A prickly problem: developing a volunteer-friendly tool for monitoring populations of a terrestrial urban mammal,the West European hedgehog (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Erinaceus europaeus</Emphasis>)

Across Europe, hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) appear to be in decline in both urban and rural landscapes. Current methods used to monitor urban populations are, however, associated with several potential limitations. In this study, we conducted hedgehog footprint-tunnel surveys in 219 residential gardens across Reading, UK between May–September in 2013 and/or 2014; gardens were surveyed for five continuous days. Single-species occupancy models were used to investigate factors influencing hedgehog occupancy and two-species occupancy models were used to estimate a species interaction factor (SIF) between hedgehogs and (a) badgers (Meles meles), (b) foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and (c) dogs (Canis familiaris). The five-day survey protocol was associated with a false-absence error rate of 0.1–0.4%, indicating that it was a reliable method for determining hedgehog presence; conversely, 34.7% of householders were not able to correctly predict hedgehog presence or absence. Hedgehogs were widely distributed across Reading, but detected in only 32–40% of gardens. None of the within-garden or outside-garden factors investigated significantly affected hedgehog occupancy in the single-species models, but the two-species models indicated that badgers (SIF?=?0.471?±?0.188), but not foxes (SIF?=?0.954?±?0.048) or dogs (SIF?=?0.780?±?0.228), negatively affected the presence of hedgehogs in gardens, although not significantly. Overall, footprint-tunnels represent a viable field method for monitoring urban hedgehog populations, however, other approaches are required to identify factors that make gardens “hedgehog friendly”.     

OPTIMAL EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP CONTRACTS UNDER AMBIGUITY AVERSION

The aim of this paper is to compute and describe the conditions of an optimal employee ownership contract between an employer and an ambiguity‐averse employee. We then introduce ambiguity aversion in the baseline model of Aubert et al. (2014) using the multiple prior preferences of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) and its extension proposed by Maccheroni et al. (2006). This model offers solutions that reconcile labor and financial economics and behavioral economics research findings on employee ownership. The paper focuses on the most common situation where employee ownership has a positive impact on corporate performance, but can also be used as an entrenchment mechanism. We determine the optimal company stock contribution, which corresponds to a perfect subgame Nash equilibrium in the ambiguity framework. Using the framework of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989), we show that the optimal ownership contract is increasing with respect to the lower bound of the return expectation in the case of a high level of effort, and decreasing with respect to the upper bound of the return expectation in the case of a low level of effort. In the framework of Maccheroni et al. (2006), we prove that if aversion to ambiguity is sufficiently high, then we find the same behavior as in the case of no ambiguity. (JEL G11, G32, G34, J33)     

The role of neighborhood physical environment on mobility and social participation among people using mobility assistive technology

This paper presents a systematic literature review on the impact of the neighborhood physical environment on mobility and social participation among people using mobility assistive technology (MAT). Peer-reviewed articles from eight databases published in French or English from 1990 to 2016 were searched. Thirty studies were included in this review. Factors related to neighborhood environmental features, mobility in transit, and accessibility of homes and public buildings influenced mobility and social participation of MAT users. The majority of reviewed studies combined different types of MAT, which made the interpretation of the results challenging. Few studies included walker, cane, and crutch users. Definitions of mobility and social participation lacked consistency and were often simplistic. Future empirical research needs to examine the impact of neighborhood physical environment factors separately for different MAT users. Causality and links between mobility and social participation of different MAT users at the neighborhood level should be further explored.     

Measuring Community Economic Resilience in Australia: Estimates of Recent Levels and Trends

We measure changes in community economic resilience (CER) across geo-locations in Australia between 2006 and 2011, a time span characterised by major natural and economic shocks. We build an index of potential CER that captures communities’ stocks of human, social, natural, physical and financial capitals, levels of economic diversity and accessibility to service centres. Using Census data and the ARIA index, we resort to principal component analysis to generate CER indexes at statistical area level 1, which is our community proxy. Our analysis of index values provides a number of useful insights. First, there was a statistically significant improvement over time in the overall CER index in all states and regions. Second, our CER measures improved at a different pace across regions and states while their rank remained mostly unchanged. Third, CER improved over time in social and physical capital and accessibility terms, but declined in human, natural, financial capital and diversity terms. Fourth, communities with a high economic diversity level reported higher capital stock except for natural capital, and communities with a low accessibility level had lower capital stock except for social and natural capital. Finally, CER has a long-term positive association with household income.     

Kuznets Curve for the US: A Reconsideration Using Cosummability

Social Indicators Research - The relationship between income inequality and long-run economic growth has gained a growing attention in economic research for over decades. This study employed...     

The social and economic impacts of drought

Although the environmental and economic impacts of drought have been widely studied, few large‐scale studies have examined the broader social impacts of drought. To fill this knowledge gap, the Australian Institute of Family Studies undertook the Regional and Rural Families Survey in 2007, when a significant part of Australia was experiencing a severe drought. This paper analyses that survey to measure the extent to which drought affects a range of economic, health and social outcomes. Drought is found to have a substantial negative economic and health impact on farmers and others employed in the agricultural sector. There is some evidence that groups that are not employed in agriculture are adversely affected, with a widespread loss of services in drought‐affected areas and some marginal labour market groups (e.g. carers) experiencing poor employment outcomes in a drought‐affected local economy. Policymakers need to take these impacts into account in designing effective responses to future droughts.     

Workplace Relationships,Psychological Capital,Accreditation and Safety Culture: a new Framework of Analysis within Healthcare Organizations

Public Organization Review - This paper used Social Exchange Theory (SET), Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) and Cooper’s (Safety Science, 36(2), 111–136, 2000) frameworks to...     

Costly voting when both information and preferences differ: is turnout too high or too low?

We study a model of costly voting over two alternatives, where agents’ preferences are determined by both (i) a private preference in favour of one alternative e.g. candidates’ policies, and (ii) heterogeneous information in the form of noisy signals about a commonly valued state of the world e.g. candidate competence. We show that depending on the level of the personal bias (weight on private preference), voting is either according to private preferences or according to signals. When voting takes place according to private preferences, there is an unique equilibrium with inefficiently high turnout. In contrast, when voting takes place according to signals, turnout is locally too low. Multiple Pareto-ranked voting equilibria may exist and in particular, compulsory voting may Pareto dominate voluntary voting. Moreover, an increase in personal bias can cause turnout to rise or fall, and an increase in the accuracy of information may cause a switch to voting on the basis of signals and thus lower turnout, even though it increases welfare. This is a substantially revised version of Department of Economics University of Warwick Working Paper 670, “Information Aggregation, Costly Voting and Common Values”, January 2003. We would like to thank B. Dutta, M. Morelli, C. Perrroni, V. Bhaskar and seminar participants at Warwick, Nottingham and the ESRC Workshop in Game Theory for their comments. We would also like to thank the editor and an anonymous referee for their comments.     

Impact of government and industrial agglomeration on industrial land prices: A Taiwanese case study

Government intervention in industrial development is important in promoting national economic development in numerous Asian countries. This study aims to examine the influence of government and industrial agglomeration on industrial land prices by constructing hedonic pricing functions. Based on model testing, this study indicates that variables related to general attributes, locational attributes, industrial agglomeration and government determine land prices. Moreover, industrial agglomeration is positively related to land prices; that is, industrial parks with a stronger agglomeration economy have higher land value. However, the role of government is negatively related to land prices, indicating that government intervention has no influence in increasing land prices and probably results from the inappropriate location of industrial parks and dissatisfaction of those parks' management services. To increase the development efficiency and industry competitiveness, this study proposes that government should identify and improve the weaknesses of industrial parks and promote the establishment of industrial clustering and information transfer among firms.     

Imagined Masculinity: Body,Sexuality, and Family among Israeli Military Reserves

This article explores how middle‐class Jewish men on reserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces form a “proper” masculinity through humor and jokes. Reserve service creates a fruitful territory for researching four issues that have not been extensively studied in the literature on masculinities: the relation between gender and age, the periodic reaffirmation of masculinity along the life course, how women are perceived as sexual objects and how informal social pressure is placed on singles to marry and begin families, and how men not only are motivated by homophobia but use images of women and homosexuals to map and interpret power relations and competition between men.