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Mobile: ‘changing easily in expression, mood, purpose.’ Devices: ‘invent from existing principles or ideas.’ Definitions from Websters Universal Dictionary.

Questions the values and wisdom of those proposing to tackle the global digital divide. Why, for instance, the concern for the digital divide and not the health divide? Questions too the methods for determining and measuring the divide and the naive assumption that the Internet itself can transform the destinies of the digitally poor. What is really at issue is not finding the best way of bringing the Internet to the poor, but finding the best way for the poor to take advantage of the Internet in order to improve their lot.

A content analysis of the coverage of European Union stories in British daily newspapers. Three months of newspapers were scanned an a daily basis and their pro and anti stance monitored. Includes an analysis of websites. The results show that for both hardcopy newspapers and their online equivalents the anti‐European press is passionate in its beliefs, whereas the pro‐European press largely solid but unexciting in theirs. Concludes with the view that in political and newspaper speak Europe is just not a ‘heart’ issue.

Managers are constantly making decisions that affect profit. One of the decision‐making areas which is crucial to all managers concerns profit planning. Attempts to show how cost‐volume‐profit (CVP) analysis, aided by the computer spreadsheet, can be applied to the practical profit planning situation in the hospitality industry. Paradoxically, CVP analysis is one of the most widely referred to techniques in managerial accounting, but all too often it is not used to its full potential in the operating environment. Aims at encouraging greater use of the CVP approach to hospitality profit planning.

The purpose of this study is to examine the propagation of consumer and business confidence in the euro area with a particular focus on the global financial crisis (GFC), the European sovereign debt crisis (ESDC) and the COVID-19-induced Great Lockdown.

The authors apply Diebold and Yilmaz’s connectedness framework and the improved method based on the time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model.

The authors find that although the evolution of business confidence marked the GFC and the ESDC the role of consumer confidence (mainly in those countries with stricter containment and closure measures) increased in the COVID-19-induced crisis.

The findings are related to the different origins of the examined crisis periods, and the analysis of their interrelationship is a very relevant topic for future research.

Entering and exiting the Pandemic Recession, the author study the high-frequency real-activity signals provided by a leading nowcast, the ADS Index of Business Conditions produced and released in real time by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The author tracks the evolution of real-time vintage beliefs and compares them to a later-vintage chronology. Real-time ADS plunges and then swings as its underlying economic indicators swing, but the ADS paths quickly converge to indicate a return to brisk positive growth by mid-May. The author shows, moreover, that the daily real-activity path was highly correlated with the daily COVID-19 cases. Finally, the author provides a comparative assessment of the real-time ADS signals provided when exiting the Great Recession.

This chapter compares smoking among American women employed outside the home with those of full-time homemakers at two points in time: 1979 and 2014.

Data are from the 1979 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) and from the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). The NHSDA is the precursor to the present-day NSDUH and part of the same continuum of nationwide surveys on drug use. The analysis uses logistic regression models and the survey suite of commands in Stata 13 to include 1979/2014 sample weights and adjustments for the complex sample design.

Results show that smoking is most prevalent among homemakers in small communities. This outcome supports earlier studies citing smoking as a major causal factor for the decline in female life expectancy among less-educated white women in certain low-income and rural counties in the United States. The premise that female smoking is strongly associated with the workplace appears to be no longer true.

These data provide only a limited test of health lifestyle theory because many of the model’s structural variables are not included. Otherwise the findings support the model.

This study finds that smoking is greatest among women who are full-time homemakers in medium and especially small towns. This is a new development and suggests the locus of smoking among women has moved away from its association with the job in cities to the home in less populated areas.

Business confidence is crucial to firm decisions, but it is deeply related to professional forecasters' expectations. Since Brazil is an important inflation targeting country, this paper investigates whether monetary policy credibility and disagreements in inflation and interest rate expectations relate to business confidence in Brazil. The study considers the aggregate business confidence index and the business confidence indexes for 11 industrial sectors in Brazil.

The authors run ordinary least squares and generalized method of moments regressions to assess the direct effects of disagreements in expectation and monetary policy credibility on business confidence. The authors also make use of Wald test of parameter equality to observe whether there are “offsetting effects” of monetary credibility in mitigating the effects of both disagreements in expectations on business confidence. Besides, the authors run quantile regressions to analyze the effect of the main explanatory variables of interest on business confidence in contexts where business confidence is low (pessimistic) or high (optimistic).

Disagreements in inflation expectations reduce business confidence, monetary policy credibility improves business confidence and credibility mitigates the adverse effects of disagreements in expectations on business confidence. The sectors most sensitive to monetary policy credibility are Rubber, Motor Vehicles, Metallurgy, Metal Products and Cellulose. The findings also suggest the effect of disagreement in inflation expectations on business confidence decreases as confidence increases, and the effect of monetary policy credibility on business confidence increases as entrepreneurs are more optimistic.

While there is evidence that monetary policy credibility is beneficial to the economy, there are no studies on the effects of disagreements in inflation and interest rate expectations on business confidence (at the aggregate and sectoral levels). Besides, there are no studies that have investigated whether monetary policy credibility can mitigate the effects of disagreements in inflation and interest rate expectations on business confidence (at the aggregate and sectoral levels). Therefore, there are gaps to be filled in the literature addressing business confidence, monetary policy credibility and disagreements in expectations. These issues are particularly important to inflation targeting developing countries.

This paper aims to develop a compound measure, which is fiscal vulnerability index, provides early warning signals of fiscal sustainability problems for Türkiye's economy.

The index is constructed using twelve distinct fiscal indicators and applying the portfolio method, which considers the time-varying cross-correlation structure between the subindices.

Dynamics of the fiscal vulnerability index indicate that it accurately predicts to the well-known fiscal crisis occurring in Türkiye's recent history. As a result, such a compound measure should be used in the early identification of fiscal vulnerability in Türkiye.

The main contribution of this paper, relative to existing papers, is that a fiscal vulnerability index was constructed by employing the most contemporaneous method and evaluating its performance in terms of capturing historical stress periods.

The authors construct an index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) for Greece using textual analysis and analyze its role in the 10-year Greek economic crisis.

To identify the causal relationship between various measures of economic activity and EPU in Greece, the authors use a sophisticated “shock-based” structural vector autoregressive identification scheme. Additionally, the authors use two additional models to ensure the robustness of the results.

EPU is negatively associated with domestic economic activity and economic sentiment, and positively with bond credit spreads. EPU is also estimated to have prolonged the crisis even in periods when macroeconomic imbalances were cured. The results are robust across various model specifications and different proxies of economic activity.

Brunnermeier (2017) observed that uncertainty may be central to understanding the evolution of the Greek crisis. Yet little attention has been paid to policy uncertainty in the existing long and growing literature on the Greek crisis. The authors attempt to fill this gap.