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Since Converse's paper, opinion constraint has been defined as the degree to which voters hold ideologically consistent opinions across different issues. Yet, scholars have found that opinions departing from the liberal/conservative categories constitute alternative ways of organizing political preferences. This suggests a methodological dilemma: how can we assess the consistency of opinions based on empirical, rather than theoretically predefined, criteria? This article proposes measuring constraint as the extent to which citizens' policy preferences resemble those of their most preferred political parties (a top-down approach). To do so, it relies on data from the 2019 European Election Studies and the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey. Analyses show that a top-down measure of opinion constraint correlates weakly with pre-existing measures of this concept (discriminant validation). Findings also suggest that well-established hypotheses about the predictors and effects of constraint are confirmed when using the top-down measure (nomological validation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an empirical investigation on the determinants of workplace accidents across Europe and focuses on the extent to which production-system characteristics (employment sectoral risk, size of firms, temporary contracts), business cycle and socio-economic factors (GDP, level of investments, unemployment, education) and other territorial controls (crime index) might account for cross-country heterogeneity. We use Eurostat data, and our panel is composed of 27 European countries over the period 2010–2018. Implementing different functional forms and estimation methodologies (pooled OLS, panel fixed and random effects models, system-GMM and semiparametric fixed effects model), we find robust evidence that productive-system structural characteristics, business cycle controls and the other territorial variables are effective in explaining European cross-country heterogeneity. Moreover, we find evidence of a nonlinear relationship between GDP and occupational accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although leisure constraints that individuals have to cope with can negatively affect their social inclusion and satisfaction with life, little research has addressed the link between these variables. Therefore, the current paper examined the moderator role of leisure constraints on the relationship between satisfaction with life and leisure constraints among adults living in five different European countries. The respondents were 1,382 women and 877 men adults. The findings of analysis revealed that all factors used in the study accounted for 15% of the variance in satisfaction with life and social inclusion had a significant and positive impact on satisfaction with life. As a result, it can be said that leisure constraints had a moderating effect on the relationship between satisfaction with life and social inclusion. The present research study recommends that social inclusion should be encouraged through decreasing to leisure constraints to increase the life satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 crisis holds for firms all over the world. Under these circumstances, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the landscape of the European countries in terms of the earnings manipulation in COVID-19 era. Therefore, we compared companies from 15 European countries. The results show that the deteriorating economic conditions caused by COVID-19 are reflected in the managers' activity for earnings management in the context of European companies. Moreover, the panorama of earnings management activities in Europe is quite heterogeneous and inconsistent as we observe significant differences between European countries in the practice of earnings management. Additionally, rather than a single incentive or factor, we find a wide range of variables that affected managers' decisions to engage in earnings manipulation in COVID-19 times. Indeed, the results show that lack of growth opportunity caused by the pandemic, increased amount of debt, volatility of cash flow or sales, even size, age, or book value, were variables that influenced managers' decisions to manipulate earnings in pandemic. In addition, the industry effect cannot be separated from the impact of COVID- 19. Surprisingly, institutional mechanisms of control, including audit quality or board monitoring, which are widely documented in the literature as limiting earnings management, were ineffective in the COVID-19 period. The presence of mechanisms of control is considered essential variables that limit the practices of earnings management, but even these can occasionally fail, as confirmed our study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines how digital transformation in both the public and private sectors impacts the performance of marine living resources to demonstrate its importance for promoting a sustainable blue economy. Our approach captures the sustainable performance of countries within the European blue economy using three different measures: value added at the factor cost of capture fisheries, shellfish aquaculture, and marine aquaculture. In the context of digitalization, four different aspects are measured, namely online selling, e-commerce sales, e-commerce turnover, e-commerce, and customer relationship management, while digital public services are measured based on digital literacies, business mobility, and key enablers. By using various empirical techniques, namely a panel-corrected standard error (PCSE) model, FGLS models, and a pooled mean group estimation (PMG) in an autoregressive distributed lag estimation method (ARDL), we provide many remarkable findings. During the 2011–2019 period, we estimate that digitalization will have a significant impact on improving the sustainability of the blue economy in Europe. Nevertheless, long-term effects are more likely to be noticeable. Further, in the shape of a U curve, we also find that digitalization has nonlinear effects on marine living resources in the private and public sectors. In this study, results indicate that digitalization affects marine living resources only to a certain extent once they have reached a certain maturity level. Our findings suggest that European countries should accelerate the digital economy, strengthen the establishment of digital infrastructure, and promote digital implementation on the path toward sustainable marine living resources. • We examine impacts of digital transformation on the performance of marine living resources. • Different measures are used to capture marine living resources. • Digitalization has a significant impact on improving the sustainability of the blue economy. • The effects of digitalization on resource productivity follow a nonlinear U-shaped curve. • Long-term effects are more likely to be noticeable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the role of wealth in modeling the propensity to consume luxurious goods and services, the literature has so far neglected the role of wealth as inferred from the stock market in modeling tourism inflow. Using 43 European countries over the period 1994???2019, we demonstrate that demand-side wealth effect as inferred from the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) indexes is an important determinant of inbound tourism. We find that a good financial mood extrapolated from the bullish wealth effect positively influences the inflow of tourists to Europe. The effect of the relationship between external wealth effect and inbound tourism is higher for non-EU member countries and countries in Eastern Europe. Lastly, we find that the wealth effect in the US was an important factor in predicting inbound tourism during the global financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]