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This Element synthesizes a decade of research on who is doing what and where in global value chains. Moving beyond the traditional product- or industry-based approach, the authors introduce a task-based framework for analyzing trade and structural transformation. This novel perspective captures the increasingly fragmented and specialized nature of global production. They present new data and methods to measure the income and employment associated with task exports, and analyze evolving patterns of task specialization along countries' development paths. By demonstrating the versatility and policy relevance of this approach, they aim to inspire further research and inform debates on trade, growth, and development. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
As CEOs play pivotal roles in shaping environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment strategies, existing studies have explored the influence of CEOs’ demographic and professional traits while acknowledging the impact of their cognitive characteristics. However, an overlooked aspect in these investigations is the role of CEOs’ time perspective. To address these gaps, this study investigates the relationship between CEOs’ temporal focus, a key executive perception in strategic contexts, and three dimensions across ESG investments. Utilizing data of Chinese listed firms between 2009 and 2021, we find that CEOs with past-oriented or present-oriented temporal focus exert suppressive effects on environmental and social investments, whereas CEOs with future-oriented temporal focus significantly enhance such sustainability initiatives. Present-focused CEOs are more likely to champion governance investments while both past-focused and future-focused tend to restrict them. Notably, these relationships are further moderated by CEO wealth sensitivity. Our findings illuminate the considerable influence of executive temporal perceptions on ESG investment heterogeneity, offering valuable implications for both research and practice.
We introduce a family of parsimonious network models that are intended to generalize the configuration model to temporal settings. We present consistent estimators for the model parameters and perform numerical simulations to illustrate the properties of the estimators on finite samples. We also derive analytical solutions for the basic and effective reproduction numbers for the early stage of the discrete-time SIR spreading process for our temporal configuration model (TCM). We apply three distinct TCMs to empirical student proximity networks and compare their performance.
We study how COVID-19 affected the ownership co-location network of French multinationals over 2012–2022. Using INSEE’s LiFi, we build annual country-industry co-location networks and assess robustness via topology (density, centralization, assortativity, and clustering) and edge survival (Weighted Jaccard). We then test for post-shock shifts in the determinants of dyadic co-location with multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure. Three results emerge. First, the network’s core is robust: topology shows no discontinuity and centrality persists. Second, adaptation is continuous at the margin: around one-third of edges rewire, concentrated in the periphery while core ties endure. Third, after 2020 the determinants of tie weights change, with a reduced role for gravity-like factors and greater cross-sector rebalancing. Thus the system is structurally robust with active peripheral adjustment. Rather than strict resilience in the sense of a return to the pre-COVID configuration, we observe durable strategic reweighting.
Many empirical systems contain complex interactions of arbitrary size, representing, for example, chemical reactions, social groups, co-authorship relationships, and ecological dependencies. These interactions are known as higher-order interactions, and the collection of these interactions comprise a higher-order network, or hypergraph. Hypergraphs have established themselves as a popular and versatile mathematical representation of such systems, and a number of software packages written in various programming languages have been designed to analyze these networks. However, the ecosystem of higher-order network analysis software is fragmented due to specialization of each software’s programming interface and compatible data representations. To enable seamless data exchange between higher-order network analysis software packages, we introduce the Hypergraph Interchange Format (HIF), a standardized format for storing higher-order network data. HIF supports multiple types of higher-order networks, including undirected hypergraphs, directed hypergraphs, and abstract simplicial complexes, while actively exploring extensions to represent multiplex hypergraphs, temporal hypergraphs, and ordered hypergraphs. To accommodate the wide variety of metadata used in different contexts, HIF also includes support for attributes associated with nodes, edges, and incidences. This initiative is a collaborative effort involving authors, maintainers, and contributors from prominent hypergraph software packages. This project introduces a JSON schema with corresponding documentation and unit tests, example HIF-compliant datasets, and tutorials demonstrating the use of HIF with several popular higher-order network analysis software packages.
This study uses a basket-based choice experiment with 2,010 U.S. adults to analyze alcohol and cannabis preferences in social settings following cannabis legalization. Through descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic modeling, we highlight the heterogeneous preferences consumers have for alcohol and cannabis products. Specifically, we demonstrate that a substantial portion of the survey respondents prefer to consume these substances together in social settings, while others view them as independent markets. Regression analysis then reveals that males and younger consumers are most likely to bundle these substances, while personality traits also correlate with expected simultaneous substance use. These results offer valuable insights to improve public health policy and messaging on the potential short- and long-term risks associated with cosubstance use.
Fiscal rules for devolved nations present some fundamental challenges not faced when making national fiscal Rules. Most importantly, rules across devolved nations involve a negotiation between the central and devolved governments who have very different objectives and so the framework created ends up as a mix of economics, politics and the vagaries of compromise. This article highlights how these issues have resulted in Scotland finances being heavily influenced by both inflation and population growth in ways that were never intended to become a long run feature of the funding framework.
We study how competition impacts security-bid auctions by comparing Monopolistic and Competitive auctions. Sellers choose their security designs between debt and equity, and buyers select auctions based on sellers’ choices. We find that an auction’s security design has limited influence on revenue under monopoly, whereas equity substantially increases revenue under competition due to equity attracting more bidders. Despite this, sellers’ rate of choosing equity does not differ between the treatments. While theory suggests that security choice when acting as a buyer should be negatively correlated to one’s choice as a seller, we find the empirical correlation to be positive.
The paper examines job quality in South Korea by applying a novel wellbeing-based approach to defining ‘bad jobs’, extending methodology previously validated in European labour markets. The study analyses Korean Working Conditions Survey (2014–2023) data to investigate the relationship between job quality and worker wellbeing. The analysis reveals a significant discontinuity in the marginal effects of job quality on wellbeing at the bottom decile, where improvements yield distinctly larger wellbeing gains for workers moving above this threshold, providing empirical support for this approach to defining ‘bad jobs’. The prevalence of bad jobs shows a declining trend between 2014 and 2023, reflecting both economic growth and policy interventions. While the sectoral distribution of bad jobs shows similarities with European patterns, distinctive features emerge in South Korea’s labour market structure, characterised by the unique role of large business conglomerates (chaebols) and institutional arrangements. This study represents the first application of a wellbeing-based approach to defining bad jobs in an Asian context, demonstrating both its international applicability and the importance of national context in understanding the patterns of bad jobs. The findings carry significant implications for labour market policy in South Korea’s rapidly evolving economy, particularly for addressing persistent disparities in job quality across different segments of the labour market.
This study examined the malleability of beliefs and preferences about ground beef when presented with information about the environmental, animal welfare, and food safety impacts of organic and conventional beef production. Two online discrete choice experiments were used to illicit respondents’ beliefs and preferences for ground beef. Information treatments were then introduced to assess modification of belief parameters. We find information, particularly negative information, modified respondents’ beliefs about the relationship between credence attributes and perceived quality. Correspondingly, willingness-to-pay for organic status on ground beef changed an average of –70.50% (22 cents) to +38.96% (52 cents) depending on information treatment provided.
A novel family of statistical distributions, called enriched truncated exponentiated generalized family, is theoretically developed to model heavy-tailed data. One of the three-parameter sub-models of this family derived from log-logistic distribution is comprehensively studied. The statistical properties are explored, including moments and Fisher information matrix. In addition, tail-heaviness is studied using the tail-index approach. The method of maximum likelihood is used for parameter estimation, and existence and uniqueness of these estimators are shown. The flexibility of the new family is further validated by applying to the Norwegian fire insurance claim dataset. The goodness-of-fit measures are used to illustrate the adequacy of the proposed family of distributions. Furthermore, a backtesting procedure is conducted for well-known risk measures to assess the accuracy of the right tail fit.
The rise of digital money may bring about privately issued money that circulates across borders and coexists with public money. This paper uses an open-economy search model with multiple currencies to study the impact of such global money on monetary autonomy – the capacity of central banks to set a policy instrument. I show that the circulation of global money can entail a loss of monetary autonomy, but it can be preserved if government policy that limits the amount or use of global money for transactions is introduced or if the global currency is subject to the threat of counterfeiting. The result suggests that global digital money and monetary autonomy can be compatible.
This article examines how the absence of physical branches and embodied oversight in fintech reconfigures financial life in Nigeria. Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jimeta, it shows that the absence of physical infrastructures and the dominance of virtual ones is not merely technical but an active condition that reshapes moral obligation, trust, and accountability in borrowing. Branchless fintech enables users, mostly Muslims, to rationalise interest-bearing loans as private acts beyond communal or religious scrutiny – a process conceptualised as financial secularisation. Yet the same absence generates mistrust as users perceive fintech as intangible and unreliable. The article also shows how the impersonal nature of fintech borrowing encourages default, which fintech companies counter through coercive digital enforcement. These dynamics reveal a dialectic of absence and presence: physical absence weakens moral accountability while hyper-visible digital oversight reinstates coercion. The article contributes to debates on credit-debt relations and infrastructure by showing how digital finance transforms moral economies in the global south and reshapes financial subjectivities.
This article is an environmental history of Anaconda Copper Company’s disposal of hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic waste from its Potrerillos and El Salvador mines into Chile’s Río Salado and Bahía de Chañaral. First, it uncovers a long history of disputes between copper companies and workers who panned the river for tailings. This early water war in Chile was shaped by competing understandings of water’s legal status. While workers claimed rights under the water law’s definition of water as a bien nacional de uso común, mining companies invoked the mining code and contended that the river’s water and waste were private property under civil law. Mining companies claimed rivers’ water by treating rivers in legal terms as mines and property of the state, bienes fiscales, that could be conceded as private property. They argued that human engineering of rivers in dams and canals, and through pollution, made rivers into a commodity and a form of property akin to subsoil minerals. Second, the article describes how, during the social reformist government of Eduardo Frei (1964–1970) and the revolutionary government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973), the state asserted control over Chile’s waterways while balancing centralized state management of water in the name of development with local users’ claims of long-standing riparian use rights. Third, the article traces the long history of the state and mining companies treating water as an economic commodity, often superseding local use rights, and argues that this history built the foundation for the later privatization of water during the Pinochet dictatorship. The article demonstrates that the privatization of water in Chile under Pinochet had its origins in the resolution of the tension between water and civil law in favor of extending property rights to water and building as a subsidy to transnational mining companies. This meant rolling back state management of rivers and often eroding local users’ water rights. Finally, the article concludes by examining the town of Chañaral’s successful 1987 lawsuit against the El Salvador mine to win an injunction against further pollution of the Salado as part of a moment of broader Latin American “environmental constitutionalism” during the 1980s. While this legal victory reflected a significant change in environmental law and an emergent environmentalist movement in Chile and across Latin America, it struck a blow to hundreds of workers who depended on extracting tailings from the river for their livelihood and who responded with unsuccessful protests.
Elections in many contemporary Latin American democracies unfold in a setting that complicates traditional political communication strategies. Indeed, many countries in the region are characterized by weak political parties, high levels of institutional distrust, and growing disdain for political elites. While a large body of literature has sought to explain which factors weaken parties and increase institutional distrust, less attention has been paid to the question of how these characteristics shape political communication. Drawing on the content of television advertisements created for Chile’s constitutional plebiscite campaigns, and original interviews with the creative and political teams that designed the ads, we explore how each side communicated with voters; the issues they focused on; and to what extent they relied on partisan, policy, generic, or emotional appeals. The analysis identifies important changes in messaging across the three electoral contests and probes an explanation for this variation. We find that in the absence of partisan messages, the constitutional campaigns relied first on policy-based appeals but then transitioned to generic appeals, ultimately opting for “antipolitics” messaging. These changes resulted from the expansion of the electorate and growing distrust in the constitutional convention. The analysis also underscores that pro–status quo plebiscite campaigns are more likely to deploy negative emotional language than campaigns centered on change.
This article explores the ‘rationality wars’, contemporary debates about the nature and scope of rationality across economics, psychology, behavioral public policy and philosophy. It traces the evolution of the concept from classical thinkers and shows how modern disagreements – such as Daniel Kahneman’s logical model versus Gerd Gigerenzer’s ecological approach – restate long-standing philosophical tensions. These divergences arise from the distinct epistemological demands of each discipline. Using Gustavo Bueno’s distinction between concepts (discipline-specific) and ideas (transdisciplinary), the article critiques reductionist attempts to impose one framework as definitive. Instead, it argues for a pluralistic, scientifically grounded understanding of rationality that respects diverse aims, methods and standards.