Spatial patterns of office employment in the New York region

This study analyzes the regional spatial dynamics of the New York region for a period of roughly twenty years and places the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the context of longer-term regional dynamics. The analysis reveals that office-using industries are still heavily concentrated in Manhattan despite ongoing decentralization in many of these industries over the last twenty years. Financial services tend to be highly concentrated in Manhattan whereas administrative and support services are the least concentrated of the six major office-using industry groups. Although office employment has been by and large stagnant in Manhattan for at least two decades, growth of output per worker has outpaced the CMSA as well as the national average. This productivity differential is mainly attributable to competitive advantages of office-using industries in Manhattan and not to differences in industry composition. Finally, the zip-code level analysis of the Manhattan core area yielded further evidence of the existence of significant spillover effects at the small-scale level.

Higher education as a portfolio investment: students’ choices about studying, term time employment, leisure, and loans

Recent UK changes in the number of students entering higher education, and in the nature of financial support, highlight the complexity of students’ choices about human capital investments. Today’s students have to focus not on the relatively narrow issue of how much academic effort to invest, but instead on the more complicated issue of how to invest effort in pursuit of ‘employability skills’, and how to signal such acquisitions in the context of a highly competitive graduate jobs market. We propose a framework aimed specifically at students’ investment decisions, which encompasses corner solutions for both borrowing and employment while studying.

Competing for attentional priority: temporary goals versus threats

Numerous studies have shown that attention is biased toward threatening events. More recent evidence has also found attentional biases for stimuli that are relevant to the current and temporary goals of an individual. We examined whether goal-relevant information still evokes an attentional bias when this information competes with threatening events. In three experiments, participants performed a dot probe task combined with a separate task that induced a temporary goal. The results of Experiment 1 showed that attention was oriented to goal-relevant pictures in the dot probe task when these pictures were simultaneously presented with neutral or threatening pictures. Whether goal-relevant pictures themselves were threatening or neutral did not influence the results. Experiment 2 replicated these findings in a sample of highly trait-anxious participants. Experiment 3 showed that attention was automatically deployed to stimuli relevant to a temporary goal even in the presence of stimuli that signal imminent and genuine threat (i.e., a colored patch signaling the presentation of an aversive noise). These findings further corroborate the conclusion that an individual's current and temporary goals guide early attentional processes

The politics of temporary work deregulation in Europe: solving the French puzzle

Temporary work has expanded in the last three decades with adverse implications for inequalities. Because temporary workers are a constituency that is unlikely to impose political costs, governments often choose to reduce temporary work regulations. While most European countries have indeed implemented such reforms, France went in the opposite direction, despite having both rigid labour markets and high unemployment. My argument to solve this puzzle is that where replaceability is high, workers in permanent and temporary contracts have overlapping interests, and governments choose to regulate temporary work to protect permanent workers. In turn, replaceability is higher where permanent workers’ skills are general and wage coordination is low. Logistic regression analysis of the determinants of replaceability — and how this affects governments’ reforms of temporary work regulations — supports my argument. Process tracing of French reforms also confirm that the left has tightened temporary work regulations to compensate for the high replaceability.

The effect of the national setting on employment practice: the case of downsizing

Although there is now a sizeable body of academic literature that tries to explain cross-country differences in terms of corporate control, capital market development, investor protection and politics, there is as yet very little literature on the degrees of protection accorded to other corporate stakeholders such as employees, based on a systematic comparison of firm level evidence. We find that both theories of legal origin and the varieties of capitalism approach are poor predictors of the relative propensity of firms to make redundancies in different settings. However, the political orientation of the government in place and even more so the nature of the electoral system are relatively good explanators of this propensity. In other words, political structures and outcomes matter more than more rigid institutional features such as legal origin. We explore the reasons for this, drawing out the implications for both theory and practice.

Workers with elderly dependants: employment law’s response to the latest care-giving conundrum

This paper considers how employment laws are being used in response to what we have termed ‘the eldercare/workplace conundrum’. It is well known that people are now living longer but health is still failing in a significant percentage of older people, meaning that many adults require care for longer, albeit to varying degrees and for varying amounts of time. Many of these individuals will receive care from relatives or close friends who are participating in the labour market: this is increasingly likely as adults are expected / wanting to remain in paid work for longer, often into their 60s and 70s. The requirements of elderly dependants can cause these workers huge difficulties and dilemmas as they attempt, across time, to accommodate the particular needs of the person for whom they wish to provide care, often a loved one, and meet the particular demands of their employment relationship. In this paper we consider why this is an area of social policy that warrants effective legal engagement and consider, drawing on various examples of legal responses in other countries that face similar conundrums, what might improve legal engagement in this area.

Investigating hydrological regimes and processes in a set of catchments with temporary waters in Mediterranean Europe

Seven catchments of diverse size in Mediterranean Europe were investigated in order to understand the main aspects of their hydrological functioning. The methods included the analysis of daily and monthly precipitation, monthly potential evapotranspiration rates, flow duration curves, rainfall runoff relationships and catchment internal data for the smaller and more instrumented catchments. The results showed that the catchments were less dry than initially considered. Only one of them was really semi-arid throughout the year. All the remaining catchments showed wet seasons when precipitation exceeded potential evapotrans-piration, allowing aquifer recharge, wet runoff generation mechanisms and relevant baseflow contribution. Nevertheless, local infiltration excess (Hortonian) overland flow was inferred during summer storms in some catchments and urban overland flow in some others. The roles of karstic groundwater, human disturbance and low winter temperatures were identified as having an important impact on the hydrological regime in some of the catchments.

Union inclusiveness and temporary agency workers: the role of power resources and union ideology

This article investigates the determinants of union inclusiveness towards agency workers in Western Europe, using an index which combines unionization rates with dimensions of collective agreements covering agency workers. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we identify two combinations of conditions leading to inclusiveness: the ‘Northern path’ includes high union density, high bargaining coverage and high union authority, and is consistent with the power resources approach. The ‘Southern path’ combines high union authority, high bargaining coverage, statutory regulations of agency work and working-class orientation, showing that ideology rather than institutional incentives shapes union strategies towards the marginal workforce.