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Personnel economics tends be based on single-firm case studies. Here, we examine several internal labor market dimensions of nearly 5,000 firms, over a period of 20 years, using detailed matched employer–employee data from Portugal. In the spirit of Baker, Gibbs, and Holmstrom (1994a, 1994b), we consider worker turnover, the role of job levels and human capital as wage determinants, wage dispersion within job levels, the importance of tenure in promotions and exits, and the scope for careers. We find a large degree of diversity in most of these personnel dimensions across firms. Moreover, some dimensions are shown to be robust predictors of firm performance, even after controlling for time-invariant firm heterogeneity and other variables. These dimensions include low worker churning, the importance of careers, low wage dispersion at low and intermediate job levels, and a tight relationship between human capital variables and wages.

Grass roots movements in relationships of cooperation and conflict between firms, communities, and government have an important role to stop a living city from disappearing. This chapter describes and analyzes the implications of the collective action used by grass roots movements in the defense of an old mining town, Cerro de San Pedro, of being disappeared due to the pollution of fresh watersheds by the operations of a mining company and the effects on the living city of San Luis Potosì, in the center of Mèxico.

We review the state of the literature concerning work–family conflict in the military, focusing on service members’ parenting roles and overall family and child well-being. This includes recognition that for many women service members, parenting considerations often arise long before a child is born, thereby further complicating work–family conflict considerations in regard to gender-specific conflict factors such as pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and breastfeeding. Subsequently, we consider more gender-invariant conflict factors, such as the nature of the work itself as causing conflict for the service member as parent (e.g., nontraditional hours, long separations, and child care challenges) as well as for the child (e.g., irregular contact with parent, fear for parent’s safety, and frequent relocations), and the ramifications of such conflict on service member and child well-being. Finally, we review formalized support resources that are in place to mitigate negative effects of such conflict, and make recommendations to facilitate progress in research and practice moving forward.

Purpose – Urban youths’ agency to represent their realities through media has been largely unexplored in the youth development literature. In this qualitative case study of an after-school youth media program in the Bay Area, expressions of youth agency and the role of audiences are explored during the process of producing videos for public consumption.

Methodology – As participant observer of 14 ethnically diverse youth participants aged between 15 and 18 years over 18 months, I documented (a) the kind of agencies participants engaged in and (b) the impact of live and imagined future audiences on youths’ creative processes. Analyses of field notes, semi-structured interviews, and media projects were conducted using thematic analysis to inductively generate emerging categories.

Findings – Themes included an agentive sense of self-efficacy, commitment, and responsibility, as well as perceived contributions to local audiences and an emerging collective identity. The youth demonstrated their increased sense of a social or civic duty to realistically represent youth of color to familiar and unfamiliar audiences.

Implications – This case study demonstrated how one youth media organization fostered agency through youth authorship, production, distribution, and local community dialogue. By documenting the impact of audiences from conception to public reception, this study provides valuable insight into the agentive process of publicly “performing” a commitment to complete a social change video project.

Contribution – This chapter underscores the value of performance within youth development programs and the critical component of audiences as one form of authentic assessment in order to foster individual and collective agency.

Millions of ratings and reviews about products are available on the Internet for free, and they are used by academic researchers in the tourism sector. Data from websites like TripAdvisor are replacing or complementing traditional questionnaires and interviews. The authors are proposing a methodology to estimate the percentage accounted for by the sample of self-interviewed individuals over the total study population, in order to calculate the reliability of the results obtained. Average percentages obtained for hotels cannot be easily generalized due to the high dispersion in participation rates among hotels, even in the same city. Participation levels for tourist attractions are substantially lower than those for hotels and are likely biased, due to the fact that some tourists evaluate places without actually visiting them, merely after viewing them from the outside.

This chapter uses an intellectual capital (IC) qualitative approach for assessing the bio health technologies entrepreneurial ecosystem of a university located in Southern Europe, aiming to identify the role played by IC in fostering the sustainable success of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. There has been limited research dedicated to deepening the knowledge of the entrepreneurial ecosystems’ dimensions, using an IC lens, in the context of university cities with different dimensions. Small cities may not have some dimensions, so developed, comparing with the ones of the ecosystems of large urban centers. This chapter uses a qualitative approach funded in a case study exploring internal and external stakeholders of a Portuguese entrepreneurial ecosystem, UBImedical, targeted at the bio health sector. The study is part of an exploratory study funded in the scope of a European Project, aiming to explore in a pioneering way the application of the dominant triad of capitals forming IC and, thus, identifying and understanding the dimensions of different entrepreneurial ecosystems. The case study reveals that the IC’s dimensions more critical for the success of the bio health entrepreneurial ecosystems are the structural capital and the relational capital, although human capital is perceived as a basic prerequisite for fostering the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s performance. The results are funded in primary and qualitative data collected from the interviews developed to previously identified external and internal stakeholders of this type of entrepreneurial ecosystem under study.

This chapter provides an alternative interpretation of the emergence of the “Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans” growth model, a framework which, alongside the overlapping generation model, is the dominant approach in today’s macroeconomics. By focusing on the role Paul Samuelson played through the works he developed in the turnpike literature, the author’s goal is to provide a more accurate history of growth theory of the 1940–1960s, one which started before Solow (1956) but never had him as a central reference. Inspired by John von Neumann’s famous 1945 article, Samuelson wrote his first turnpike paper by trying to conjecture an alternative optimal growth path (Samuelson, 1949 [1966]). In the 1960s, after reformulating the intertemporal utility model presented in Ramsey (1928), Samuelson began to propound it as a representative agent model. Through Samuelson’s interactions with colleagues and PhD students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and given his standing in the profession, he encouraged a broader use of that device in macroeconomics, particularly, in growth theory. With the publication of Samuelson (1965), Tjalling Koopmans and Lionel McKenzie rewrote their own articles in order to account for the new approach. This work complements a recently written account on growth theory by Assaf and Duarte (2018).