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Matchings in a market may have varying degrees of compromise from efficiency, fairness, and or stability. A distance function allows to quantify such concepts or the (dis)similarity between any two matchings. There are a few attempts to propose such functions; however, these are tailored for specific applications and ignore the individual preferences completely. In this paper, we construct a normative framework to quantify the difference between outcomes of market mechanisms in matching markets, while endogenizing the preferences of the individuals into the distance concept. Several conditions are introduced to capture natural and appealing behavior of such functions. We find a class of distance functions called scaled Borda distances, which is the only class of distance functions that satisfies these conditions simultaneously.

In an empirical, dynamic simultaneous equation model (DSEM) for Brazil with 22 equations and variables, we show that foreign income is a driver of economic growth besides semi-endogenous technical change. With a balance-of-payments constraint and endogenous terms of trade, the major mechanism is (i) world GDP driving exports, (ii) exports paying for imported capital goods, which (iii) enter a production function increasing output and the foreign-debt/GDP ratio and (iv) increase the endogenous labour force, and (v) slightly reduce human capital growth. The savings gap drives foreign debt and interest rates up and make the model unstable. Permanent increases of human capital increase the R&D/GDP ratio, labour-augmenting productivity, and GDP. A policy to increase the R&D/GDP ratio leads to more human capital, labour productivity and GDP levels. Both knowledge policies reduce the debt/GDP ratio. A lasting shock on the terms of trade reveals that there is no Harberger–Laursen–Metzler effect. The results hold in the presence of endogenous terms of trade, foreign debt, net foreign income, and net current transfers from abroad, and non-Walrasian (dis-)equilibrium variables: inflation and changing inventories for the goods market, and unemployment in the labour market. Policy should strengthen the weak link from R&D (research and development) to technical change and make education more attractive.

PurposeThis paper aims to measure the extent to which students possess the necessary competences of an employable graduate, the authors explored the development and validation of a questionnaire that measures employability competences of students in higher education through combining insights from higher education and workplace learning literature.Design/methodology/approachThe paper aims to develop and validate the questionnaire a systematic literature review and factor analyses were conducted. The authors applied the questionnaire to two different groups of students. First, to undergraduate students in an applied sciences program in Belgium (N = 935). The dataset was randomly divided into two subsets to conduct an exploratory and a confirmatory factor analysis. Next, another confirmatory factor analysis was done to cross-validate the factor structure found. For this, the questionnaire was offered to a group of undergraduate and graduate students at a university in The Netherlands (N = 995).FindingsThe results support a model of employability based on combined insights from higher education and workplace learning literature. The model consists of the following seven factors: social competences, e-literacy, efficacy beliefs, flexibility, healthy work–life balance, lifelong learning and oral and written communication.Originality/valueThe questionnaire can be utilized to screen students' employability profiles and examine the relationship between teaching practices and students’ employability competences.

We analyze the dynamic interaction of Japan's total factor productivity (TFP), GDP, stocks of domestic and foreign private and public as well as mission-oriented R&D, called GBARD in OECD statistics, in a vector-error-correction model (VECM) for Japan with stock data for the period 1987-2016. Permanent policy changes show the following main results: (i) GBARD as well as private and public R&D each encourage growth rates of the other R&D stocks and of TFP and GDP, and (ii) all have high internal rates of return; (iii) Japan's R&D policies affect and are affected by foreign R & D; in particular, Japan's public R&D has a positive impact on European private R&D, whereas other OECD countries' R&D has a negative one. Japan's R&D policies should be supported by education policies enhancing especially the number of PhDs and IT personnel.

To adapt to a changing climate, decision-makers design, evaluate, and implement measures that have an implication of justice on citizens in the present and well into the future. Decision-makers are often required to make decisions without certainty of the consequences and understanding their effects on intergenerational justice. Thus, managing the impacts of climate change requires novel decision-aiding approaches that consider climate impacts’ temporal and spatial heterogeneity and the uncertainty in climate predictions, preferences, and values. We reviewed the literature on the extent to which principles of intergenerational justice—conservation of options and resources for future generations—have been integrated to traditional approaches in climate resilience decision-making. We explore the extent to which flexibility, i.e., the conservation and expansion of options in subsequent decision periods, can contribute to upholding the principles of intergenerational justice under uncertainty. We illustrate the approach in the case of the Delta Programme in the Netherlands, a complex system designed to protect against sea-level rise (SLR). Designing adaptation strategies to SLR with flexibility as a core concept brings significant advantages in circumstances of uncertainty. The conservation of options in flexible pathways, in this case, contributes to the principles of intergenerational justice. Our civilization’s long-term sustainability and survival may depend on the extent to which individuals can see beyond their gains and toward the gains of the collective society at an intergenerational scale.

Prior research finds that clients of high-quality auditors report higher-quality GAAP earnings. We extend this research to investigate whether auditor quality is associated with the quality of voluntarily disclosed non-GAAP earnings measures. Using a sample of Australian firms disclosing annual non-GAAP metrics, we find that clients of high-quality auditors are more likely to voluntarily disclose non-GAAP earnings numbers. However, clients of high-quality auditors make adjustments in calculating non-GAAP earnings (non-GAAP exclusions) that are less predictive of future earnings and less value relevant than those of other firms. These results indicate that their adjustments are of higher quality. We also find similar results for U.S. firms using a sample of quarterly non-GAAP earnings disclosures. Overall, our evidence indicates that commonly used indicators of audit quality for GAAP reporting are positively associated with the quality of voluntarily disclosed non-GAAP earnings measures. JEL Classifications: J33; M41.

Two important and current trends in the domain of work are the aging workforce and the high and increasing requirement for work-related learning due to the rate of technological advancement and innovation. Together, they create a precarious situation, as many theories suggest a decline in motivation to learn as people age. This study investigates antecedents of motivation and intention to learn in older employees in the financial sector. Specifically, we research how learning motivation is affected by personal and job resources and how these translate into intentions to learn. Data was collected via a quantitative survey of 870 employees aged 50 or older. The data is analyzed by the means of structural equation modelling (SEM). The results show positive relationships between proactive personality and motivation (subjective task value and learning self-efficacy) and negative relationships between institutionalized negative age stereotypes and motivation. This, in turn, affects older employees’ intention to learn. Finally, in contrast to supervisor support, organizational support for professional development raised utility value in the respondents. The findings suggest that organizations might want to recruit employees who are high in pro-active personality. Also, trainings may be fruitful to educate against the negative stereotypes that often associate old age with an inability to learn. Finally, supervisors and trainers should explain the utility and interest of the learning activities since it makes employees motivated to learn.

This paper compares multipliers of different categories of US federal government spending, and in doing so provides a new insight as to why fiscal multipliers may differ across countries and time. We identify exogenous federal government spending shocks at the state level for defense and non-defense spending. Using a projection-based approach, we estimate the cumulative multiplier due to shocks in either of these spending categories. Our results indicate that defense spending yields lower multipliers than non-defense spending. Thus, focusing only on defense spending may result in underestimating the multiplier for government spending.

Many business-owning families aspire to someday transfer their firm to the next family generation. Controversy surrounds the question of how these transgenerational intentions affect risky growth strategies such as investments in innovation: some emphasize the positives of a transgenerational time horizon for investments in future growth, others highlight the negatives of a more conservative mindset with amplified concern for stability and risk avoidance. Using regulatory focus theory, we resolve this long-standing controversy about the impact of transgenerational intentions by theorizing how they can trigger a promotion focus with increased innovation spending or a prevention focus with reduced innovation spending, depending on the firm's survival hazard. Based on a sample of around 3,900 German firms using OLS and 2SLS estimation, we find empirical support for our predictions. This study extends the mixed gamble lens on family firm decision-making with insights from regulatory focus theory to build consensus on the role of transgenerational intentions while shifting consensus on the role of family ownership in relation to the innovation spending decision.

Exploiting detailed disclosures mandated by Accounting Standard Codification (ASC) 820, we provide evidence for the return relevance of Level 3 fair value remeasurements for a comprehensive sample of U.S. listed banks. We find that Level 3 remeasurements recognized in earnings are more return relevant than those recognized in other comprehensive income (OCI). Our results suggest that Level 3 remeasurements in OCI partially reflect transitory illiquidity discounts that are less relevant when banks have the ability to hold the underlying assets. The regulatory capital treatment of OCI also affects the return relevance of Level 3 remeasurements in OCI. Importantly, we find no differences in the return relevance of realized versus unrealized Level 3 remeasurements in earnings, allaying concerns that investors perceive unrealized Level 3 remeasurements of lesser quality. Overall, our findings support the usefulness of the segregated disclosures of Level 3 fair value remeasurements. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

The Kemeny rule is one of the well studied decision rules. In this paper we show that the Kemeny rule is the only rule which is unbiased, monotone, strongly tie-breaking, strongly gradual, and weighed tournamental. We show that these conditions are logically independent.

Expectations are usually introduced in macroeconomic stock-flow consistent models (SFC-models from hereon) in an ad hoc way, without much motivation. Moreover, these are usually very simple forms of expectations, and certainly not some form of rational expectations. The implicit assumption is that expectations do not matter very much in these models. However, the way expectations are modelled in SFC-models is very important for two reasons. The first reason is that expectations are very important in understanding the way the economy reacts to a shock, since the stability of the economy is dependent on the nature of expectations. We show for instance that the more backward-looking expectations are, the more stable the economy tends to become. The second reason is that expectations themselves can also be a source of shocks. We show how under certain circumstances optimism or pessimism in expectations can lead to self-fulfilling prophesies. To illustrate the impact of expectations on the stability of an economy we use a simple model, based on the models in Godley & Lavoie, 2007. The model includes a financial sector and government, since we are convinced that the notion of a monetary economy is crucial to understand the impact of expectations on an economy. We also introduce a foreign sector in a very simple way to allow for a better understanding of the multiplier impact of shocks and of foreign reserves on the economy. First we analyse the stationary state solution and analyse its properties. We show that this model is only stable when either the tax rate or government debt is not too high. We also point out the self-fulfilling properties of optimism and pessimism in expectations in this model. Next to that, we show that under “perfect foresight” the model becomes less stable – more restrictions on taxes and government debt are necessary to guarantee stability of the model. However, under naïve expectations the model becomes more stable – there are less restrictions necessary to guarantee stability of the model (due to path dependency). Finally, we introduce the notion of fundamentalist expectations and show how these affect the stability of the model in an intermediate way. In order to introduce adaptive expectations, we conclude our model with some simulation results – analytical solutions cannot be found. We show how adaptive expectations also require an intermediate reaction of fiscal policy to keep the economy stable.

Infrastructure investment is increasingly important for institutional investors. This paper focuses on pension fund allocations to infrastructure, using the CEM Benchmarking database. We document that larger pension funds, public pension funds, and pension funds with a higher allocation to other alternative assets are more likely to invest in infrastructure. Pension funds across the globe face infrastructure investment costs that are comparable, but we observe significant scale advantages in infrastructure investments, with larger pension funds exhibiting lower investment costs, and higher net returns. Importantly, infrastructure has been among the best-performing asset classes, as measured by net returns, and we document persistence in pension fund infrastructure investment performance over a one-year horizon.

We develop a theoretical framework and propose a relevant empirical analysis of the soybean-complex prices’ cointegration relationships in a high-frequency setting. We allow for heterogeneous expectations among traders on the multi-asset price dynamics and characterize the resulting market behaviour. We demonstrate that the asset prices’ autoregressive matrix rank and the speed of reversion towards the long-term equilibrium are related to the market realized and potential liquidity, unlike the cointegrating vector. Our empirical application to the soybean complex, where we control for volatility, supports our theoretical results when the price idleness of the different assets is properly accounted for. Our analysis further suggests that the presence of cointegration among assets is related to the time of day and the contract maturities traded at a given time.

Teachers play important roles in identifying and promoting gifted students. An open question is: Which student characteristics do teachers use to evaluate whether a student is gifted or not? We used data from a representative sample of Dutch primary school teachers ( N = 1,304) who were asked whether or not they thought the students ( N = 26,720) in their class were gifted. We investigated students’ cognitive and noncognitive attributes as well as demographic factors that might be relevant for this judgment. In sum, the findings revealed that teachers considered students to be gifted when, in comparison with their peers, students were superior in cognitive domains, especially with respect to academic achievement, scored higher on openness to experience and lower on agreeableness, were male, were younger, and came from families with higher parental education. These findings are discussed in relation to research on teacher nominations, teachers’ representations of giftedness and gifted students, and theoretical conceptions of giftedness.

This study goes beyond the classic paradigm that newly qualified teachers (NQTs) are in need of formal support in order to cope with the challenges they face during the early stages of their teaching career. The focus of this survey study with 443 NQTs in Flanders, Belgium is whether NSTs' proactive seeking of feedback from the principal and from their colleagues acts as a mediator between the characteristics of their collegial network and NQTs' job satisfaction. The results reveal that seeking feedback from the principal and colleagues mediates the relation between knowing other colleagues' areas of expertise and valuing that expertise in the collegial network, on the one hand, and job satisfaction, on the other. More specifically, seeking feedback from the principal was more strongly related to NQTs' job satisfaction than seeking feedback from colleagues. Remarkably, psychological safety was only related to seeking feedback from colleagues. No relationship was found between psychological safety and seeking feedback from the principal. The study concludes with suggestions on how to support the professional development of NQTs.

Using quasi-experimental treatment effect methods with unique longitudinal survey data, the paper assesses the impact of vocational training on economic mobility in the short, medium and long term in Thailand. We find that vocational training does not affect upward mobility in terms of income, expenditure and employment. The analysis of the heterogeneity of effects suggests that women, rural residents, youth and elderly, low-educated workers, and economically inactive people benefit less from the vocational training. Computer training courses, training offered by private institutions or in public-private partnerships, and training financed by employers are associated with better outcomes.

We examine how audit partners' geographic proximity to clients affects audit quality. We use hand-collected data to show that approximately half of audit partners are assigned to clients headquartered more than 100 km away from the partners' home locations. Few of these partners relocate after receiving their assignments and, as a result, more than one-third of clients are audited by partners who must commute long distances to visit the client in person. We explore this phenomenon by first modeling how distance affects partner-client matching. We find that partners' geographic proximity to a prospective client is an important matching criterion, but also that trade-offs are made when other partner characteristics such as industry specialization are more likely to be important. Next, consistent with our prediction, we show that audit quality is lower when partners reside farther from their clients. We corroborate our primary findings by showing that the association between partner distance and audit quality is mitigated when partners have access to direct flights to their clients' headquarters and when clients are geographically dispersed. Our paper should be informative for regulators, practicing auditors, and academics interested in how partner-client matching affects audit outcomes.

Cannabis legalization is a hotly contested policy topic. While beneficial to some, cannabis dispensaries may create negative externalities for others. This paper studies the external effects of coffeeshops – Dutch cannabis sales facilities – on house prices. We employ a difference-in-difference framework around a change in regulation, leading to exogenous coffeeshop closings. We find that closings have a negative effect on house prices. Compared to homes nearby remaining coffeeshops, homes nearby closing coffeeshops decrease on average 1.6 to 8.5 percent in value. The findings are robust to a battery of tests and unaffected by the subsequent use of coffeeshop locations.

We analyze the trade effects of a new unfolding transport infrastructure in connection with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Using panel data for the years 1996–2018, featuring 27 exporting countries and 96 industries, we exploit variation in the timing and number of railway connections to estimate whether European countries benefit from increased export revenues and product variety of their shipments to China. We find that both increase and that also indirectly connected countries benefit. Using additional data on the mode of transport, we find that industries with intermediate time-sensitivity appear to increase their utilization of rail-freight to China the most and confirm that the overall increase in exports is also driven by these industries. We further show that mainly Central, Eastern and Southeast European regions are specialized in economic activities related to “railway adopting industries”, which makes likely to benefit the most from first-order gains of improved market access and export opportunities.

This research explores the effect of implementing educational open microcredentials on student motivation, engagement, and completion in open access online courses. Our case study reviews the impact on the Community of Learning for African PhD Fellows, a capacity-building project supporting PhD fellows in Sub-Saharan Africa. It builds on an analysis of data from learning analytics, surveys, and semi-structured interviews. Our case study findings indicate that course completion was low, in course offering rounds with and without online certification. Main hurdles to completion are lack of time and lack of direct career benefits or academic value attached to the course completion. We found that, while open access online courses are appreciated by PhD fellows, the implementation of open microcredentials did not provide an incentive towards completion of online courses for this population. Hard and soft copy certificates at this point are more appreciated.

In this paper, we develop and study a complex data-driven framework for human resource management enabling (i) academic talent recognition, (ii) researcher performance measurement, and (iii) renewable resource allocation maximizing the total output of a research unit. Suggested resource allocation guarantees the optimal output under strong economic assumptions: the agents are rational, collaborative and have no incentives to behave selfishly. In reality, however, agents often play strategically maximizing their own utilities, e.g., maximizing the resources assigned to them. This strategic behavior is typically mitigated by implementation of performance-driven or uniform resource allocation schemes. Next to the framework presentation, we address the cost of such mitigation.

PurposeIn a fast evolving labour market, higher education graduates need to develop employability competences. Key in becoming employable is the ability to reflect on learning experiences, both within a curriculum as well as extra-curricular and work placements. This paper wants to conceptualise how an online learning platform might entail a reflective practice that systematically supports students in reflecting on their learning experiences.Design/methodology/approachWhen studying online learning platforms for developing students' employability competences, it became clear that the effectiveness of the platform depends on how the platform guides students' reflective practice. In turn, the authors studied which features (tools, services and resources) of the online learning platform are guiding the reflective practice.FindingsThis resulted in the introduction of an online learning platform, containing a comprehensive set of online learning tools and services, which supports students' reflective practice and, in turn, their employability competences. The online platform facilitates both feedback from curricular and work-related learning experiences and can be used as a start by students for showcasing their employability competences. The reflective practice consists of a recurrent, systematic process of reflection, containing various phases: become aware, analyse current state, draft and plan a solution, take action and, finally, reflect in and on action.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research revolves around studying the features of online learning platforms and their role in fostering students' reflection and employability competences.Practical implicationsThe conceptual model provides concrete indicators on how to implement online learning platforms for supporting students' reflection and employability competences.Originality/valueThis is the first article that analyses an online learning platform that guides students' reflective practice and fosters their employability competences. The authors provide concrete suggestions on how to model the online platform, building further on reflective practice theory.

We examine persistence and cross-market liquidity spillovers in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange soybean complex futures markets. A multidimensional liquidity measure is derived from the limit-order-book, and a Vector Heterogeneous Autoregressive model estimates high-resoluted liquidity from 30 s to one trading day. We find traders' order placement influenced by the liquidity of related markets. Liquidity persistence and positive liquidity spillovers mainly occur within 30 s, whereas spillovers for longer horizons are mostly negative. Findings are important for hedgers that hedge the crush and traders who wish to capitalize on the short-term deviation of price relationships.

This paper investigates the effects of social assistance on subjective well-being looking at the case of Kyrgyzstan. For this purpose, we exploit recent changes in the design of social assistance and apply a difference in difference (DiD) method combined with an inverse probability weighting (IPW) technique. In contrast to the existing literature, we find that in the short-term, the receipt of social assistance benefits is associated with lower levels of subjective well-being. Our findings also reveal that participation in social assistance leads to some reduction in satisfaction regarding recipients' own economic conditions. Moreover, we find that the negative effects on subjective well-being disappear for the oldest generations, which experienced the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By contrast, the effect is negative for the youth, who grew up in a new society where needing help is ultimately the responsibility of the individual citizen. For individuals with high trust in political institutions, the negative effect of state intervention does not hold, while it persists in case of low trust in political institutions.

This paper studies job search behavior in the midst of a pandemic recession. We use long-running panel data from the Netherlands (LISS) and complement the core survey with our own COVID-specific module, conducted in June 2020. The survey provides data on the job search effort in terms of the number of applications of employed as well as unemployed respondents. We estimate an empirical model of job search over the business cycle over the period 2008–2019 to explore the gap between predicted and actual job search behavior in 2020. We find that job search during the pandemic recession differs strongly from previous downturns. The unemployed search significantly less than what we would normally observe during a recession of this size. For the employed, the propensity to search is even greater than what we would expect, but those who do search make significantly fewer job applications. Expectations about the duration of the pandemic seem to play a key role in explaining job search effort for the unemployed in 2020. Furthermore, employed individuals whose work situation has been affected by COVID-19 are searching more actively for a new job.

This study investigates the impact on audit pricing of PCAOB inspection outcomes on the quality control systems of small audit firms. Quality control deficiencies (QCDs) provide a strong signal about audit quality, which is expected to lead to price changing. We first document that audit fees in the pre-inspection period were higher for small audit firms without QCDs, implying that quality differences were already partially known and priced in the market. Next, we find evidence that in the post-inspection period audit fees further increase for firms without QCDs, while there is limited evidence for fee increases for firms with remediated QCDs, suggesting changes in audit firm reputation. Interestingly, we do not find support for fee changes for audit firms with disclosed quality control deficiencies. Finally, the magnitude of change in audit fees decreases over time. Collectively, these findings contribute to our understanding of audit quality differences amongst small audit firms and the functioning of the small audit firm market.

PurposeLearning from errors is a complex process that requires careful support. Building on affective events theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore how a supportive learning from error climate can contribute to social learning from errors through affective and cognitive error responses by individual professionals.Design/methodology/approachA total of 139 early-career auditors completed an online questionnaire consisting of validated survey scales, allowing for serial mediation analysis to compare direct and indirect effects.FindingsLearning from error climate was directly and positively related to engagement in social learning activities after committing an error. Furthermore, the authors found a double mediation by error strain (an affective error response) and reflecting on errors (a cognitive error response) on this relationship.Practical implicationsOrganizations can actively encourage professionals to learn from their errors by creating a supportive learning from error climate and holding professionals accountable for their errors.Originality/valueThe present study enriches the authors’ understanding of the mechanisms through which learning from error climate influences engagement in social learning activities. It extends prior research on learning from errors by investigating the sequential effects of engagement in error-related learning activities performed individually and in social interaction.

We start from five economic relations of research and development R&D driven growth for 14 OECD countries: GDP and technical change; technical change and private business R&D; domestic private and public R&D; domestic and foreign public R&D; foreign private and public R&D. Cointegration tests force us to go from these five pairs to four triples of these variables. We establish the four relations through (i) panel cointegration tests and (ii) a panel vector-error-correction model (VECM) with cross-section fixed effects in the differenced part and long-term relations from group mean versions of FMOLS and DOLS (fully modified and dynamic OLS) estimation (also with fixed effects), which are the current econometric standard for panel VECMs with homogenous adjustment coefficients and slopes in the differenced terms. Public R&D has positive long-run regression coefficients for direct effects on productivity and indirect ones via private R&D. Shocks on the intercepts of the public R&D growt h equation of the VECM enhance private R&D, technical change, and GDP in a statistically significant way. Permanent changes of foreign public and private R&D have positive growth effects, which are transitional for foreign public R&D.

In Maastricht zijn buitenlandse studenten geen probleem, constateert hoogleraar Frank Cörvers. Zie hen wat vaker als een kans voor Nederland.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have an important position in global sustainability since they are a prominent contributor to global pollution. It is challenging for SMEs to assess their level of business sustainability and identify actions to diminish environmental impact. Sustainability assessment models have been developed for this purpose, but a process focus is missing. Green business process management (Green BPM) aims at reducing the negative environmental impact of organizations through business processes rather than only considering final products and services. Combining literature from business sustainability and Green BPM, our study conceptualizes a Green BPM maturity model and, through multiple case study research, uses it to assess the Green BPM practices of ten manufacturing SMEs. The results reveal the level of business sustainability of SMEs based on six Green BPM factors: green attitude, strategy, governance, modeling, monitoring, and optimization. We further identify relevant benefits, pressures, and barriers that can drive or hinder Green BPM practices. Based on the findings, we make recommendations on how SMEs can accelerate their transition towards higher levels of business sustainability.

It has long been acknowledged that many aspects of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) are highly gendered and that women face an increased risk of violence when access to WASH services is not adequate. However, not enough studies explore where these incidents of violence occur or document the different forms of violence. This research paper will add to the newly emerging research on sextortion as a form of violence that women and girls encounter disproportionately in accessing WASH. This form of violence that takes place at the intersection of corruption and sexual violence has dire social, economic and health consequences, yet little is known as of what increases vulnerability to sextortion. Analyzing original data from a standardized survey with adult women (n = 1,200), interviews (n = 21) and focus group discussions (n = 5), this paper examines the factors that make women vulnerable to sextortion in accessing WASH services. The study was conducted in 2 rural and 2 urban areas in Bangladesh between September and December 2021. The analysis shows that those women living in poverty, in water insecure households and in rural areas are especially vulnerable to experiencing sextortion. The research also shows that the vulnerability factors, while overlapping are not the same as those making women vulnerable to experiencing sexual and gender-based violence, highlighting the importance of studying sextortion separately. The findings contribute to an emerging evidence-base around sextortion, which remains an understudied phenomenon posing an obstacle to the achievement of safe access to water and sanitation for all.

Deze tweede bundel ‘Onderwijs aan het werk’ is het slotdocument van de Leerstoel Onderwijsarbeidsmarkt, die tien jaar werd ingevuld door de bijzonder hoogleraren Frank Cörvers en Marc van der Meer. In hun oraties van 2014 hebben zij de accenten van hun toekomstige onderzoeksactiviteiten gegeven. Tevens hebben zij als leidraad voor hun werk de ‘Lerarenagenda 2013-2020: de leraar maakt het verschil’ van het ministerie van OCW genomen (gepubliceerd in oktober 2013). In 2018 verscheen de eerste bundel ‘Onderwijs aan het werk’ met vele artikelen die een licht werpen op de thema’s die in de Lerarenagenda zijn opgenomen. De leerstoelhouders hebben met ondersteuning van het CAOP gedurende de afgelopen jaren tientallen schriftelijke bijdragen gepubliceerd, expertmeetings en webinars georganiseerd en interviews en presentaties gegeven. Of deze activiteiten hun vruchten hebben afgeworpen in de praktijk, laten we het in het midden. In elk geval hebben ze, gezien alle aandacht die ervoor is geweest, bijgedragen aan de kennisuitwisseling tussen belanghebbenden in het onderwijsveld op het terrein van de onderwijs-arbeidsmarkt, en daarbuiten.

This paper introduces a novel methodology aimed at addressing a critical knowledge gap related to the lack of a systematic understanding of agriculture projects across spatial and temporal dimensions. This gap has impeded efforts to enhance learning and accountability, thereby reducing the overall effectiveness of foreign assistance to the agriculture sector. To address this gap, deductive and inductive methodologies are applied to develop a standardized taxonomy for benchmarking United States Agency for International Development (USAID) agricultural projects. By applying this taxonomy to code all available final evaluations of USAID projects, a large qualitative dataset was generated. This dataset facilitates the analysis of the rich qualitative information available within public project evaluations and covers ninety countries over a span of six decades. The result of this research is a new dataset on the multi-layer composition of development projects, forming the foundation for a machine learning algorithm that expedites the process of synthesizing qualitative evidence and measuring the impact of development aid projects at a systems level. The overarching objective of this research is to contribute to the improvement of project and policy implementation in the field of agriculture development.

"Openness" has become an established norm in the contemporary business environment. However, despite the crucial importance of boundaries and boundary work in organization and management theory, openness-as opening up boundaries of family firms and entrepreneurial families in collaborating with external actors-has received only nascent attention in the family business domain. We introduce the notion of openness in the family business field. Drawing on the organizational boundary and family business literatures, we develop a conceptual framework of family firm openness as boundary work and examine and discuss the drivers, mechanisms, and consequences of openness in family enterprises. Then, drawing on this framework, we set out an agenda for future research that will contribute to a better understanding of openness, boundaries, and boundary work in family firms and entrepreneurial families. We conclude by discussing some contemporary examples of research on the "open family firm." Plain English Summary Openness as boundary work is a significant challenge for many family firms but is critically important in an increasingly complex business environment. We develop a generative framework and future research agenda. Our main implications are for (1) research: our conceptual framework on openness as boundary work and the research questions we put forward as a critical future research agenda open up many possibilities for further developing meaningful and useful theory on openness, boundaries, and boundary work in family firms and entrepreneurial families; (2) practice: we help family firms, entrepreneurial families, and family business advisors better understand the dynamics, complexities, and consequences of openness to make more informed boundary decisions; and (3) society: when family firms open up their boundaries, not only can they create more opportunities for other societal actors, but they can also generate more value than they can do alone. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL

Covid-19 has dramatically changed life in cities across the globe. What remains uncertain is how national policies and appeals to comply with suggested rules translate to changes in the behaviour of citizens in urban areas. This lack of local knowledge leaves urban policy makers and planners with few clues as to the determinants of social resilience in cities during protracted crises like a pandemic. Methods are required to measure the capacity of people to conduct routine activities without risking exposure to a prevalent disease, particularly for those most vulnerable during a health crisis. By spanning the fields of urban resilience, human geography, mobility studies and the behavioural sciences, this study explores how to measure social resilience in cities during a protracted crisis. Using a public participation GIS online platform, we observe changes in citizen behaviour within urban spaces during the Covid-19 pandemic. Inhabitants from three districts of a Dutch city mapped their activity routines during the lockdown period and during the year before the pandemic. Spatio-temporal analysis reveals changes in the clustering of activities into what we describe as ‘activity bubbles'. We reflect on the influence of the urban space on these changes and assess the contribution of this exploratory research methodology for gaining insights into behavioural change. Implications for urban planning and resilience theory are discussed.

Targeting error assessments for social transfers commonly rely on accuracy as a performance metric. This process is typically insensitive to the distributional position of incorrectly classified households. In this paper we develop an extended targeting assessment framework for proxy means tests that accounts for societal sensitivity to targeting errors. We use a social welfare framework to weight targeting errors depending on their position in the welfare distribution and for different levels of societal inequality aversion. While this provides a more comprehensive assessment of targeting performance, we show with two case studies that bias in the data, here in the form of label bias and unstable proxy means testing weights, leads to substantial underestimation of welfare losses that disadvantage some groups more than others.

This paper investigates the role of timely delivery in international competition. Using a demand-side, industry -specific measure of time-sensitivity, we assess the effect of Chinese competition on the export performance of Eastern European transition economies into Western European (EU15) destination-product markets. Our empirical analysis relies on exploiting the increase of Chinese competition in global markets during the first decade of the 2000s. We find evidence of heterogeneous adjustments to Chinese competition among Eastern European exporters due to the differential importance of timely delivery across sectors (i.e. time-sensitivity). While we observe sizable real displacement effects, they appear to be at least 50 percent smaller for time -sensitive exports. Relying on firm-level customs data, we establish that this mechanism also plays a role for responses to Chinese competition within firms.

We link records of firm performance, equity analyst forecast errors, and stock returns around companies’ earnings announcements to firm-specific measures of heat exposure for more than 17,000 firms in 93 countries from 1995 to 2019. We find that increased exposure to extremely high temperatures reduces firms’ revenues and operating income. A one-standard-deviation increase in the number of hot days decreases revenues (operating income) by 0.6% (1.8%) of the average quarterly revenue (operating income). Moreover, we provide evidence that increased heat exposure impacts negatively on firm financial performance relative to analyst predictions and on earnings announcement returns. These findings indicate that capital market participants do not fully anticipate the economic consequences of heat as a first order physical climate risk. This paper was accepted by Colin Mayer, special issue on business and climate change. Funding: N. Pankratz gratefully acknowledges financial support from the French Social Investment Forum and the Principles for Responsible Investment [PhD Research Grant 2017]. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4685 .

China and Europe have both announced plans to be carbon neutral by 2060 and 2050 respectively. In residential sector, energy-saving technologies and behaviours are important measures to achieve carbon neutrality. This study investigated the adoption of technical and behavioural energy-saving measures in Northern China and Western Europe as important paths to achieve carbon neutrality in residential sector. The prevalence of six measures was investigated using a survey, which also enquired about the reasons for the adoption and nonadoption of such measures. The study highlighted remarkable differences in the measures adopted and the reasons for them. People in Northern China were more likely to adopt technical energy-saving measures but less likely to adopt behavioural energy-saving measures than people in Western Europe. Differences in respondents' socio-demographic backgrounds, building details, environmental concerns, or beliefs played a role in the differences observed, but not a great one according to our econometric analysis. Two important reasons for the observed differences were subsidy policies and split incentives due to principal-agent issues between energy companies and energy users. The results showed that the residential sectors in China and Europe are working towards carbon-neutral targets, but in different ways. In Northern China, the direct energy-saving subsidy policy encouraged residents to adopt technical energy-saving measures. In Western Europe, the relatively reasonable energy charging system encouraged people to adopt behavioural energy-saving measures.

Students' academic achievement is a key predictor of various life outcomes and is commonly used for selection as well as for educational monitoring and accountability. With regard to achievement indicators, a differentiation has traditionally been drawn between grades and standardized tests. There is initial, albeit inconclusive, evidence that these indicators might differentially reflect students' personality as encapsulated in the Big Five personality traits as well as measures of cognitive abilities. In this article, we propose the personality-achievement saturation hypothesis (PASH) as an overarching model that describes the association between achievement indicators and personality. The PASH suggests that the differentiation between grades and tests is too simplistic and that associations between personality and achievement instead vary across five main features of the achievement measures that are used: level of standardization, relevance for the student, curricular validity, instructional sensitivity, and cognitive ability saturation. On the basis of findings from prior studies, we focused in particular on conscientiousness and openness to test the PASH. We used data from three large-scale studies (total N = 14,953) and aggregated our findings across these studies. In line with the PASH, the Big Five trait of conscientiousness was most strongly related to measures that were less standardized and less saturated with cognitive ability but higher on curriculum validity, relevance, and instructional sensitivity. In addition, openness was most strongly related to measures that were higher on standardization and cognitive ability saturation but lower on relevance, curriculum validity, and instructional sensitivity in English.Educational Impact and Implications Statement Achievement measures are of central importance for student selection, employment, and educational policy, and according to a widely shared belief, they involve intellectual abilities as well as aspects of personality such as effort and persistence. Up to now, prior research has remained rather inconclusive about why achievement measures vary in their degree of personality saturation. In this study, we developed and successfully tested a new framework (the PASH), which categorizes achievement measures along five main features and thereby contributes to a better explanation of differential associations between personality traits and different achievement measures.

Recent studies have concentrated on environmental and economic impacts of ships. In this regard, fuel and C O 2 emission is considered as one of the important factors for such impacts. In particular, the sailing speed of the vessels affects the fuel consumption and therefore the emission directly. In this study, we consider a speed optimization problem in inland waterway, which is characterized by stochastic waiting times at the lock caused by uncertainty in lock processing time estimations of other vessels. The objective is to minimize fuel consumption of an approaching ship, such that it traverses the river segment in a set deadline. We introduce a mathematical model for this problem and evaluate the effectiveness and attractiveness of two solution approaches: an optimal solution and a simple heuristic. This creates intuitive guidelines for skippers based on information provision to select an appropriate speed decision approach to minimize the total expected fuel consumption and C O 2 emission of inland waterway transportation.

Education is one sector being challenged by aging staff, as well as by increased pressure to innovate. In order to cope with these challenges, educational institutions require teaching staff members, who include teachers, support staff and managers, to show a high level of employability. In this survey-based study, the predictive value of quantitative and qualitative job demands, job autonomy and self-directed learning orientation for three employability competences (occupational expertise, personal flexibility, anticipation and optimization) was investigated using a Dutch sample (N=3139). Moreover, three teaching staff age groups were compared: 50 years old (senior). Path analysis results showed that self-directed learning orientation was positively associated with the three employability competences across all three different age groups. Positive relationships across age groups were also found between quantitative job demands and occupational expertise, and between qualitative job demands and personal flexibility. In addition, multi-group comparisons revealed age differences in our model relationships. The relationship between self-directed learning orientation, on the one hand, and personal flexibility and anticipation and optimization on the other, was stronger for seniors in comparison with the young employees. For the young employees, the role of autonomy was more important in enhancing their occupational expertise. Implications for school principals and HRD managers are discussed. Promoting a self-directed learning orientation and custom-made workplaces that take into account age differences among teaching staff members appear to be key for protecting and enhancing sustainable employability.

We briefly survey the literature which uses data for Gini coefficients of education. We update the Gini coefficients of education to include the year 2015, added to the Barro-Lee data set recently, and compare them to those of the earlier data set based on older Barro-Lee data. A panel analysis shows that every five years education inequality falls by 2.8 percentage points. A stable average value is predicted to be 0.22. Kernel density world distributions for education Ginis loose their twin peaks when going from 1955 to later years, and the right tail of the distribution with high inequality is losing mass over time.

A growing impact evaluation literature on antipoverty transfer programmes in low- and middle-income countries measures changes in utilitarian terms, at their unit value. The paper argues that valuing antipoverty transfers is more appropriately done within a framework of prioritarian social welfare functions, as the very presence of these programmes indicates that polities place a greater value on gains and losses among the disadvantaged. The paper applies this framework to the Senior Citizen Grant in Uganda, including survey and experimental work throwinglight on social preferences for redistribution. It finds that default utilitarian valuation significantly underestimates the social value of transfer programmes.

We investigate the effect of being in the high track for secondary school students on cognitive and non-cognitive skill outcomes. Dutch students are assigned to tracks at the end of elementary school based on a test score. We use this test score in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to exploit the discontinuity in the probability to be assigned to the high track. Our results show that track placement influences cognitive outcomes positively, but leaves students with worse non-cognitive skills. Marginal students therefore face a tradeoff if they could choose the high track over the lower track.

Using unique crop-specific data gathered over 7 years, we study if and how maize-producing farmers in Ethiopia adjust their land allocation decisions in response to pre-planting-season weather variations. We show that farmers adjust their land allocation decisions in response to increased temperatures early in the growing season. In addition to quantifying a substantial adaptation margin that has not been documented before, our study also reveals the presence of a weather variation-induced expansion of maize production into areas that are less suitable for maize cultivation.

Qualitative research is a powerful means to capture human interactions and behavior. Although there are different methodologies to develop models based on qualitative research, a methodology is missing that enables to strike a balance between the comparability across cases provided by methodologies that rely on a common and context-independent framework and the flexibility to study any policy problem provided by methodologies that focus on capturing a case study without relying on a common framework. Additionally, a rigorous methodology is missing that enables the development of both theoretical and empirical models for supporting policy formulation and evaluation with respect to a specific policy problem. In this article, the authors propose a methodology targeting these gaps for ABMs in two stages. First, a novel conceptual framework centered on a particular policy problem is developed based on existing theories and qualitative insights from one or more case studies. Second, empirical or theoretical ABMs are developed based on the conceptual framework and generic models. This methodology is illustrated by an example application for disaster information management in Jakarta, resulting in an empirical descriptive agent-based model.

De energietransitie en de huidige hoge prijzen dwingen ons tot het verminderen van ons gasverbruik. Om van het gas af te gaan zullen alle woningen eerst goed geïsoleerd moeten worden. Hoeveel vermindering van gasverbruik levert woningisolatie op? En is isolatie ook rendabel vanuit een financieel oogpunt?