This volume contains an Open Access chapter. We have witnessed an avalanche of quantitative public measures over the past decades. Research in the social sciences has shown that rankings in particular are now a driving force of social change - both, desired and undesired - in many areas of...

This volume is motivated by key questions and challenges associated with reviving and developing a comparative perspective. One organizing theme of the volume is to present comparative analysis as a means to explain and describe organizational heterogeneity, at varying levels and contexts. While...

Recent attention has focused on the UK's productivity gap in the retail sector. Figure 1 shows an estimate of labour productivity in retail across countries, using output per hour worked. The UK lies well behind the US, France and Germany. Reynolds at al (2005) contribute to this debate by...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labour market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...