The patterning of finance/security : a designerly walkthrough of challenger banking apps

Culture is being ‘appified’. Diverse, pre-existing everyday activities are being redesigned so they happen with and through apps. While apps are often encountered as equivalent icons in apps stores or digital devices, the processes of appification – that is, the actions required to turn something into an app – vary significantly. In this article, we offer a comparative analysis of a number of ‘challenger’ banking apps in the United Kingdom. As a retail service, banking is highly regulated and banks must take steps to identify and verify their customers before entering a retail relationship. Once established, this ‘secured’ financial identity underpins a lot of everyday economic activity. Adopting the method of the walkthrough analysis, we study the specific ways these processes of identifying and verifying the identity of the customer (now the user) occur through user onboarding. We argue that banking apps provide a unique way of binding the user to an identity, one that combines the affordances of smart phones with the techniques, knowledge and patterns of user experience design. With the appification of banking, we see new processes of security folded into the everyday experience of apps. Our analysis shows how these binding identities are achieved through what we refer to as the patterning of finance/security. This patterning is significant, moreover, given its availability for wider circulation beyond the context of retail banking apps

Temporary Agency Work and Firm Performance: Evidence from German Establishment-Level Panel Data

This paper empirically examines the impact of temporary agency work on firm performance using panel data from German establishments. Thereby, special attention is devoted to the question, whether there are performance differences between firms using temporary agency workers (TAWs) as a buffer stock (flexibility strategy) and firms using TAWs for screening purposes (screening strategy). While the theoretical discussion on this issue does not lead to clear-cut results, our empirical investigation provides the following results. First, we find an inverse U-shaped relationship between the share of TAWs and firm performance. Second, we obtain that firms following the screening strategy are significantly more productive than firms following the flexibility strategy. These results are found to be valid in both cross-sectional and panel data settings, so they are robust to unobserved firm heterogeneity.Temporary agency work, firm performance, flexibility strategy, screening strategy

Higgs Spin Determination in the WW channel and beyond

After the discovery of the 126 GeV resonance at the LHC, the determination of its features, including its spin, is a very important ongoing task. In order to distinguish the two most likely spin hypotheses, spin-0 or spin-2, we study the phenomenology of a light Higgs-like spin-2 resonance produced in different gluon-fusion and vector-boson-fusion processes at the LHC. Starting from an effective model for the interaction of a spin-2 particle with the SM gauge bosons, we calculate cross sections and differential distributions within the Monte Carlo program Vbfnlo. We find that with specific model parameters such a spin-2 resonance can mimic SM Higgs rates and transverse-momentum distributions in $\gamma \gamma$, $WW$ and $ZZ$ decays, whereas several distributions allow to separate spin-2 from spin-0, independently of the spin-2 model parameters.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Complementarities between Workplace Organisation and Human Resource Management:

Owing to changes in the business environment, there has been a tremendous adoption of innovative workplace organisation (WO) and human resource (HR) practices during the last few decades. Assuming a holistic perspective on human resource management (HRM), the present study establishes the hypothesis of mutually reinforcing WO and HR practices that, thus, constitute a so-called high-performance work system. Precisely, it is argued that there may be a complementary relationship between a more decentralised way of allocating tasks and decision rights on the one hand and continuing training (or skilled labour), incentive pay or a more intensive use of long-term, as opposed to temporary, employment on the other. This hypothesis is examined empirically using latest nationally representative panel data of about 2,500 firms in Switzerland and applying econometric estimation techniques on the basis of an augmented Cobb-Douglas production function. The estimation results show statistically significant complementarities between the WO and HR practices mentioned above. In addition, socalled innovative HRM systems of mutually reinforcing WO and HR practices increase firm performance significantly. These results are robust to unobserved firm heterogeneity and to the problem of reversed causality.

Trace maps, invariants, and some of their applications

Trace maps of two-letter substitution rules are investigated with special emphasis on the underlying algebraic structure and on the existence of invariants. We illustrate the results with the generalized Fibonacci chains and show that the well-known Fricke character I(x,y,z) = x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - 2 x y z - 1 is not the only type of invariant that can occur. We discuss several physical applications to electronic spectra including the gap-labeling theorem, to kicked two-level systems, and to the classical 1D Ising model with non-commuting transfer matrices.Comment: 23 pages, including 2 figures, paper made available here due to renewed interes