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The corporate governance systems of continental Europe have traditionally been quite different to those of the liberal market economies (e.g., the United States and the United Kingdom). Company ownership has been dominated by incumbent blockholders, with a relatively minor role for minority shareholders and institutional investors. However, since the mid‐1990s, European corporations have adopted many of the characteristics of the Anglo‐American shareholder model. Furthermore, such an increased shareholder orientation has coincided with a significant role for the Left in European government. This presents a puzzle, as conventional wisdom does not conceive of the European Left as the natural ally of pro‐shareholder capitalism. This book provides an analysis of this paradox by arguing that the postwar support of the European Left for the prevailing blockholder‐dominated corporate system depended on the willingness of blockholders to share economic rents with employees, both through higher wages and greater employment stability. However, during the 1990s, product markets became more competitive in many European countries. The sharing of rents between social actors became increasingly difficult to sustain. In such an environment, the Left chose to relinquish its traditional social partnership with blockholders and embraced many aspects of the shareholder model. The hypothesis is initially explored through a panel data econometric analysis of fifteen non‐liberal market economies. Subsequent case study chapters examine the political economy of recent corporate governance change in Germany and Italy.

The book proposes a unifying conception which shows that the differences between ‘majoritarian’, ‘consensus’ and other forms of representative democracy are superficial compared to what unites them. The common element is the empowerment of the median voter by making the party (s)he votes for the median party in the legislature. Comparative evidene covering 21 democracies from 1950-1995 is assembled to check out the descriptive credentials of this idea, in contrast to the government mandate which forms the normal description and justification of democracy as providing ‘a necessary link between popular preferences and public policy’. Although, spontaneous majorities rarely emerge, median voter - median party correspondences do (72% of all governments, 82% under PR). Policy correspondence, distortion, long term bias, and responsiveness are examined in both static and dynamic terms. They reveal that underneath short-term fluctuations, the long-term equilibrium positions of governments and median voters map each other closely. Many other questions about democracy are also raised and investigated — economic and retrospective voting (‘ kicking the rascals out’): policy incrementalism, etc. — giving the book an appeal to different groups of specialists in political science. The comparative data on voting, on electoral party and government preferences, and on actual policy outputs are unsurpassed with regards to comprehensiveness over nations and time.

This book argues that what it is to be a picture does not fundamentally concern how such representations can be perceived, but how they relate to one another syntactically and semantically. This kind of approach, first championed by Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art, has not found many supporters in part because of weaknesses with Goodman’s account. It is shown that a properly crafted structural account of pictures has many advantages over the perceptual accounts that dominate the literature on this topic. Part I (Chapters 1-5) presents the account and draws out some of its immediate consequences. In particular, it explains the close relationship between pictures, diagrams, graphs, and other kinds of non-linguistic representation. Also, it undermines the claim that pictures are essentially visual by showing how many kinds of non-visual representations, including audio recordings and tactile line drawings, are genuinely pictorial. Part II (Chapters 6-10) shows that the structural account of depiction can help to explain why pictures seem so perceptually special. Part III (Chapters 11-12) provides a new account of pictorial realism and shows how accounting for realism relates to an account of depiction in general.

This book is intended to be read at any stage in the dissertation process, but will be particularly useful in the early stages of preparation for a social work dissertation, and as a reference resource throughout. The book is a guide to successful dissertation completion. Content includes a brief history and overview of social work doctoral education in the United States, the importance of values in social work, and the relationship between personal, research, and social work values. Chapter 2 addresses issues in selecting and working with the dissertation supervisor and committee, as well as the role and tasks of all three parties in successful completion of the dissertation. In Chapter 3 strategies for researching, and evaluating the literature, as well as writing the literature review are discussed. In addition, the relevance of theory to social work research is examined. Chapter 4 describes ethical issues in social research and requirements for the protection of human subjects. In addition, an overview of both quantitative and qualitative research methods is provided. In Chapter 5 sample design and sample size are discussed in relation to both quantitative and qualitative research. The significance of the psychometric properties of measurement instruments is also discussed. Chapter 6 addresses issues in data collection, data management, and data analysis in qualitative and quantitative research. Finally Chapter 7 presents strategies for dissertation writing including structure and content, as well as data presentation.

Theoretical research undertaken over the last decades showed that the nature of nominal rigidities plays a key role in determining the effects of different shocks on the economy. This research has made clear that a thorough understanding of the extent and causes of the sluggish adjustment of nominal prices is crucial to the design and conduct of monetary policy. This book presents the main results of a research program undertaken by the Eurosystem central banks on price setting decisions by firms in the euro area. Its objective is to deepen our understanding of the behavioral mechanisms driving agents' pricing decisions, adopting a methodological approach—asking firms directly about how they set the price of their output (their pricing strategies) and why (the rationale of these strategies)—that is particularly well suited for the purpose at hand. The book also compares results for the euro area to similar analyses for other countries and summarizes the main findings of studies based on individual quantitative micro data on consumer and producer prices carried out for most euro area countries. Finally, the book explores the monetary policy implications of the main findings.

Procrustean methods are used to transform one set of data to represent another set of data as closely as possible. This book unifies several strands in the literature and contains new algorithms. It focuses on matching two or more configurations by using orthogonal, projection, and oblique axes transformations. Group-average summaries play an important part, and links with other group-average methods are discussed. The text is multi-disciplinary and also presents a unifying ANOVA framework.