Job creation and regional change under New Labour : a shift-share analysis

The paper examines changes in UK regional employment during the period of the New Labour administration, 1997–2010, with the Blair and Brown administrations considered separately. The paper employs a shift-share analysis of workplace employment data by industry and subregion, using annual data from the UK Labour Force Survey. The results reveal significant regional shifts, with interesting spatial dynamics in and around the capital and resilient employment growth in the provinces

Five minutes with Saskia Sassen: “The issue right now is not the lack of discipline in Eurozone economies; it’s the financialisation of everything”

Has the Eurozone crisis undermined Europe’s place in the world? In an interview with EUROPP’s editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson, Saskia Sassen discusses the role of finance in the crisis, the threat posed by transnational systems of surveillance, and the potential for public disorder to give a political voice to the powerless

Exploring the role of professional associations in collective learning in London and New York's advertising and law professional service firm clusters.

The value of regional economies for collective learning has been reported by numerous scholars. However often work has been criticised for lacking analytical clarity and failing to explore the architectures of collective learning and the role of the knowledge produced in making firms in a cluster economy successful. This paper engages with these problematics and investigates how collective learning is facilitated in the advertising and law professional service firm clusters in London and New York. It explores the role of professional associations and investigates how they mediate a collective learning process in each city. It argues that professional associations seed urban communities of practice that emerge outside of the formal activities of professional associations. In these communities individual with shared interests in advertising and law learn from one-another and are therefore able to adapt and evolve one-another approaches to common industry challenges. The paper suggests this is another form of the variation Marshall highlighted in relation to cluster-based collective learning. The paper also shows how the collective learning process is affected by the presence, absence and strength of an institutional thickness. It is therefore argued that a richer understanding of institutional affects is needed in relation to CL

Social Preferences, Skill Segregation and Wage Dynamics

We study the earning structure and the equilibrium asignment of workers to firms in a model in which workers have social preferences, and skills are perfectly substitutable in production. Firms offer long-term contracts, and we allow for frictions in the labour market in the form of mobility costs. The model delivers specific predictions about the nature of worker flows, about the characteristic of workplace skill segregation, and about wage dispersion both within and cross firms. We shows that long-term contracts in the resence of social preferences associate within-firm wage dispersion with novel "internal labour market" features such as gradual promotions, productivity-unrelated wage increases, and downward wage flexibility. These three dynamic features lead to productivity-unrelated wage volatily within firms.Publicad

Flatte-like distributions and the a_0(980)/f_0(980) mesons

We explore the features of Flatte-like parametrizations. In particular, we demonstrate that the large variation in the absolute values of the coupling constants to the pi-eta (or pi-pi) and KKbar channels for the a_0(980) and f_0(980) mesons that one can find in the literature can be explained by a specific scaling behaviour of the Flatte amplitude for energies near the KKbar threshold. We argue that the ratio of the coupling constants can be much better determined from a fit to experimental data.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure

Meson model for f_0(980) production in peripheral pion-nucleon reactions

The Juelich model for pion-pion-scattering, based on an effective meson-meson Lagrangian is applied to the analysis of the S-wave production amplitudes derived from the BNL E852 experiment pi^- p -> pi^0 pi^0 n for a pion momentum of 18.3 GeV. The unexpected strong dependence of the S-wave partial wave amplitude on the momentum transfer between the proton and neutron in the vicinity of the f_0(980) resonance is explained in our analysis as interference effect between the correlated and uncorrelated pi^0 pi^0 pairs.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, formulas added, typos removed, new figure

Exploring future agricultural development and biodiversity in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi: a spatially explicit scenario-based assessment

Competition for land is increasing as a consequence of the growing demands for food and other commodities and the need to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services. Land conversion and the intensification of current agricultural systems continues to lead to a loss of biodiversity and trade-offs among ecosystem functions. Decision-makers need to understand these trade-offs in order to better balance different demands on land and resources. There is an urgent need for spatially explicit information and analyses on the effects of different trajectories of human-induced landscape change in biodiversity and ecosystem services. We assess the potential implications of a set of plausible socio-economic and climate scenarios for agricultural production and demand and model-associated land use and land cover changes between 2005 and 2050 to assess potential impacts on biodiversity in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. We show that different future socio-economic scenarios are consistent in their projections of areas of high agricultural development leading to similar spatial patterns of habitat and biodiversity loss. Yet, we also show that without protected areas, biodiversity losses are higher and that expanding protected areas to include other important biodiversity areas can help reduce biodiversity losses in all three countries. These results highlight the need for effective protection and the potential benefits of expanding the protected area network while meeting agricultural production needs

Are Labour Markets Necessarily Local? Spatiality, Segmentation and Scale

This paper draws on recent debates about scale to approach the geography of labour markets from a dynamic perspective sensitive to the spatiality and scale of labour market restructuring. Its exploration of labour market reconfigurations after the collapse of a major firm (Ansett Airlines) raises questions about geography’s faith in the inherently ‘local’ constitution of labour markets. Through an examination of the job reallocation process after redundancy, the paper suggests that multiple labour markets use and articulate scale in different ways. It argues that labour market rescaling processes are enacted at the critical moment of recruitment, where social networks, personal aspirations and employer preferences combine to shape workers’ destinations