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The paper examines the degree of interlocking directorships across the major Eurozone economies. It uses the major stock market indices in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium to identify the top of the corporate elite in each country. For the period of 2005–2008, it studies transnational links between European companies. The paper draws attention to a number of features of these interlocks. Firstly transnational interlocks remain relatively low but secondly they do vary considerably. An important issue here is the degree of bilateral integration which is occurring between some countries within the Eurozone, for example France and Belgium, and the degree to which other countries, most notably, Italy are increasingly disconnected, whilst the two most powerful economies, France and Germany, are very weakly connected. This variability reflects a series of structural divides between big business in the Eurozone that makes it difficult for this corporate elites to be cohesive at the European level.

This chapter reviews the key results obtained in previous studies of airline mergers. It is found that the effect of mergers on airfares is dependent on the network configurations of merging airlines. Fare increases are frequently observed on overlapped routes. However, if the networks of two merging airlines are complementary, the expanded network after the merger leads to cost savings, increase in travel options, and improvement in service quality. Therefore, in a deregulated market, with few entry barriers, relaxing merger regulations is likely to improve welfare. However, most welfare evaluations do not incorporate quality changes or dynamic competition effects. Empirical investigations are primarily ex post analysis of mergers that have already passed antitrust reviews. The relationship between market concentration and welfare might be nonlinear and market specific. Therefore, airline mergers and alliances should be reviewed case by case. Methodological improvements are needed in future studies to control for the effects of complicating factors inherent in ex post evaluations.

JoAnn Wypijewski, reflecting on the experience of workers laid off from General Electric’s (GE) Bloomington, Indiana refrigerator plant, as GE announced profits of $12.7 billion, and the relocation of half the production to Celaya, Mexico, asks: What will it take to match fire with fire at GE, not just in Bloomington but everywhere? Twenty years ago, Jack Welch openly articulated a strategy for taking the company to where it is today. The GE unions never developed a parallel strategy, and 100,000 lost jobs later, most of them still haven’t shed their faith in what the AFL-CIO likes to call “high-road capitalism.” During the 2000 national contract talks, Robert Thayer, the Machinists’ representative to the CBC, was trying to convince the company to agree not to interfere in future unionization drives, arguing that a “contract is a partnership, not a hindrance.” To which the company coolly asserted, “GE has never been neutral and doesn’t intend to be neutral” (Wypijewski, 2001, p. 22).GE has become an icon of global capital mobility and union avoidance. However, GE’s current capacities can be traced back to a long term, explicit strategy of corporate reorganization initiated in the 1940s. At that time GE was a vertically integrated manufacturing conglomerate, based in a series of huge, northern U.S. plants, organized at extremely high density by the left and militant UE. In the sixty years since, GE has transformed itself into a networked and globalized conglomerate, whose manufacturing capacity has been relocated endlessly, first into smaller U.S. greenfield sites and then increasingly overseas, decimating U.S. union density, and replacing UE with a patchwork of AFL-CIO affiliates that have embraced a far more conservative and limited vision of unionism. U.S. labor has been unable to halt this transformation.

This chapter investigates productivity and cost patterns in the all-cargo US air transport sector. We empirically test the productivity growth influence of changes in unexplained technology, air operations movement characteristics, and factor input prices. Findings show productivity trends depicting negative growth for the 1993–2001 sample, then shifting measurably such that productivity trends depict positive growth for the 2002–2014 sample. The post 2001 growth was fueled by changes in unexplained technological advancements. We interpret this finding as an indication of the importance of technological innovation as a performance enhancer in this transport sector. Findings also reveal a lack of productivity change associated with changes in input prices and movement characteristics. We interpret input price findings as indicating increases in factor input prices such as wages and fuel prices are commensurate with enhanced labor and fuel productivity. The movement characteristic findings are attributable to a lack of sustained increases in load factors, stage length, network size and carrying more volume over the network (density).

The nature of immigration to the United States has varied tremendously over the course of the last 100 years. While the rate of immigrants in comparison to the total population was as high as 14% in the early 1900s, it steadily declined due to regulations passed at the beginning of the First World War reaching its lowest point in 1970 at less than 5% (Bernard, 1998). Yet, ever since the early 1970s, in response to the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments that replaced national-origin quotas with a single annual worldwide ceiling for all other immigrants while eliminating any numerical limitations for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, the number of immigrants has been continuously on the rise. In 1996, about 1 of every 10 residents in the United States was foreign born. This is exemplified by the fact that more than one fourth of the present foreign-born population of the United States arrived after 1990 (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2004).

Purpose: The evidence regarding the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown on domestic violence is mixed. Studies using hotline call services identify an increase on domestic violence, while studies using police reports find a decrease. One limitation is that most of these studies came from diverse regions using different types of data sources. The purpose of this study is to use two separate data sources to study this question in the same region, and to contribute to the discussion for potential mechanisms that explain this mixed evidence.

Methodology: This study estimates the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown on domestic violence in Mexico City. The authors use two separate data sources: hotline calls and official police reports. Our empirically strategy is based on a difference-in-differences methodology and an event-study design.

Findings: As a consequence of the COVID-19 lockdown, hotline calls for psychological domestic violence increase by 17%, while police reports of domestic violence decrease by 22%. To reconcile these discrepancies between hotline calls and police reports, the authors consider several potential mechanisms. The authors find suggestive evidence that the increase in psychological domestic violence is related to financial stress. Further, the results of this study indicate that the reduction in police reports is related to women facing more barriers to report their abusive intimate partners during the lockdown.

Value: These results confirm that the variation observed in the existing literature is related to the type of data being used. The mixed evidence suggests that more women suffer from psychological domestic violence as captured by hotline calls, while women encounter more barriers to report their abusive husbands to the police as captured by the official police reports.

Where international nonviolence organizations have increasingly become key players in both the development and evaluation of effective nonviolent movements, little scholarly attention has been given to their role in transnational mobilization. In this chapter, I present new data on a growing population of nonviolent protest INGOs, a transnational nonviolence network, working to globally spread tactical knowledge and resources. To examine determinants of how this population has grown as a whole, I employ negative binomial regression analysis to weigh the effect of nonviolent protest, social movements, and world society theories on nonviolent INGO expansion. I then examine how this network and its ties to different world regions have changed over the latter half of the twentieth century. I find it has been most significantly shaped by the expansion of global political and civil society networks, global human rights work, and a global discourse about nonviolence. The purpose here is to expand knowledge of the global institutional foundations of transnational protest resources, opportunities, and discourse among nonviolent movements.