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Purpose: Grandparents are common providers of childcare within the Caribbean region. Yet research on the implications of grandparent caregiving for older adults’ well-being is limited. This study examined gender differences in the relationship between grandparent caregiving and the life satisfaction of older adults in Jamaica.

Methodology: Using a sample of 1,622 grandparents 60 years and older drawn from the 2012 study “The Health and Social Status of Older Jamaicans,” we estimated binary logistic regression models to examine the association between the frequency of grandparent caregiving and the life satisfaction of grandparents.

Findings: Grandmothers were more likely than grandfathers to provide care. We did not find a statistically significant gender difference in the life satisfaction of caregiving grandparents. Yet, gender differences in the patterns of association between grandparent caregiving and life satisfaction were evident. Among grandmothers, both occasional and regular caregiving was associated with higher life satisfaction relative to non-caregivers. Among grandfathers, however, only regular caregiving was positively associated with life satisfaction.

Originality: This is the first population-based study within the Caribbean to examine gendered patterns of grandparent caregiving and the association with grandparents’ well-being. The findings of this study suggest that grandparent caregiving is beneficial to the well-being of older Jamaican men and women. This study challenges assumptions of gender norms that typically do not position men to be involved in caregiving roles, and to derive satisfaction from such roles, within Caribbean households. The authors suggest more attention should be given to interventions to encourage men to be actively involved in family caregiving.

To demonstrate how generational as well as gendered identities impacted on researcher-researched relationships built during the interview process, engendering specific insights about contemporary British grandfathering.

An ‘ad-hoc’ reflection of interview transcripts and researcher field notes generated from 31 qualitative interviews with men who are grandfathers, to reflexively interrogate how various identity markers operated within my encounters with them, as a young female researcher.

Men positioned me within a grandparent-grandchild relationship during the interviews, which afforded specific insights into contemporary grandfatherhood, including the socio-historical context in which grandfathering takes place. Whilst perceptions and assumptions about gender influence how participants perceive researchers, focusing too rigidly on gender is problematic. It risks re-enforcing potentially stereotypical assumptions about men and women, thus downplaying the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in men’s constructions and performances of their diverse later life identities, as well as obscuring the complex intersectionalities and power relations that operate in the field.

To argue that the concept of ‘betweenness’ aids in developing a more robust understanding of the complex and knowable negotiations of similarity and difference within research encounters.

Purpose – This study constitutes a first attempt to experimentally test the performance of a 100% auction versus a 100% free allocation of CO2 permits under the rules and parameters that mimic the EU ETS (imperfect competition, uncertainty in emissions' control, and allowing banking), with environmental targets more restrictive than the current ones but foreseeable for the near future.

Methodology/approach – Two experimental treatments were run to achieve our goal. Both included the rules and the parameters that parallel the EU ETS structure, the only difference being the rule for the primary allocation of permits.

Findings – Our experimental results indicate that the EU ETS has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions, achieving targets considerably more restrictive than the current ones at high efficiency levels, both with auctioned and free emission permits.

Practical implications – Concerns about undue scarcity, and corresponding high prices, in secondary markets generated by a primary auction market are not warranted under the proposed dynamic auction format. This adds arguments favoring auctioning over grandfathering as the rule for the initial allocation of emission permits in the EU ETS.

Originality/value of chapter – This study implements a theoretically appropriate auction format for the primary allocation of emission permits (the Ausubel (2004) auction) and incorporates a first attempt to include in the analysis measures of the risk preferences of subjects participating in emission permits experiments. These characteristics are for the first time implemented under a complex experimental design (including uncertainty of emission abatement, and banking), trying to parallel the EU ETS trading environment.

I must admit to a dream of a Utopian management training situation where there are no courses as such (see ‘Stop the courses I want to get off’, ICT, May 1970) but where getting the job done and learning are genuine twin objectives of equal importance. The concept is reasonable enough. In my Utopia jobs would be designed with equal emphasis on achieving a desired result and on the job holder learning or growing as a result of the experience. Perhaps you think my Utopia has already arrived? Alas, I have not yet found it.

In this chapter the authors take an auto-ethnographic approach to draw from recent experiences of being integrally involved in the death rituals pertaining to a close family member, ranging across three different cultural backgrounds, all located in Aotearoa New Zealand and involving intercultural complexities. All of these funeral proceedings were unusual circumstances, due to the status of the deceased, meaning that in all three instances, the rituals were very public, due to cultural expectations. Through narrative descriptions, this chapter illuminates the ways in which traditional cultural values are played out in contemporary contexts and their importance in providing a framework of support for the bereaved families through the mourning period, albeit in the public gaze. Despite the impacts of colonization, immigration, and globalization, these traditional practices, passed down through generation after generation, demonstrate their resilience and contemporary application in service of the emotional and spiritual well-being of the respective collectives.

Stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships are increasingly common as a result of relatively high rates of divorce and remarriage and increased longevity. When relationships are close, stepgrandparents may be valuable resources for stepgrandchildren, but the relational processes salient to the development of these ties remain largely unknown. The purposes of our research were: (1) to explore the complexity of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships, and (2) to examine processes that affected stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationship development.

We present results from four grounded theory projects, which were based on semistructured interviews with 58 stepgrandchildren who provided data about 165 relationships with stepgrandparents. Collectively, these studies highlighted key processes of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationship development operating within four distinct pathways to stepgrandparenthood – long-term, later life, skip-generation, and inherited pathways.

Stepgrandchildren’s closeness to stepgrandparents was influenced by factors such as timing (the child’s age and when in their life courses intergenerational relationships began), stepgrandparents’ roles in the life of the middle-generation parent and the quality of those relationships, whether or not the stepfamily defined the stepgrandparent as kin (e.g., through the use of claiming language), intergenerational contact frequency, and stepgrandparents’ affinity-building.

Our study furthers understanding of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild by attending to the importance of context in examining the processes that affect intergenerational steprelationship development. Exploring processes related to intergenerational steprelationships strengthens our understanding of the benefits and challenges associated with steprelationship development. Our study also sheds light on the “new look at kinship” and the processes that inform the social construction of family in a changing familial landscape.

Plymouth Tube, a family business, was a manufacturer of precision tubing and extruded shapes for aerospace, desalination, medical, mining, energy, and water industries globally. Founded in 1924, as of 2012 it employed 770 people at thirteen plants in seven U.S. states and had sales of about $240 million. The family had twenty members across three generations, including spouses. The board was composed of eight members, three from the family and five who were independent. Stacy, age 30, was the only fifth-generation family member working for the company. Her father, Van, age 64 and a fourth-generation member, had been in the business for forty years and had succeeded his father as president, CEO, and chairman.

In early 2013, management presented a very large expansion project that was riskier than previous recent investments to the board, and requested the board's approval. Independent board members asked Van to obtain feedback from the family about the proposal. Van asked Stacy to direct the process for informing the family, asking for their input, and communicating it back to the board.

How should Stacy conduct the process? What should be done with the information once it has been gathered? Should family members be involved in this type of business decision? Based on the information given in the case, is this a good investment?

Most intergenerational mobility studies use data on two generations to estimate the elasticity between son's and father's earnings. The purpose of this paper is to use a data set spanning three generations to estimate additional relationships between a person's earnings and family background yielded by intergenerational mobility models such as Becker-Tomes (1979) model and modified versions of it.

The paper uses data from the 1996 PNAD – a nationally representative household survey in Brazil. The author builds a data set consisting of 5,125 grandfather-father-son triplets by taking advantage of two characteristics of Brazil. First, commonly in Brazil, individuals live with their parents until they marry. Second, individuals tended to quit school and begin working at an early age. As a result, there are many households with adult sons who are not at the very beginning of their working careers. Since the sample is limited to households with adult sons, the author applies Heckman (1979) estimation procedure to address selection bias.

Estimation results contradict some predictions of simple versions of the Becker and Tomes model. The paper proposes a modified version of the Becker and Tomes model that allows for a skipping generation effect, and finds that family background explains 34.9 percent of the variation in earnings among males aged 16-27 in Brazil. If there were no differences in endowments (talent, IQ, health, physical appearance, attitudes toward work, family connections, etc.), the variation in earnings would fall by no less than 26 percent. If it were possible to eliminate differences in investment in human capital, the variation in earnings would fall by at most 21.1 percent.

The paper has two main data limitations. First, the 1996 earnings of the fathers and sons are used as proxies for lifetime earnings although the transitory component of one-year earnings may be quite large, particularly at young ages. Second, in spite of the efforts to deal with the sample selection bias, the paper shows that the intergenerational elasticity in earnings for the sons aged 22-27 is about 14.6 percent lower for the subsample of households with adult sons than for the full sample.

The paper finds evidence supporting the existence of a direct effect of the grandparents on the grandchildren beyond their influence on the parents, and reinforces consideration of this factor in intergenerational mobility studies.

The findings in this paper may suggest a room for improvements in economic outcomes of children in less privileged families through investment in formal education as well as policies that considers other aspects of a person's life. For instance, Bolsa Família – a Brazilian government program that provide cash allowances to poor families conditional on children school attendance – may improve the economic outcomes of poor children by enforcing formal education and by lessening the children hardships at home.

The paper proposes a modified version of the Becker and Tomes model which allows for a skipping generation effect. Under the assumptions of the modified model and in hand with a three-generations data set from Brazil, the paper estimates a lowerbound for the variation in earnings explained by differences in endowments across families, and an upperbound for the variation in earnings explained by differences in human capital.