Search results

Explores the changing relationship between work and leisure with particular reference to women’s equality in economic and other activities through a review of the history of leisure opportunities since the industrial revolution; indicates the ways in which social and economic changes have had a major impact on women’s leisure needs and activities. Focuses in particular on the provision of workplace fitness facilities, undertaking a survey of more than 200 companies across a number of industry sectors (the rationale for selection is outlined here) to discover the reasons behind such provision and the actual facilities provided; identifies the reasons behind provision as primarily commercial (e.g. being seen as an additional benefit to help recruit high quality employees) and notes that assessment of user group needs was not carried out, with the result that women’s particular needs tended not to be taken into account, for example gyms (favoured by men) being more widely provided than space for aerobic exercise (favoured by women). Concludes that the findings strongly suggest that women remain unequal in their leisure as well as working lives.

We hypothesize that a CEO’s responsiveness to security analysts’ demands for information about the firm is influenced by the structure of the CEO’s compensation package. Our analysis is based on a sample of 469 CEO presentations to security analyst societies by 149 firms during the period 1984‐1988. Consistent with the argu ments of Nagar (1999; 1998) that CEO shareholdings and golden parachutes reduce the cost to the CEO of disclosing proprietary information, we find that CEO share holdings and the presence of golden parachutes are positively associated with the total amount of information that a CEO discloses at an analyst society presentation. Consistent with the argument that CEOs whose cash compensation is sensitive to firm performance have incentives to release bad news so as to lower expectations about future performance and, hence, bonus targets, CEO cash compensation performance sensitivities are positively associated with the CEO’s willingness to disclose bad news.

This article describes the origin of the UK's Sure Start programme, an innovative early years' programme launched in 1998. The programme owed its beginnings to support from the UK Treasury that saw it as a vehicle for combating intergenerational deprivation. The programme has expanded rapidly in the past few years. This paper analyses how the programme has changed and in particular how some of its basic characteristics, such as the integrated working across disciplines, the involvement of parents and the stress on family support, seem likely to change. The dilemmas posed by spreading the funding more thinly are also examined. There is some danger that the features of the programme that made it so attractive to participants and workers will be lost in the rush to mainstream the programme, so that it may become a victim of its own success.

The aim of this paper is to show how provisions of the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments (SURE) program impacts production practices, and empirically examine changes in crop insurance participation rates as a means of measuring producer responses to the program.

The structure of the SURE program is described and a stylized theoretical model is used to show the SURE program's effects on farm‐level crop insurance and production decisions. A county‐level cross‐sectional empirical specification with regional fixed effects is used to test the hypothesis that producers who are most likely to benefit from production practice re‐optimization are more likely to participate in crop insurance.

Results from empirical analyses of corn, soybean, and wheat production areas show that the SURE program has had substantial impacts on crop insurance participation by producers who are more likely to receive SURE indemnities and exploit moral hazard opportunities.

Because the program has only recently been introduced, empirical estimates of the program's long‐run impacts are not estimable.

Results indicate that the program can have unexpected market consequences, with increased frequency and size of SURE indemnity claims than the Congressional Budget Office anticipated and increases in aggregate tax payer subsidies for both the crop insurance and SURE program. These outcomes can have important implications on motivating a restructuring of the program in the next farm bill.

Increased tax payer expenditures on the SURE and crop insurance programs in the form of subsidies can lead to non‐trivial reductions in social welfare.

This research is the first to develop a rigorous model of the SURE program's impacts on producer responses and associated effects on crop insurance participation. The study also provides empirical evidence of these effects.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize the concept of arbitration by subrogation as a means to increase recoveries of indemnities paid out to exporters or any financial institutions by K-SURE, an export credit agency of Korea, against possible non-payment or breach of obligations from the buyer or the buyer’s country. It looks into the possibility of K-SURE and KCAB reactivating its 2004 MOU to give more jurisdictional protection to K-SURE’s indemnities recovery transactions.

This paper first introduces a brief elucidation about export insurance provided by K-SURE and the necessity of arbitration in the export insurance, and a summary of a subrogation arbitration case referred to the KCAB by K-SURE in 2005. Cognizant of the 2004 MOU between K-SURE and KCAB, as well as the foreign and domestic developments in arbitration, the paper then analyzes legal principles of subrogation by insurer, as well as domestic and overseas precedents on the matters of assignment of claim and arbitration by subrogation.

While it appears that there is still no universally recognized authority nor established court precedents applying arbitration by subrogation, the authors discovered that similar to Korea, most of leading courts in the world have consistently held that the assignee can request and be requested for arbitration pursuant to the arbitration agreement contained in the assigned contract. The paper concludes that the K-SURE now can be admitted as a party having proper standing in the arbitration proceedings so long as the specific claim right under the contract which includes the arbitration agreement is assigned to the K-SURE.

This paper suggests a possible plan to increase recoveries in export insurance. The outcome of the research is expected to enhance the arbitration system on the back of increasing numbers of arbitration related to export insurance, to improve the balance sheet of K-SURE and ultimately, to help the Korean economy by collecting export insurance recoveries which will lead to saving Korean people’s tax.

Both the government and local service providers in the UK are becoming increasingly aware of the possibility of improving child outcomes through the delivery of parenting programmes. Government initiatives, such as Sure Start, Pathfinders and Flying Start are a positive step forward, yet programmes sometimes fail to work in service settings. This article describes the components necessary to deliver effective interventions, exploring the need to choose an evidence‐based parent programme, implement it with fidelity and evaluate the outcome. It describes the steps taken in North and Mid Wales to do this and reports briefly on the successful outcomes achieved by delivering the Incredible Years Basic Parenting Programme to the parents of high‐risk children in Sure Start areas.

This article outlines the experience of the first 260 Sure Start Local Programmes of developing interagency partnerships in their areas. It draws on quantitative and qualitative data collected between 2000‐2005 by the implementation module of the government‐commissioned National Evaluation of Sure Start. Following a résumé of the aims and design of the Sure Start Local Programme initiative, a description of the implementation module methodology and an overview of existing knowledge around inter‐agency collaboration, five factors are identified which impacted on the partnership‐building task. These comprise: the nature of partnership history; clarity of purpose; the extent of strategic commitment at the highest levels; trust among partners; and the characteristics of the national workforce. The article concludes by highlighting the continuing relevance of these issues to the new collaborations required by the UK government's Every Child Matters agenda, including the work of children's centres.