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The purpose of this chapter was to investigate consumer perceptions of retail agglomeration (RA) characteristics in Zagreb region. Perceived RA characteristics were compared between two major types of RA: Planned retail agglomerations (PRA) and Evolved retail agglomerations (ERA).

Data were collected with consumer survey and analyzed using descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA).

Findings indicate that four factors of RA characteristics can be identified: convenience, accessibility, atmosphere, and image. The shoppers’ ratings indicate the strength and weaknesses of RA, and also the dominant position of PRA as compared to evolved RA.

Results show that there were significant differences in shoppers’ perceptions between Planned and evolved RA in Zagreb region. Shoppers evaluated PRA better than ERA on all four factors. Convenience and atmosphere are the best-rated PRA characteristics. Managerial implications are discussed in the study.

This chapter’s goal is to determine the essence and causal connections of the emergence of conflicts at the level of economic systems (countries) due to technological inequality and to find the perspectives of overcoming these conflicts. The chapter models the economic and political conflict of modern time under the conditions of high-tech development based on the methods of variation analysis and regression analysis. It is proven that the scale of technological inequality in the world economy is very large. It is the economic and political conflict of modern time, the essence of which is as follows: the differentiation of economic systems amid digital development predetermines the opportunities for their entering the world markets. This chapter contributes to the development of the theory of economic and political conflicts, proving the existence of technological inequality as a new form of differentiation of economic systems amid digital development and defining this inequality as a new economic and political conflict of modern time. The chapter also contributes to the development of the theory of international trade, disproving – for the first time – the action of the principle of freedom of international trade. The authors describe technological barriers of the world markets, which limit the presence of countries that are behind the leading countries by digital development. Three key factors that determine the level of technological development of the economy are given: knowledge-intensive employment, venture investments and financing of innovations in business. Due to the above, the chapter provides opportunities for technological conflict management.

Between 1995 and 2012, the wage distribution of male workers in Brazil shifted to the right and became less dispersed. This paper attempts to identify the reasons for that movement in male wage distribution, focusing on the impact of education expansion on wage distribution. The Oaxaca-Blinder (OB) and Recentered Influence Function (RIF) decomposition results show that both changes in returns on skills and upgrades in the composition of work skills contribute to increases in the average wage and wages at the 10th and 50th percentiles. The shifts in returns to skills had a decreasing impact on wages at the 90th percentile and are identified as the primary force reducing wage inequality. Education expansion had an equalizing impact on wage distribution, primarily through the decline in return to education.

This paper argues that the assumption of a homogeneous workforce, which is implicitly invoked in the decomposition analysis of changes in welfare indicators, hides the role that schooling and its returns may have on the understanding of these changes. Using Peruvian cross-sectional data for a period of 10 years (2004–2013) and counterfactual simulations, this paper finds that the main factor contributing to poverty reduction has been individuals’ changes in labor earnings, and the role of these changes has been less important in reducing income inequality. The main driving force of reduced income inequality has been the fall in returns to education, which at the same time has been one of the important factors to constraining the period’s remarkable progress in poverty reduction and expansion of the middle class.

Introduction – Bologna’s summit guidelines regarding the Bachelor/Master structure, which is currently used in most Colleges and Universities, were mostly aimed at standardising the educational system in European higher education. Educational institutions use these guidelines as a basis for setting up their educational model.

Aim – This chapter aims to review models of learning management systems (LMSs), the stage of activity of every method applied at Universities, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of these prototypes. The literature review in question identifies and classifies strategic methods of LMS, differentiates method type and categorises common activities.

Results – The results show that higher education institutions are in the preparatory phase regarding the application of e-learning, whereas private institutions have applied this system since their foundation and use it on a daily basis across all services.

Conclusion – However, different educational institutions in our country are at different stages in implementing new learning models. A strategic plan for developing knowledge management systems can be determined by using some of the information system strategic methods.

Originality/Value – This chapter contributes to the literature by providing additional evidence for existing studies in LMS in the Universities of the Republic of Kosovo. Studies suggest the implementation of different models and highlight the impact of technology especially during this pandemic whereby we should mainly focus and implement curricula using these kinds of technology. Also, this study identifies a major weakness in existing Kosovar studies, which have identified concepts but they are not implemented at all.

We use OECD-PIAAC data to estimate the earnings effects of both years of education and of numerical skills. Our identification strategy exploits differential exposure to educational reforms across birth cohorts and countries. We find that education has the strongest earnings effect. A one standard deviation increase in years of education raises earnings by almost 22 percentage points (corresponding to a return to education above 7 percentage points), which compares with a lower percentage points return to an equivalent increase in numerical skills. Our results suggest that the same set of unobservables drives the accumulation of both formal years of education and numeracy skills. OLS estimates underestimate returns to human capital, consistently with the idea that educational reforms favor the human capital acquisition of abler children from disadvantaged parental backgrounds. When we consider numerical skills alone education reforms cannot identify any significant effect of skills on wages, however, when we jointly consider schooling and skills as endogenous factors in a recursive structure we find a significant role for skills in determining wages.

While there has been intense debate in the empirical literature over the evolution of the college wage premium in the United States, its evolution in Europe has received little attention. This paper investigates the causes of the evolution of the college wage premium in 12 European countries from 1994 to 2009, assessing the relevance of the supply factor as a determinant of the college wage premium. I use cross-country variation in relative supply, demand, and labour market institutions to examine their effects on the trend in wage inequality. I address possible concerns of endogeneity of the relative supply using an IV strategy exploiting the differential legislations of university autonomy and their variations over time. Results show that the strong increase in the relative supply that European countries have experienced has decreased the college wage premium. The most relevant institution is the minimun wage, which significantly decreases college wage premium.

This research explores how skill proficiencies are distributed between low-income and not-in low-income groups using the results of a highly complex survey of the information-processing skills of Canadians between the ages of 16 and 65. We find that having measures of skills enhances our understanding of the correlates of low income. Skills have an independent effect, even when controlling for other known correlates of low income, and their inclusion reduces the independent effect of education and immigrant status. This result is relevant for public policy development as the knowledge of the skills profile of the low-income population can inform the design of efficient and effective programmes.

This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth to estimate the changing returns to cognitive and non-cognitive skills with respect to college completion, and quantifies the extent to which gender differences in these skills are driving the college gender gap. The use of two distinct college graduation cohorts allows a dynamic analysis of the widening female advantage in college graduation. I decompose the increase in the college gender gap into three pertinent categories of measurable attributes: family background, cognitive skills, and non-cognitive skills (captured by school suspensions, behavioral problems, and legal infractions). A second decomposition is applied to the change in the gap between the two periods. The results show that roughly half of the observed college graduation gender gap in the NLSY97 is due to female advantages in observable characteristics, and roughly half is “unexplained”: due to gender differences in the coefficients. With respect to the change in the gap, approximately 29% of the difference in differences is the “explained” component, attributed to changes in the relative characteristics of men and women. In particular, declining non-cognitive skills in men are associated with about 14% of the increase in the gender gap.

The prevalence and stability of marriage has declined in the United States as the economic lives of men and women have converged. Family change has not been uniform, however, and the widening gaps in marital status, relationship stability, and childbearing between socioeconomic groups raise concerns about child well-being in poor families and future inequality. This paper uses data from a recent cohort of young adults – Wave IV of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health – to investigate whether disparities in cognitive ability and non-cognitive skills contribute to this gap. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions of differences in key family outcomes across education groups show that, though individual non-cognitive traits are significantly associated with union status, relationship instability, and single motherhood, they collectively make no significant contribution to the explanation of educational gaps for almost all of these outcomes. Measured skills can explain as much as 25 percent of differences in these outcomes by family background (measured by mother’s education), but this effect disappears when own education is added to the model. Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly predictive of educational attainment but, conditional on education, explain very little of the socioeconomic gaps in family outcomes for young adults.