Suchergebnisse

The unambiguous reality of human civilization is that we now are globally interconnected. This fact is revealed by 'world wars', which happened for the first time in the history of humankind only in the last century. In context, global human population size has grown more than 1000% since the advent of the nation-state with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. During this period, the influence of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) has been expanding, certainly since the industrial revolution around 1800 when the human population reached 1 billion, accelerating to 8 billion people as we enter the next decade during our digital revolution. The challenges are on a planetary scale, as reflected further by concern about Earth's climate, crossing the spectrum of sub-national to international jurisdictions with the nation-state at the centre. As an example, science diplomacy from the polar regions illustrates how transatlantic science relations are embedded into a global context. With hope and inspiration from the perspective of a practitioner and observer, the evolution of science diplomacy is shared herein with local-global applications as an international, interdisciplinary and inclusive (holistic) process, involving informed decision-making to balance national interests and common interests for the benefit of all on Earth across generations.

This article introduces the research problem and questions guiding the special issue, situating them in the relevant academic context with references to the literature on soft power and its historical and contemporary relevance for the transatlantic relationship. Based on a reconceptualization of the notion of soft power in the context of 'Transatlantica', defined as the political and geographical space inhabited by the EU and the US, it provides an overview of the key insights of the research articles and synthesizes the findings emerging from the different policy domains studied in the special issue. It concludes by deriving the broader conceptual insights – in particular an expanded conception of soft power – as well as the normative, policy-relevant implications from these findings.

SUMMARYWe study the rise of the so-called 'gig economy' through the lens of Uber and its drivers in the United Kingdom. Using administrative data from Uber and a new representative survey of London drivers, we explore their backgrounds, earnings, and subjective well-being. We find that the vast majority of Uber drivers are male immigrants, primarily drawn from the bottom half of the London income distribution. Most transitioned out of permanent part- or full-time jobs and about half of drivers' report that their incomes increased after partnering with Uber. After covering vehicle operation costs and Uber's service fee, we estimate that the median London driver earns about £11 per hour spent logged into the app. But while Uber drivers remain at the lower end of the London income distribution, they report higher levels of life satisfaction than other workers. Consistent with a trade-off between evaluative and emotional well-being observed among the self-employed, they also report higher anxiety levels. We hypothesize that the higher life satisfaction among Uber drivers partly reflects their preferences for flexibility and the autonomy that the platform offers. We provide suggestive evidence showing that drivers who emphasize flexibility as an important motivation to join Uber also report higher levels of subjective well-being. However, a minority of drivers who report that they would prefer work as an employee report lower levels of life satisfaction and higher levels of anxiety. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of non-monetary factors in shaping the welfare of workers in the gig economy.

SUMMARY
In Europe, the need for additional funding coming from either budget cuts and/or increased costs due to increased competition in university quality has reopened the debate on the financing of university systems. An attractive alternative to the current general-tax-financed subsidies is Income Contingent Loans (ICL), a flexible scheme that puts more weight on private resources while enhancing progressivity. One challenge of the viability of ICL systems is the functioning of the labor market for university graduates. This paper offers a general analysis of the economics of ICL, followed by an application to Spain. We set up a loan laboratory in which we can explore the distributional effects of different loan systems to finance tertiary education at current costs as well as to increase university funding to improve its quality. We use simulated lifetime earnings of graduates matching the dynamics of employment and earnings in the Spanish administrative social security data to calculate the burden of introducing ICL for individuals at different points of the earnings distribution and for the government. We find that (1) our proposed structure is highly progressive under all specifications, with the top quarter of the distribution paying close to the full amount of the tuition and the bottom 10% paying almost no tuition and (2) the share of total university education subsidized by the government is between 16 and 56 percentage points less than under the current system.

SUMMARY
We study the effects of public evaluation of university research on the pay structures of academic departments. A simple equilibrium model of university pay determination shows how the pay–performance relationship can be explained by the incentives inherent in the research evaluation process. We then analyse the pay–performance relationship using data on the salary of all UK university full professors, matched to the performance of their departments from the 2014 UK government evaluation of research, the Research Excellence Framework (REF). A cross sectional empirical analysis shows that both average pay level and pay inequality in a department are positively related to performance. It also shows that the pay–performance relationship is driven by a feature of the research evaluation that allows academics to transfer the affiliation of published research across universities. To assess the effect of the REF on pay structure, we take advantage of the time dimension of our data and of inherent uncertainty in the evaluation of the performance of academic departments generated by the rules of the exercise. Our results indicate that higher achieving departments benefit from increased subsequent hiring and higher professorial salaries with the salary benefits of REF performance concentrated among the highest paid professors.