Doing gender in public services: Affective labour of employment agents

The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organizations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation have changed the work requirements of front‐line workers in public employment agencies across Europe. Public employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour, but have to perform service work. They use affective means to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This article provides evidence that these transformations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gendering of public service work. We discovered four typical modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and female employment agents follow feminized service work patterns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a possible loss of their professional status, some employment agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activation paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work or by still adhering to affect‐neutral male bureaucratic work.     

Individual Wealth and Subjective Financial Well‐being in Marriage: Resource Integration or Separation?

Economic wealth is mostly assumed to be a household‐level resource that is pooled by spouses in married couples. Using comprehensive data on the individual wealth of both spouses in married couples from the German Socio‐Economic Panel Study (N = 13,623 individuals), the author tests this assumption. To this end, the associations between individuals' wealth and their spouses' wealth with individuals' subjective financial well‐being are examined. Results show that women's financial well‐being is equally associated with their own individual wealth and their spouses' wealth in older birth cohorts. In younger birth cohorts, women's financial well‐being is more strongly associated with their own individual wealth than with their spouses' wealth. For men from all birth cohorts, their own individual wealth is more strongly related to their financial well‐being than is their spouses' wealth. These findings suggest that wealth is not generally and fully pooled and that individual ownership matters within married couples in Germany.     

The traveling salesman problem on grids with forbidden neighborhoods

We introduce the traveling salesman problem with forbidden neighborhoods (TSPFN). This is an extension of the Euclidean TSP in the plane where direct connections between points that are too close are forbidden. The TSPFN is motivated by an application in laser beam melting. In the production of a workpiece in several layers using this method one hopes to reduce the internal stresses of the workpiece by excluding the heating of positions that are too close. The points in this application are often arranged in some regular (grid) structure. In this paper we study optimal solutions of TSPFN instances where the points in the Euclidean plane are the points of a regular grid. Indeed, we explicitly determine the optimal values for the TSPFN and its associated path version on rectangular regular grids for different minimal distances of the points visited consecutively. For establishing lower bounds on the optimal values we use combinatorial counting arguments depending on the parities of the grid dimensions. Furthermore we provide construction schemes for optimal TSPFN tours for the considered cases.     

Translation style and participant roles in court interpreting1

This paper investigates the translation styles of court interpreters in New York City and the styles' social and pragmatic implications for multilingual interactions in court. Interpreters are found to vary between using first or third person to represent the voice of a translated source speaker, thereby varying between adherence to explicit institutional norms that require first person and accommodation to non‐professional interpreting practices that favor the use of reported speech. In a quantitative and qualitative analysis, this variation is shown to be influenced by several pragmatic and social factors, and to index the interpreters' stances towards source speakers and towards the immigrant court users who are the recipients of translations from English. It is argued that translation styles have profound consequences for limited English speakers, as the insistence on institutional norms in translating to them is viewed as a gatekeeping behavior that may impede their full participation in the proceedings.     

Planning Until Death Do Us Part: Partnership Status and Financial Planning Horizon

Positive economic outcomes of marriage are often explained with a higher future orientation of married individuals who are assumed to plan their finances for a longer period than the nonmarried. Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (2001–2014; N = 4,819 individuals), the authors provide the first longitudinal test of whether individuals change their financial planning horizons when they change their partnership status using fixed and random effects regressions. Results show that the financial planning horizon increases as individuals enter cohabitation. No further changes in financial planning horizons are found when they transition into marriage. Changes in horizons are similar for women and men. These results indicate that longer financial planning horizons and marriage are likely outcomes of couples' long‐term commitment, which develops during cohabitation. The symbolic and legal institution of marriage is not additionally associated with individual financial planning as a dimension of future orientation.     

Verbot von Leerverkäufen in der Krise

During the recent financial and economic crisis political and corporate representatives demanded for stricter regulations of short sales to limit the risks of price manipulation and potential stock price crashes. In autumn 2008 regulators of most industrial countries decided to implement temporary short sale restrictions to prevent a further collapse of the capital market. While some countries restricted only naked short sales and increased their disclosure requirements, other markets like the USA and Great Britain implemented a full ban on short selling. The analysis of these two markets supports the hypothesis that temporary bans are unlikely to prevent or limit large price drops in the affected stocks. Instead the results suggest that the implemented emergency measures led to a temporary overvaluation of stock prices and to a deterioration of market efficiency. These results become even more prominent for stocks with high dispersion of investor opinion.     

Drivers of internationalization success: a conjoint choice experiment on German SME managers

Internationalization is a common growth strategy for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, SMEs face several challenges within the internationalization process. As SMEs are characterized by limited resources, managers are constantly involved in a decision-making process concerning the allocation of the SMEs’ resources. Therefore, internationalization can be understood as a complex, multidimensional decision process. Based on a set of 2244 internationalization decisions made by German SME managers, the present study examines how eight strategic and structural factors drive the perceived international success of SMEs. When applying conjoint choice analysis, the results suggest that especially equity financing in the internationalization process, an appropriate market selection as well as proactive motives, and a long-term scope can drive SMEs’ international success. Moreover, it becomes evident that strategic factors are more relevant for successful internationalization than structural factors.