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This study aims to determine how the prices of residential properties in the Greek real estate sector are affected by their structural characteristics and by the prevailing economic factors during recession.

Based on 13,835 valuation reports for the city of Athens, covering a period of 11 years (2006–2016), this study develops a series of econometric models, taking into account both structural characteristics of the property market and the macroeconomic relevant variables. Finally, the city of Athens is divided into sub-regions and the different effects of the structural factors in each area are investigated via spatial analysis confirming the validity of the baseline model.

Findings show that the size, age, level, parking and storage space can explain the property price movements. Moreover, the authors find evidence that it is primarily house demand variables (e.g. the annual average wage, the unemployment rate, the user cost of capital, financing constraints and expectations about the future course of the house market) that affect house prices in a statistically significant manner and with the correct sign. Finally, using a difference-in-differences approach, this study finds that an increase in house demand (on account of net migration) led to higher house prices in smaller and older than in larger and younger apartments in areas with high concentration of immigrants.

This study uses a novel data set to help entities, individuals and policy-makers to understand how the recent economic and financial crisis has affected the real estate market in Athens.

We consider the relationship between external aid and development in Mozambique from 1980–2004, identifying the specific mechanisms through which aid has influenced the developmental trajectory of the country. We undertake both a growth accounting analysis and review the intended and unintended effects of aid at the micro-level. Sustained aid flows to Mozambique, in conflict and post-conflict periods, have made an unambiguous, positive contribution to rapid growth since 1992. However, proliferation of donors and aid-supported interventions has burdened local administration, indicating a need for deeper domestic government accountability. To sustain growth, Mozambique must maximize benefits from natural resources while promoting constructive international market integration.

The new economic-policy regime in Sweden in the 1990s included deregulation, central-bank independence, inflation targets and fiscal rules but also active labour market policy and voluntary incomes policy. This chapter describes the content, determinants and performance of the new economic policy in Sweden in a comparative, mainly Nordic, perspective. The new economic-policy regime is explained by the deep recession and budget crisis in the early 1990s, new economic ideas and the power of economic experts. In the 1998–2007 period, Sweden displayed relatively low inflation and high productivity growth, but unemployment was high, especially by national standards. The restrictive monetary policy was responsible for the low inflation, and the dynamic (ICT) sector was decisive for the productivity miracle. Furthermore, productivity increases in the ICT sector largely explains why the Central Bank undershot its inflation target in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The new economic-policy regime in Sweden performed well during the global financial crisis. However, as in other OECD countries, the moderate increase in unemployment was largely attributed to labour hoarding. And the rapid recovery of the Baltic countries made it possible for Sweden to avoid a bank crisis.

Social media is a product that is co-created by consumers and multinational enterprises, that partially manage the customer experience and that has garnered significant attention in the field of international marketing. However, international marketing scholars have yet to address the societal costs of the use of social media, even as academics in other disciplines and business leaders are raising alarm that social media has created a digital ecosystem that may harm individuals within the global market. The objective of this research is to examine the generalizability of the relationship between the use of social media and the prevalence of depression across countries.

Employing social cohesion theory and the social network approach of the strength of ties, this work examines the relationship between the use of social media and time spent on social media at the country level and the prevalence of depression. The authors examine this issue within a 28-country, eight-year, unbalanced panel dataset, accounting for cultural, economic and structural factors.

The authors find that as more people within a country use social media, the prevalence of depression in that country increases. However, the authors also find that as the average time spent on social media in a country increases the deleterious relationship between the use of social media and the prevalence of depression diminishes.

Answering the calls in the international marketing literature for a greater understanding of the externalities (i.e. consumer well-being effects) of marketing activities of multinational companies, this study demonstrates the varying relationships of the use of and time spent on social media and the prevalence of depression at the population level, across a wide variety of countries, thus also contributing to the effort to improving generalizations from multi-country comparisons in international research.

The aim of this paper is to use psychological contracts theory to explore performance management practices in Mexico paying particular attention to the impact of national culture, social and structural factors.

The paper examines the content of psychological contracts from the viewpoint of both parties in the employment relationship – managers and employees – in the context of performance appraisals. It conducted focus groups and interviews at these two organizational levels in three different organizations.

Findings are organized around three themes: performance appraisal systems, the promises (fulfilled and unfulfilled) and the sources of terms and conditions as the content of psychological contracts for managing and participating in performance evaluation systems. For each theme the paper presents and contrasts the viewpoints of managers and employees.

Because of the sensitive cultural nature of performance appraisals, the findings help managers implement this process by explaining the underlying psychological contracts in Mexico. Specifically, employees experience the socio‐emotional behaviors that accompany performance evaluation and engage in the process at different levels of commitment. Both managers and employees respond according to their needs and what they perceive to be the company's reward.

Performance appraisal has received little attention from studies of psychological contracts, though it is a key practice in which work promises and rewards related to performance are made. In this study, the paper brings these two research streams together and apply it to a culturally unique setting.

The Covid-19 pandemic has rekindled interest in sovereign debt crises amidst calls for debt relief for developing and emerging countries. But has debt relief lessened the debt burdens of emerging and developing economies? The purpose of this paper is to empirically address this question. In particular, the focus is on the implications of debt relief and institutional qualities for sovereign debt in emerging and developing economies.

The model extends the framework on the probability of default by incorporating the receipt of debt relief by a debtor country. Doing so allows to better explain movements of sovereign defaults relating to debt relief. The model is estimated via the regular probit regression.

The analysis shows that the debt relief provided, thus, far, failed to ease the debt overhang problems of developing and emerging countries and reduced investment. The current debt relief schemes may underscore the prospects of self-enforcing and self-fulfilling sovereign debt crises rather than eliminating the dilemma completely. Regarding the forms of debt relief, the analysis shows that debt forgiveness offers favourable prospects in terms of debt sustainability and economic outcomes than debt rescheduling. Perhaps, the sovereign debt crises, particularly in low-income countries, hinge on insolvency problems rather than transitory illiquidity issues.

Any debt relief mechanism should consider seriously the potential incentive effect that reinforces expectations of future debt-relief initiatives. Importantly, solving the sovereign debt problem requires a programme for sustained investment and economic growth, while not discounting the critical role of prudent debt management policies and institutions.

This study contributes a different angle to the debate on sovereign debt distress. Aside from the structural and economic factors, this study investigates the role of debt management policy in the debtor nation and the implications of debt relief benefits for sovereign risk. The framework also focuses on whether the different forms of debt relief exert distinctive impacts.

Given the increasing importance of engineering insurance, it is still unclear which specific factors can enhance the role of engineering insurance as a risk transfer tool. This study aims to propose a hybrid approach to identify and analyze the key determinants influencing the consumption of engineering insurance in mainland China.

The empirical analysis utilizes provincial data from mainland China from 2008 to 2019. The research framework is a novel amalgamation of the generalized method of moments (GMM) model, the quantile regression (QR) technique and the random forest (RF) algorithm. This innovative hybrid approach provides a comprehensive exploration of the driving factors while also allowing for an examination across different quantiles of insurance consumption.

The study identifies several driving factors that significantly impact engineering insurance consumption. Income, financial development, inflation, price, risk aversion, market structure and the social security system have a positive and significant influence on engineering insurance consumption. However, urbanization exhibits a negative and significant effect on the consumption of engineering insurance. QR techniques reveal variations in the effects of these driving factors across different levels of engineering insurance consumption.

This study extends the research on insurance consumption to the domain of the engineering business, making theoretical and practical contributions. The findings enrich the knowledge of insurance consumption by identifying the driving factors specific to engineering insurance for the first time. The research framework provides a novel and useful tool for examining the determinants of insurance consumption. Furthermore, the study offers insights into the engineering insurance market and its implications for policymakers and market participants.

The retail sector is not largely studied in Italy. The study offers a comparison between youth retail shift work in Milan and London. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the one hand on youth work and on the other hand to the debate on agency and structural factors in life planning, representation of the future and the transition to adulthood, observed in the United Kingdom's and Italian labour market. Even if the second one is a Southern European Country, these contexts are both characterised by a service-oriented economy and the widespread of precarious and flexible jobs.

Qualitative methods were used: one year of ethnographic observation, 50 interviews and two focus groups were carried out between 2015 and 2018 with retail workers and trade unionists. The contexts are Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, Italy, and Oxford Street in London, United Kingdom. Analysing young workers' discourses, the author identifies narratives that allow to grasp their present agency and imagined future.

Observing the crisis of the narrative (Sennett, 2020) allows to highlight the social consequences of working times on young workers' everyday life and future. The author argues that young workers struggle with the narrative of their present everyday life and the representation of the future. This relates to the condition of time alienation due to the flexible schedules and the fast pace of work in retail, both affecting the work-life balance.

The social consequences of flexible schedules in retail and fast fashion sector, which are new issues not yet sufficiently explored, are here investigated from the perspective of young workers. The study is focussed on the representations of young people working with customers in social and economic contexts characterised by flexible schedules and the deregulation of shop openings, the so-called 24/7 service society, not largely investigated in the sociological scientific literature, above all in the Italian context.

Focussing on entrepreneurs’ experiences inhibiting them from launching a business – at the micro level – the purpose of this paper is to identify issues that limit rural entrepreneurship in Pakistan and also, to identify the cultural, social, economic and religious traditions and settings that discourage entrepreneurship thus hindering economic development

An ethnographic approach was used to obtain a picture of current problems and perspectives of rural inhabitants. Members of 84 families were interviewed.

Religious, socioeconomic and structural forces play a significant role in suppressing social and cultural capital in rural areas of Pakistan, explaining the low level of entrepreneurship in these areas. Social and cultural capital requires a certain socioeconomic context for entrepreneurship to thrive.

This study examines the determinants of very low levels of entrepreneurship in rural settings in the agro-based regions of interior Sindh, Pakistan; this contributes to the gap of understanding the context of rural entrepreneurs in agro-based economies. This study makes recommendations for policy makers to promote entrepreneurship in such areas.

The study aims to explore the sectoral contributions defined as agriculture, manufacturing and services value added, capital inflows defined as workers' remittances, foreign direct investment, official development assistance and domestic credit by banks as a proxy for financial deepening in Brazil-led, and Mexico-led clusters, and Latin America and the Caribbean region as a whole. The goal is to ascertain the polarization and uniformity effects of these parameters in shaping the growth and development in the midst of global financial crisis and economic challenges facing the region.

Using the classifications of Brazil-led cluster and Mexico-led cluster from Izquierdo and Talvi, the study is advanced using panel (pool) data estimation using the ARDL approach. The author used the augmented Solow framework to advance the study. He first established the desired cointegration vector for individual countries within the cluster, each cluster level and the region prior to pursuing the regression estimation. Both clusters were combined to represent the region. The author estimates the short-run (first-difference) and long-run effects of sectoral contributions and capital inflows in the region.

The region's capital productivity is driven by Brazil-led cluster. In phase 1 (sectoral shifts), polarization is noted in agriculture (dominated by Brazil-led cluster); and services (dominated by Mexico-led cluster). Uniformity exists in two clusters and the region with respect to manufacturing share where both clusters have almost equal (positive) dominance and hence exuding positive effects in the region. In phase 2, polarization is noted in remittances (dominated Brazil-led cluster), foreign direct investment (dominated by Mexico-led cluster) and financial development (dominated by Brazil-led cluster). Uniformity is noted in both clusters and the region from negative effects of official development assistance (ODA).

The study is fairly new and contemporary in its attempt to analyze the effects of sectoral shifts and capital inflows in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. Using the classification of Brazil-led cluster and Mexico-led cluster, it investigates the polarization and uniformity in the region with respect to these parameters. The study contributes to policy dialogue, and explores the emerging trends in key economic and structural factors of growth whilst highlighting some burgeoning issues shaping LAC's growth and development overall.