functioning in Spanish and Portuguese Young Adults: Initial Validation of the Arizona Sexual Experience Scale

Objectives: The authors conducted an initial validation of the Arizona Sexual Experience Scale (ASEX) and examined the sexual function of Spanish and Portuguese young adults. Methods: Participants were 523 Spanish and 595 Portuguese heterosexual young adults who completed a background questionnaire, the ASEX, and measures of sexual sensation seeking, excitation, and inhibition. Results: The ASEX showed good reliability and validity. Participants reported good sexual function. The most prevalent difficulties in men were related to desire and orgasm, and to orgasm and satisfaction in women. Conclusions: This is a psychometrically sound instrument to assess sexual functioning in Spanish and Portuguese young adults.     

Portuguese Scientists’ Migration: a study on the 2008 crisis aftermath

In the economic and social aftermath of the 2008 crisis there has been an important and growing new wave of highly qualified Portuguese emigration comprising scientists. No or very few public policies have been designed to reverse this phenomenon, risking the consequences of brain drain. International literature argues that professional reasons are central to scientists’ decision to migrate, even after the 2008 crisis. Spending some time in a foreign country to study, research, or teach, is perceived as a common step in an individual academic trajectory and an advantage for a successful professional career in academia. It is also encouraged by European Union policies. Twelve individual portraits of Portuguese scientists living in central Europe reveal how important other factors are to the migration decision‐making process. These factors include the economic crisis, student mobility programmes, and the current Portuguese scientific system revision.     

Job insecurity and work outcomes: The role of psychological contract breach and positive psychological capital

Job insecurity has received growing attention from researchers because it poses serious challenges for organisations and for society as a whole. However, there are insufficient studies about the processes through which job insecurity affects outcomes as well as potential ways to reduce its negative impact. This study focuses on the relationship between job insecurity and individual-level outcomes (in-role performance and organisational deviance) and examines if (a) job insecurity is positively and/or negatively related to work outcomes, (b) psychological contract breach acts as a mediator of the relationship between job insecurity and work outcomes, and (c) positive psychological capital (PsyCap) buffers the job insecurity–work outcomes relationship via psychological contract breach. With a sample of 362 employee–supervisor dyads, in which the outcome measures were collected from the supervisors, we found support for our hypotheses. Specifically, we found a moderated mediation effect, whereby PsyCap moderates the negative indirect relationship of job insecurity on outcomes through psychological contract breach.     

Dual class shares,board of directors’ effectiveness and firm’s market value: an empirical study

This study aims to identify whether a relationship exists between the controlling shareholders’ voting power and outside directors’ effectiveness in maximizing firms’ financial performance. We analyze a panel data with 3057 observations for the 2000–2012 period using a random effects model, logit and probit regressions, and the two-stage model of Heckman in the Brazilian stock market. Our findings show that firms whose controlling shareholders use dual class shares to leverage their voting power have less independence from the board and worse financial performance and market value. Further, the percentage of outside directors tends to be ineffective in increasing the firm’s value, and in changing the firm’s chief executive officer (CEO) when (1) the controlling shareholder’s voting power is leveraged, or (2) when the CEO assumes a position on the board of directors simultaneously. We interpreted that these results are in line with the arguments in favor of the existence of a new agency cost, which is related to the undue obedience of board members to authority, such as the largest controlling shareholder or the CEO in Brazilian listed firms.     

Town Centre Management: Outlook from Portugal

In the last two decades, the Portuguese Government has responded to the decline of centres of commerce. In this paper, we analyse the three different experiences of town centre management (TCM) schemes developed in Portugal since the turn of the millennium. The first two stages were developed using public sector initiatives and their impacts were limited. The third stage is still under way and is composed of private projects created by local business owners. Taking Lisbon as a case study for this third stage we conclude that these projects have become a pro-active means of intervention in Portuguese town centres.     

Quality strategies in supply chain alliances of disposable items

This paper studies a single-product distribution channel where a supplier manufactures items of a given type, some of which are defective, that are sold by a retailer who only detects a subset of the defective items, passing the rest along to customers. We conjecture the structure of the demand and cost functions, assuming customers to have a decreasing marginal aversion to bad quality while both the supplier and the retailer make marginally increasing efforts to avoid bad quality. This allows us to deduce several implicit parameters of a cost model based on observable data, such as the share of the channel margin. Once the parameters of the model are available, we analyze the result of vertical integration. Although we confirm the well-known fact that vertical integration improves the quality perceived by the customer, we characterize the supplier's decision of whether or not to provide a better quality in terms of the individual channel margins. As an alternative, we derive the conditions under which the supplier and the retailer may devise a mutually beneficial transfer contract that simultaneously increases their profit and improves quality.     

Swapping the Nested Fixed Point Algorithm: A Class of Estimators for Discrete Markov Decision Models

This paper proposes a new nested algorithm (NPL) for the estimation of a class of discrete Markov decision models and studies its statistical and computational properties. Our method is based on a representation of the solution of the dynamic programming problem in the space of conditional choice probabilities. When the NPL algorithm is initialized with consistent nonparametric estimates of conditional choice probabilities, successive iterations return a sequence of estimators of the structural parameters which we call K–stage policy iteration estimators. We show that the sequence includes as extreme cases a Hotz–Miller estimator (for K=1) and Rust's nested fixed point estimator (in the limit when K→∞). Furthermore, the asymptotic distribution of all the estimators in the sequence is the same and equal to that of the maximum likelihood estimator. We illustrate the performance of our method with several examples based on Rust's bus replacement model. Monte Carlo experiments reveal a trade–off between finite sample precision and computational cost in the sequence of policy iteration estimators.