Does self-employment contribute to national happiness?

Recent studies showed that self-employment impacts individual happiness either positively or negatively. Rather than considering the happiness effects at the individual level, we assess whether self-employment effects spread and impact the domestic happiness beyond the involved individuals. We distinguish a direct effect of self-employment on life satisfaction and an indirect effect through the impact of self-employment on per capita income and the subsequent impact of income on life satisfaction. Using panel data analysis for 15 OECD countries over a period of 18 years, we investigate empirically whether countries with higher levels of self-employment are happier, by disentangling the two previously mentioned effects. We remedy the potential endogeneity problem when estimating the indirect effect by instrumenting the self-employment rate. The main finding is a significant and negative direct effect which is larger in magnitude than the indirect effect, resulting in an overall negative effect of self-employment on the domestic happiness.     

On the contribution of sectoral natural population growth to the aggregate poverty change

This note extends the Ravallion and Huppi (World Bank Econ Rev 5(1):57–82, 1991) aggregate poverty change decomposition to account for the distinct contribution of migration and differential natural population growth between sectors to the aggregate poverty change. We apply our decomposition to three Least Developing countries. We find that accounting for sectoral difference in natural population growth has a considerable impact on national poverty change. Responsible editor: Alessandro Cigno     

Authenticity and community process

How does community process constitute an opening to an authentic existence? Martin Heidegger suggests that authentic Being-in-the-world is rooted in self-reflection and isolation from others—far from the public realm. Conversely, Mary Parker Follett argues that collaborative processes embed action with meaning that have far-reaching implications for individual development as well as for democracy. Drawing on classical political philosophy’s public space and citizenship, this research maintains that community process enhances authentic, self-aware participatory practices—fundamental for one’s full development and practical democracy. Public and nonprofit administrators working in community-based or oriented organizations ought to cultivate opportunities for such development.     

Bayesian non-crossing quantile regression for regularly varying distributions

Quantile regression is a very important statistical tool for predictive modelling and risk assessment. For many applications, conditional quantile at different levels are estimated separately. Consequently the monotonicity of conditional quantiles can be violated when quantile regression curves cross each other. In this paper, we propose a new Bayesian multiple quantile regression based on heavy tailed distribution for non-crossing. We consider a linear quantile regression model for simultaneous Bayesian estimation of multiple quantiles based on a regularly varying assumptions. The numerical and competitive performance of the proposed method is illustrated by simulation.     

Local Weighted Average Estimation of the Regression Operator for Functional Data

We are concerned with the problem of local weighted average estimation of the regression operator when the responses are real-valued random variables, the explanatory data are of functional fixed-design type, and the errors consist of an independent and identically distributed variables. In this article, our main contributions on the local linear functional estimation concern from one part, the situation when the data are of functional fixed-design kind, and from the other part, in deriving uniform asymptotic results on the behavior of this estimator with respect to the topological properties of the space data (normed or semi-metric).     

Benefits of adopting lean production on green performance of SMEs: a case study

Abstract

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are widely recommended to strive, not only for their performance in operational side, but they need to integrate the environmental dimension. To do that, the literature widely indicates a positive impact of lean practices on green performance. However, very few studies have been carried out in SMEs context. In this view, this paper aims at providing through a practical case study of lean implementation in a real-life small manufacturing company, the information to confirm this synergy between lean and green performance. To achieve this aim, a proposed framework of lean and green integration has been implemented in a SME producing different types of pumps. The results achieved shows that there is a strong correlation between operational metrics improvement and green metrics improvement. Moreover, the benefits of lean practices such as 5S, Kanban, SMED, AM, cellular manufacturing and quality control on green performance are widely demonstrated. Future work could study other processes and explore other case-specific supporting tools and techniques.     

The relationship between CSR and corporate governance moderated by performance and board of directors’ characteristics

Journal of Management and Governance - This paper studies the relationships among corporate governance (CG), ethical practices, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). In particular, the...     

Clan information market games

We introduce a TU-game that describes a market where information is distributed among several agents and all these pieces of information are necessary to produce a good. This situation will be called clan information market. The class of the corresponding TU-games, the clan information market games (CIGs), is a subset of the class of clan games. We provide some well-known point solutions for CIGs in terms of the market data.     

Efficiency of schemes of sampling from the inverse gaussian-weibull mixture model

The objective of this paper is to study the efficiency of sampling schemes suggested by Hosmer(1973), termed models Ml and M2, relative to the regular random sampling, termed model MO, when samples are drawn from a population having the Inverse Gaussian-Weibull (IG-W) mixture distribution.

It has been shown that whether the efficiency is based on relative variances of the maximum likelihood estimates (ML,E's) of the components of the vector of parameters or on the generalized variances of the MLE's of that vector, Hosmer's models Ml or M2 perform better than model MO.