The myth of price convergence under economic integration: A proposed explanation for the difference in food prices across European countries

Conventional globalization theory states that regional economic integration will precede price standardization across participating countries due to the increased buying power of large retail groups and parallel imports. The resulting price corridor should merely reflect differences in logistic costs and short-term, local competitive actions. Yet, this study uses panel data from 25 European countries to examine how hefty food and beverage price differentials between regions remained constant over the last decade. Income, store productivity, and market concentration all contribute to the explanation for regional price differences. These findings suggest that, contrary to straight-line globalization theory, large European retailers’ decisions can influence price convergence and maintain important price dispersion between economically integrated countries. We provide recommendations to enhance market integration.     

Modelling financial satisfaction across life stages: A latent class approach

We explore the determinants of financial satisfaction using a modelling framework which allows the drivers of financial satisfaction to vary across life stages. Given that financial satisfaction is measured as an ordered variable, our modelling approach is based on a latent class ordered probit model with an ordered probit class assignment function. Our analysis of household survey data indicates that four life stages are supported by the data. Our results suggest that such flexibility is important in understanding the drivers of financial satisfaction over the life cycle since there is a substantial amount of parameter heterogeneity across the four classes.     

Trust and the Dilemmas of Suicide Risk Assessment in Non-government Mental Health Services

Reducing suicide rates is a national mental health priority as over 2,200 people die from suicide each year in Australia. Increasingly, nongovernment organisations (NGOs) provide services to people experiencing severe and persistent mental illnesses—a significant cohort at risk of suicide. While clinical services are generally seen as the arbiters of risk, little is known of how suicide risk assessments are undertaken in NGOs. This article reports the findings of a survey-based pilot study of 44 frontline workers in mental health-focused NGOs in Tasmania, Australia, with the aim of sketching a preliminary picture of this under-studied terrain. We identified the assessment practices utilised by workers, and the challenges and dilemmas they experienced in navigating issues of trust in suicide risk assessment in contexts where they often felt vulnerable and under-prepared. We argue that these early findings demonstrate the need for organisations to foster cultures of trust to facilitate both the activities of relationship building between practitioners and clients, and those of monitoring risk.     

Building up Resilience in a Pharmaceutical Supply Chain through Inventory,Dual Sourcing and Agility Capacity

This paper is inspired by a risk management problem faced by a leading pharmaceutical company. Key operational risk mitigation measures include Risk Mitigation Inventory (RMI), Dual Sourcing and Agility Capacity. We study the relationship between these three measures by modeling the drug manufacturing firm that is exposed to supply chain disruption risk. The firm determines optimal RMI levels for assumed Dual Sourcing and Agility Capacity. We quantify the decrease in RMI levels in the presence of Dual Sourcing and Agility Capacity. Furthermore, using an example, we analyze RMI, Dual Sourcing and Agility Capacity decisions jointly. It turns out that RMI and Agility Capacity can be substitutes as long as no Dual Source is available. Once the Dual Source is available, Agility Capacity and Dual Sourcing appear to be substitutes. We further show that for long disruption times, the optimal Dual Source production rate may decrease in the disruption time. Within our modeling framework, we introduce an operational metric that quantifies Supply Chain Resilience. Supply chain disruptions can have a severe business impact and need to be managed appropriately.     

The politics of the Digital Single Market: culture vs. competition vs. copyright

This paper examines the implications for European music culture of the European Union’s (EU) Digital Single Market strategy. It focuses on the regulatory framework being created for the management of copyright policy, and in particular the role played by collective management organisations (CMOs or collecting societies). One of the many new opportunities created by digitalisation has been the music streaming services. These depend on consumers being able to access music wherever they are, but such a system runs counter to the management of rights on a national basis and through collecting organisations which act as monopolies within their own territories. The result has been ‘geo-blocking’. The EU has attempted to resolve this problem in a variety of ways, most recently in a Directive designed to reform the CMOs. In this paper, we document these various efforts, showing them to be motivated by a deep-seated and persisting belief in the capacity of ‘competition’ to resolve problems that, we argue, actually lie elsewhere – in copyright policy itself. The result is that the EU’s intervention fails to address its core concern and threatens the diversity of European music culture by rewarding those who are already commercially successful.     

Public housing into private assets: Wealth creation in urban China

State socialist economies provided public housing to urban citizens at nominal cost, while allocating larger and better quality apartments to individuals in elite occupations. In transitions to a market economy, ownership is typically transferred to existing occupants at deeply discounted prices, making home equity the largest component of household wealth. Housing privatization is therefore a potentially important avenue for the conversion of bureaucratic privilege into private wealth. We estimate the resulting inequalities with data from successive waves of a Chinese national income survey that details household assets and participation in housing programs. Access to privatization programs was relatively equal across urban residents in state sector occupations. Elite occupations had substantially greater wealth in the form of home equity shortly after privatization, due primarily to their prior allocations of newer and higher quality apartments. The resulting gaps in private wealth were nonetheless small by the standards of established market economies, and despite the inherent biases in the process, housing privatization distributed home equity widely across those who were resident in public housing immediately prior to privatization.     

Commitment to tax compliance: Timing effect on willingness to evade

Experimental and empirical literature on individual decision-making has shown a remarkable difference between planning and ongoing decisions: when asked to plan their actions, people overweight events with low probability; on the contrary, in ongoing decisions, they tend to ignore them. We report on a laboratory experiment designed to explore the presence of this decisional inconsistency in taxpayers’ behavior, by means of a commitment system for compliance. In line with the overweighting of events with small probabilities (i.e. fiscal audits), we find that planning induces the majority of people not only to adopt a mechanism of commitment to tax compliance, but also to actually comply.     

Calculation of the expected lifetime lost due to an extra risk

Methods are given for estimating the average years of life lost when a person is discovered to be at risk from an extra hazard. The methods use the probability per year of the extra risk striking, and the mean and standard deviation of lifetime in the absence of the risk. The formulae are simple enough that only a hand‐held calculator is needed.     

从国际视野看研究生教育成本分担

在西方国家,研究生交费入学,即生均教育成本分担被视为必然现象。如何联系我国研究生教育发展的实际,积极借鉴发达国家发展研究生教育的经验,把制订研究生教育成本分担与资助政策作为推进我国研究生教育运行机制改革的有效手段,已成为人们关注的焦点。建议在构建我国研究生教育投资主体多元化与资助政策的过程中,积极引进政策调节与市场竞争相结合的机制;实行研究生教育成本分担与资助的政策措施要与高校内部管理体制的改革有机结合起来。