Family Characteristics and Mate Selection: Evidence From Computer‐Assisted Dating in Japan

Research on mate selection rarely considers singles' preferences for their future partners' family configurations and experiences. Using online dating records from a matchmaking agency in Japan, a society with a strong emphasis on family and kinship, we examine how singles' responses to date requests correspond to potential mates' family circumstances. Results showed that singles' preferences for potential partners' family characteristics stem from a concern about future obligations toward the partner's family and stereotypes associated with certain family traits. Singles are less likely to accept requests from those from large families, which are seen as traditional. Being from a large family, however, hampers individuals' dating chances more if they are firstborn and have no brothers, two conditions that make them the designated child to care for elderly parents. We also find that Japanese singles seek partners with more of the universally valued family traits rather than traits similar to their own.     

Intra-household inequality in transitional Russia

The paper proposes an original strategy for analyzing household sharing of income and satisfaction. Using two different subjective questions from the Russian data RLMS (Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey), we assume a correspondence between, first, the perception of income that household members report and their true income sharing, and, second, between their answer to a satisfaction question and their utility. We show that answers given by different members of the household bring pertinent information on income sharing and utility in the household. In particular, we find a significant effect of the female–male wage ratio in reported income perception and satisfaction differentials between household members. Our data covers the transition period (1994–2003) characterized by massive economic and social changes in Russia. We investigate the evolution of intra-household welfare distribution by exploiting the episode of the financial crisis of 1998 to distinguish two periods: pre- and post-crisis. Our empirical strategy consists of applying probit-type models allowing the parameters to change in a discrete manner between two periods and accounting for discrete unobserved heterogeneity.     

Inventory Systems with Unreliable Suppliers

The aim of this article is to establish the optimal control of a periodic-review inventory system with two suppliers. One of them delivers orders immediately, the other one is unreliable delivering the orders immediately only with probability p ∈ (0, 1). Two cases are considered. In the first case, it is possible to order any inventory amount from each of suppliers. In the second case, the system budget is restricted.     

The origins of anti-Jewish policy in the Cossack regions of the Russian Empire,late nineteenth and early twentieth century

In the 1880s and 1890s several laws were issued in the Tsarist empire further restricting the rights of Jews in the Cossack regions. Consequently, the Don, Kuban and Terek regions were “closed” to permanent Jewish residence. In the early twentieth century, a similar trend occurred in relation to Ural Cossacks. On the one hand, the actions coincided chronologically with the tightening of government policy in relation to the Jewish population and, on the other, each of these areas had internal problems resulting from their specific conditions. This study attempts to find out whether this process was a simple consequence of the general restrictive policies in relation to Jews, or whether it was informed by local conditions.     

Benchmarking airports from a managerial perspective

Benchmarking airports is currently popular both in the academic literature and in practice but has proved rather problematic due to the heterogeneity inherent in any reasonably sized dataset. Most studies either treat the airport production technology as a black box, or separate the terminal and airside activities, assessing them individually. In this article we analyze airports as a single unit due to the direct complementarities, thus avoiding the artificial separation of inputs. Using data envelopment analysis (DEA), we open the black box in which a network describes the production process, thus demonstrating the sequential effects that separate final from intermediate outputs, including those under partial managerial control and those that are known to be non-discretionary. To further improve the benchmarking process, we identify appropriate peers for a case study of 43 European airports over 10 years, through a restricted reference mechanism according to pre-defined characteristics. Compared to basic DEA models, the results of the proposed structure provide more meaningful benchmarks with comparable peer units and target values that are potentially achievable in the medium term. By identifying each unit's individual reference set, unique outliers influence the performance measurement less severely than occurs under basic DEA. In addition, the formulations produce an implementation path that moves the airport towards the Pareto frontier gradually, taking into account the regulatory and business environment in which the unit is located.     

Innovation-by-numbers: an autoethnography of innovation as violence

This article offers an account of a university exercise in ‘innovation’ to illustrate how innovation discourses and processes can be a vehicle for violence in organisations. Presented as two narratives of the same event told from different perspectives, our stories of a curriculum redesign workshop explore the ways innovation became a form of symbolic capital that prompted struggles of control and compliance among individual staff. Schemes of managerial dominance were then in turn individuated, while the assault of innovation became institutionalised and ultimately shielded from critical interrogation. In presenting these accounts, we seek to challenge the rising dominance of innovation as something vital to economic growth and social needs, highlighting instead how its romanticisation is highly problematic.     

Russia and Regional Institutions in the Asia-Pacific Region

Until the past few years, post-Soviet Russia devoted insufficient attention to multilateral processes of cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region (APR). This situation gradually started to change in the period leading up to and during Russia’s stint as chair of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in 2012. An additional stimulus to more active Russian participation in institutions of regional cooperation in the APR was implementation of the policy of the “turn to the East,” which became especially urgent after the crisis of 2014 in Russia’s relations with the West. As it happened, however, Russia strengthened its ties with multilateral institutions in the APR at exactly the time when many mechanisms of cooperation were in crisis and weakened by tensions between China and the United States in the region and also by competing regional projects promoted by these powers.     

Labour migrants in post-Soviet Moscow: patterns of settlement*

This article explores the impact of the social and the spatial structures of Moscow on the patterns of settlement of labour migrants. It emphasizes the ways in which the structure of post-Soviet urban environment differs from the European and U.S. one, and uses interviews with guest workers from Central Asia to map out the strategies they employ in their search for accommodation in Moscow, as well as the barriers they encounter. Special attention is paid to the role played by ethnic networks in the lives of migrant workers, and the ways in which these networks are configured by the urban space. This article demonstrates how the absence of spatial segregation in the post-Soviet city, inherited from the Soviet period, affects the trajectories of social and economic integration of migrants and explains the absence of ‘ethnic areas’ in today’s Moscow.     

THE UNEQUAL ENFORCEMENT OF LIBERALIZATION: EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIA'S REFORM OF BUSINESS REGULATION

We document the unequal enforcement of liberalization reform of business regulation across Russian regions with different governance institutions, which leads to unequal effects of liberalization. National liberalization laws were enforced more effectively in subnational regions with more transparent government, a more informed population, a higher concentration of industry, and stronger fiscal autonomy. As a result, liberalization had a substantial positive effect on the performance of small firms and the growth of the official small business sector in regions with stronger governance institutions. In contrast, in regions with weaker governance institutions, we observe no effect of reform and, in some cases, even a negative effect.