Gender and family firms: an interdisciplinary approach

This study contributes to developing our understanding of gender and family business, a topic so crucial to recent policies about competitive growth. It does so by providing an interdisciplinary synthesis of some major theoretical debates. It also contributes to this understanding by illuminating the role of women and their participation in the practices of the family and the business. Finally, it explores gender relations and the notion that leadership in family business may take complex forms crafted within constantly changing relationships. Leadership is introduced as a concept that captures the reality of women and men in family firms in a better way than other concepts used by historians or economists like ownership and management.

Gender and family firms: an interdisciplinary approach

This study contributes to developing our understanding of gender and family business, a topic so crucial to recent policies about competitive growth. It does so by providing an interdisciplinary synthesis of some major theoretical debates. It also contributes to this understanding by illuminating the role of women and their participation in the practices of the family and the business. Finally, it explores gender relations and the notion that leadership in family business may take complex forms crafted within constantly changing relationships. Leadership is introduced as a concept that captures the reality of women and men in family firms in a better way than other concepts used by historians or economists like ownership and management.

Energy policies for rural electrification: a social multi-criteria evaluation approach

In this article, a real-world case- study is presented with two general objectives: to give a clear and simple illustrative example of application of social multi-criteria evaluation (SMCE) in the field of rural renewable energy policies, and to help in understanding to what extent and under which circumstances solar energy is suitable for electrifying isolated farmhouses. In this sense, this study might offer public decision- makers some insight on the conditions that favour the diffusion of renewable energy, in order to help them to design more effective energy policies for rural communities.

The private and fiscal returns to schooling and the effect of public policies on private incentives to invest in education: a general framework and some results for the EU

This paper develops a comprehensive framework for the quantitative analysis of the private and fiscal returns to schooling and of the effect of public policies on private incentives to invest in education. This framework is applied to 14 member states of the European Union. For each of these countries, we construct estimates of the private return to an additional year of schooling for an individual of average attainment, taking into account the effects of education on wages and employment probabilities after allowing for academic failure rates, the direct and opportunity costs of schooling, and the impact of personal taxes, social security contributions and unemployment and pension benefits on net incomes. We also construct a set of effective tax and subsidy rates that measure the effects of different public policies on the private returns to education, and measures of the fiscal returns to schooling that capture the long-term effects of a marginal increase in attainment on public finances under c

Labour market frictions, social policies, and barriers to technology adoption

Barriers to technological changes have recently been shown to be a key element in explaining differences in output per worker across countries. This study examines the role that labour market features and institutions have in explaining barriers to technology adoption. I build a model that includes labour market frictions, capital market imperfections and heterogeneity in workers' skills. I found that the unemployment rate together with the welfare losses that workers experiment after displacement are key factors in explaining the existence of barriers to technology adoption. Moreover, I found that none of these factors alone is sufficient to build these barriers. The theory also suggests that welfare policies like the unemployment insurance system may enhance these kinds of barriers while policies like a severance payment system financed by an income tax seem to be more effective in eliminating them.

Catalan Policies and Experiences on Cooperative Repositories

The Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA) together with the Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC) started in 1999 a cooperative repository, named TDR, to file in digital format the full-text of the read thesis at the universities of our country to spread them worldwide in open access preserving the intellectual copyright of the authors. This became operational in 2001 and today it is a service fully consolidated not only among the Catalan universities, but also used by other Spanish universities. Since then, there are four additional cooperative repositories which have been created: RECERCAT, for research papers; RACO, for scientific, cultural and erudite Catalan magazines; PADICAT, for archiving Catalan web sites; and MDC, for Catalan digital collections of pictures, maps, posters, old magazines... These five repositories have some common characteristics: they are open access, that is, they are accessible on the internet for free; they mostly comply with the Open Archive Initiative interoperability protocol for facilitating the efficient dissemination of content; and they have been built in a cooperative manner so that it is easy to adopt common procedures and to share the repository developing and managing costs, it permits more visibility of the indexed documents throughout the search engines, and a better provision for long-term preservation can be made. In this paper we present the common policy established for the Catalan cooperative repositories, we describe the five of them briefly, and we comment on the results obtained of our 6-year experience since the first one became operational.

Technical innovations at the service of cheaper labour in pre-industrial Europe. The Enlightened agenda to transform the gender division of labour in silk manufacturing

In 1749, Jacques de Vaucanson patented his or tour pour tirer la soie or spindle for silk reeling. In that same year he presented his invention to the Academy of the Sciences in Paris, of which he was a member1. Jacques de Vaucanson was born in Grenoble, France, in 1709, and died in Paris in 1782. In 1741 he had been appointed inspector of silk manufactures by Louis XV. He set about reorganizing the silk industry in France, in considerable difficulty at the time due to foreign competition. Given Vaucanson’s position, his invention was intended to replace the traditional Piémontes method, and had an immediate impact upon the silk industry in France and all over Europe.

The Private and fiscal returns to schooling and the effect of public policies on private incentives to invest in education: a general framework and some results for the EU

This paper develops a comprehensive framework for the quantitative analysis of the private and fiscal returns to schooling and of the effect of public policies on private incentives to invest in education. This framework is applied to 14 member states of the European Union. For each of these countries, we construct estimates of the private return to an additional year of schooling for an individual of average attainment, taking into account the effects of education on wages and employment probabilities after allowing for academic failure rates, the direct and opportunity costs of schooling, and the impact of personal taxes, social security contributions and unemployment and pension benefits on net incomes. We also construct a set of effective tax and subsidy rates that measure the effects of different public policies on the private returns to education, and measures of the fiscal returns to schooling that capture the long-term effects of a marginal increase in attainment on public finances under conditions that approximate general equilibrium.

Bargaining one-dimensional policies and the efficiency of super majority rules

We consider negotiations selecting one-dimensional policies. Individuals have single-peaked preferences, and they are impatient. Decisions arise from a bargaining game with random proposers and (super) majority approval, ranging from the simple majority up to unanimity. The existence and uniqueness of stationary subgame perfect equilibrium is established, and its explicit characterization provided. We supply an explicit formula to determine the unique alternative that prevails, as impatience vanishes, for each majority. As an application, we examine the efficiency of majority rules. For symmetric distributions of peaks unanimity is the unanimously preferred majority rule. For asymmetric populations rules maximizing social surplus are characterized.

Gender based-violence at Universities

Estudi realitzat a partir d’una estada al Center for Lifelng Learning de l’ University of Warwick, entre 2006 i 2008. Aquesta recerca es centra en l'estudi del fenomen de la violència de gènere a les universitats. Recerques prèvies ens indiquen que la violència de gènere afecta a tot tipus de dones, de totes les cultures, edats, estatus professionals i nivells educatius. També es constata que aquesta violència no només es dóna en l'àmbit domèstic, sinó també en diferents àmbits socials, incloses les institucions educatives. La literatura científica sobre aquesta temàtica de països com Estats Units o Canadà ha incidit en com també trobem aquest fenomen en els contextos universitaris. A Europa s'ha fet molt poca recerca centrada en analitzar la violència de gènere que afecta a les dones a les universitats. Amb aquest estudi s'ha explorat la literatura científica existent a nivell mundial sobre aquesta temàtica, s'ha analitzat el tractament d'aquesta problemàtica a nivell de legislacions i recomanacions institucionals, principalment a nivell de l'Estat espanyol, de Catalunya i d'organismes internacionals, i s'han analitzat pràctiques en el tractament d'aquesta problemàtica en diferents universitats del Regne Unit. Per altra banda, s'ha incidit en l'estudi del impacte que diferents formes de violència de gènere té en els processos formatius i en els projectes professionals de dones a les universitats. Així mateix, s'han analitzat elements claus de pràctiques a les universitats del Regne Unit en la implementació de polítiques contra l'assetjament sexual que afecta a les dones. La identificació d'aquests elements s'orienta a aportar recomanacions claus per a la implementació de mesures orientades a la prevenció i la superació de diferents formes de violència que afecta a les dones a les universitats.

Gender effects on performance in Bulgarian private enterprises

Many of the newly established private enterprises in transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are owned and managed by women (Degtiar, 2000). However, there are limited research and knowledge on gender, management, and organization in CEE (Metcalfe and Afanassieva, 2005) and, particularly, on the performance of female-owned companies. Sporadic empirical evidence shows that female-owned companies have worse performance than male-owned companies in transition economies (Drnovsek and Glas, 2006; Aidis, 2006). The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we study the factors that affect the performance of female-owned companies in a transition context. Second, we compare how performance varies between female and male-owned businesses in such a context. Combining the Feminist Theory, the Institutional Theory, and the literature on determinants of firm performance, we derive hypotheses about the determinants of the performance of female-owned companies and about gender differences in performance. The proposed hypotheses are tested in a sample of 501 private Bulgarian companies. Our results indicate that a number of individual, organizational, and environmental characteristics are significant determinants of the performance of both female and male-owned companies. Although there are gender differences in performance, they disappear when other factors are controlled for. We conclude with some recommendations for policy implications and place the current results in respect to future research.

The Evolution of adaptation policies in Britain

Adaptació de habitatge al Regne Unit. Ponència presentada al "2º Espacio de Encuentro Rehabilitación y Adaptación Funcional de la Vivienda" (Sant Sebastià, 2 Juny 2010)

The Impact of democratization: a preliminary investigation on social policies and political violence in Latin America

The recent strides of democracy in Latin America have been associated to conflicting outcomes. The expectation that democracy would bring about peace and prosperity have been only partly satisfied. While political violence has been by and large eradicated from the sub-continent, poverty and social injustice still prevail and hold sway. Our study argues that democracy matters for inequality through the growing strength of center left and left parties and by making political leaders in general more responsive to the underprivileged. Furthermore, although the pension reforms recently enacted in the region generated overall regressive outcomes on income distribution, democratic countries still benefit from their political past: where democratic tradition was stronger, such outcomes have been milder. Democratic tradition and the specific ideological connotations of the parties in power, on the other hand, did not play an equally crucial role in securing lower levels of political violence: during the last wave of democratizations in Latin America, domestic peace was rather an outcome of political and social concessions to those in distress. In sum, together with other factors and especially economic ones, the reason why recent democratizations have provided domestic peace in most cases, but have been unable so far to solve the problem of poverty and inequality, is that democratic traditions in the subcontinent have been relatively weak and, more specifically, that this weakness has undermined the growth of left and progressive parties, acting as an obstacle to redistribution. Such weakness, on the other hand, has not prevented the drastic reduction of domestic political violence, since what mattered in this case was a combination of symbolic or material concessions and political agreements among powerful élites and counter-élites.

How to avoid gender bias in classroom interaction? A cooperative learning experience

This project aims to analyse the kind of questions the teacher asks students in order to encourage them to participate in her classes. Consequently, the researcher has read relevant literature and has analysed a short excerpt of a video recorded during her first practicum. She has also analysed a number of activities carried out during her second practicum in order to find out if she had improved her questioning skills in the classroom