Marginal Players? The Third Sector and Employability Services for Migrants,Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Literature in the field of employability and the third sector has focused upon the impact of marketisation on third sector...     

Sensing the Bike: Creating a Collaborative Understanding of a Multi‐Sensorial Experience in MotoGP Racing

This article concerns the analysis of work interaction of a motorcycle racing team during pre‐season tests, drawing on ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis to explicate the ways in which the manager and the driver collaborate, through everyday gestures and language, to create a shared understanding of the bike's mechanical issues and disambiguate the driver's accounts of the bike's performance. We report on a set of video‐recorded encounters between the manger and the driver, examining how the multi‐sensorial experience of the driver is recollected and understood by team members, while overcoming interactional constraints imposed by the unique professional setting.     

Incentive schemes and peer effects on risk behaviour: an experiment

Theory and Decision - This paper studies whether incentivizing performance with competition and cooperation-based incentive schemes, rather than individual compensation, affects peer effects on...     

Measuring Disparities in Access to Health Care: A Proposal Based on an Ex-ante Perspective

Social Indicators Research - We provide a novel approach to evaluate access to health care based on the monetization of access barriers individuals face. This approach allows to distinguish the...     

Indirect consumer activism and politics in the market

ABSTRACT

Social movement organizations use consumer activism to mobilize public pressure and cause economic or reputational damage to their target. However, current frameworks fail to explain why organizations would use indirect consumer activism: targeting one firm to elicit change from a third party. This paper aims to explain this choice, drawing upon theories of opportunity structures to explain why groups choose to use indirect strategies. I examine three campaigns using indirect strategies: US-based Grab Your Wallet and Sleeping Giants, and UK-based Stop Funding Hate. Groups use indirect strategies to reach inaccessible targets and to mobilize the public; these strategies help social movement organizations to raise public awareness at the beginning of a campaign. I conclude with some expectations for future research.     

Asymptotic Confidence Intervals for a New Inequality Measure

This work aims at assessing, by simulation methods, the performance of asymptotic confidence intervals for Zenga's new inequality measure. The results are compared with those obtained on Gini's measure, perhaps the most widely used index for measuring inequality in income and wealth distributions. Our findings show that the coverage accuracy and the size of the confidence intervals for the two measures are very similar in samples from economic size distributions.     

The Beta-Dagum Distribution: Definition and Properties

This article introduces a five-parameter Beta-Dagum distribution from which moments, hazard and entropy, and reliability measures are then derived. These properties show the high flexibility of the said distribution. The maximum likelihood estimators of the Beta-Dagum parameters are examined and the expected Fisher information matrix provided. Next, a simulation study is carried out which shows the good performance of maximum likelihood estimators for finite samples. Finally, the usefulness of the new distribution is illustrated through real data sets.     

A practical approach for assessing the effect of grouping in hierarchical spatio-temporal models

Hierarchical spatio-temporal models allow for the consideration and estimation of many sources of variability. A general spatio-temporal model can be written as the sum of a spatio-temporal trend and a spatio-temporal random effect. When spatial locations are considered to be homogeneous with respect to some exogenous features, the groups of locations may share a common spatial domain. Differences between groups can be highlighted both in the large-scale, spatio-temporal component and in the spatio-temporal dependence structure. When these differences are not included in the model specification, model performance and spatio-temporal predictions may be weak. This paper proposes a method for evaluating and comparing models that progressively include group differences. Hierarchical modeling under a Bayesian perspective is followed, allowing flexible models and the statistical assessment of results based on posterior predictive distributions. This procedure is applied to tropospheric ozone data in the Italian Emilia–Romagna region for 2001, where 30 monitoring sites are classified according to environmental laws into two groups by their relative position with respect to traffic emissions.