Technological similarity enables wine operators to share best practices, benchmark against industry standards, and identify new areas of innovation. Despite this, measuring similarity is notoriously challenging. In this paper, I use sentence embeddings on wine patent data to show how similarity compares across different models. I validate the results both internally and externally, showing large discrepancies in annual trends. The results underscore the importance of selecting suitable models for market assessment, providing a valuable primer for both wine operators and technologists.

Many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are managed by owners, founders, or small leadership teams. The UK government’s Help to Grow Management Programme (HtGM) aims to improve SME growth through leadership and management skills training to increase firm level productivity. The government’s independent evaluation reports for the HtGM programme show that its aims were broadly met, but there is no empirical research that has reviewed the programme. To address this gap, 46 HtGM programme completers were interviewed on their perception of the HtGM outcomes. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and compared to the government’s evaluation reports. This study’s findings show that a variety of programme activities developed skills, knowledge, and management practices, resulting in improved confidence to lead and drive growth. The analysis adds depth to our understanding how this was achieved from the programme, highlighting the benefits of mentoring, networking and cross-collaboration. Follow-up support is recommended for the growth action plan (GAP).

In a game with costly information acquisition, the ability of one player to acquire information directly affects her opponent’s incentives for gathering information. Rational inattention theory then posits the opponent’s information-acquisition strategy is a direct function of these incentives. This paper argues that people are cognitively limited in predicting their opponent’s level of information, and hence lack the strategic sophistication that the theory requires. In an experiment involving a real-effort attention task and a simple two-player trading game, I study the ability of subjects to (1) anticipate the information acquisition of opponents in this strategic game, and (2) best respond to this information acquisition when acquiring their own costly information. I study this by exogenously manipulating the difficulty of the attention task for both the player and their opponent. Predictions of behavior are generated by a novel theoretical model in which Level-K agents can acquire information à la rational inattention. I find an out-sized lack of strategic sophistication, driven largely by the cognitive difficulties of predicting opponent information. These results suggest a necessary integration of the theories of rational inattention and costly sophistication in strategic settings.

The focus of existing research on perceived organizational support (POS) has largely been concentrated at the individual-level, leaving an understudied gap at a higher unit-level of analysis. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the multilevel relationship between employee POS and job satisfaction, emphasizing the moderating role of unit-level POS. We hypothesize, based on POS theory and social comparison theory, that unit-level POS serves as a contextual moderator for the relationship between individual-level POS and job satisfaction. Additionally, at the unit-level, we identify clan culture values and unit-satisfaction as correlates of unit-POS. We test our hypotheses using a Bayesian Multilevel Structural Modeling approach on 45 work units and 317 employees. The results show that at low levels of unit-level POS, individual-level POS is more important for employees’ job satisfaction. We furthermore found support for a positive association between unit-level POS, unit-clan culture, and unit satisfaction. Our results, and their notable theoretical and practical implications, are discussed.

Investment facilitation is an increasingly important policy tool to promote foreign investment. However, we know very little about its prevalence. This paper introduces a new dataset for measuring the adoption of investment facilitation measures at country level. The Investment Facilitation Index (IFI) covers 101 measures, grouped into six policy areas, and maps adoption across 142 economies. The paper outlines the conceptual and methodological framework of the IFI, analyses the current levels of adoption, and demonstrates the index’s robustness. The data show that economies with lower adoption rates typically belong to the low-income or lower-middle-income groups, often located in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. This dataset serves as a benchmark for assessing the design and impact of international agreements, such as the Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement (IFDA). It can also support the IFDA implementation by guiding domestic assessments of technical assistance needs and capacity development.

The frequency and severity of disasters are increasing, and promoting the adoption of digital technologies could enhance the agility, reach, and resilience of humanitarian supply chains. Global patterns of digital innovation in humanitarian supply chains are examined through a systematic quantitative literature review and bibliometric analysis of 4,780 Scopus-indexed documents (2015–2025). Combined with targeted qualitative syntheses, co-word analysis, co-citation mapping, and bibliographic coupling, the analysis reveals digitalisation as an expanding technology-led field, dominated by response-phase applications. Dominant clusters centre on: artificial intelligence-driven forecasting, emerging logistics optimisation, last-mile operations, and data analytics platforms. We interpreted these patterns through the Technology–Organisation–Environment model. It is found that digital technologies are necessary and applicable throughout disaster management phases. A conceptual framework reconfigures Technology–Organisation–Environment domains reflecting the context-driven dynamics of humanitarian supply chains, emphasising resilience. Future research should focus on longitudinal, co-designed case and action research into digital adoption, integration challenges, and community-based knowledge in fostering innovation.

En la segunda década del siglo XXI, varios países latinoamericanos vivieron un ciclo de movilizaciones que antecedió a campañas presidenciales marcadas por la disputa entre candidaturas de izquierdas y derechas. En algunos casos, los actores que participaron de los estallidos respaldaron a candidatos de izquierda; en otros, no. Con base en esta variación este artículo analiza los factores que incidieron en ese apoyo en Ecuador, Perú, Chile y Colombia (2021–2022). Se plantea que dicho respaldo depende de la inclusión programática de sus reivindicaciones y de las estrategias de cooperación o conflicto con las candidaturas. El análisis se desarrolla a través de un rastreo de procesos, utilizando una revisión documental de prensa, programas de gobierno y comunicados. Se concluye que los conflictos endógenos y exógenos entre actores movilizados y candidaturas presidenciales son el factor más relevante para explicar el apoyo o rechazo hacia coaliciones de izquierda.

Women tend to be underconfident about their financial knowledge. In this longitudinal study, we tested two interventions intended to raise financial confidence and engagement in positive financial management behaviors among young Canadian women (N = 1119). One intervention included a brief educational task, teaching participants definitions of financial terms. Another intervention challenged social beliefs about financial competence by prompting participants to describe and browse other women’s stories about financial competence experiences on a website. Directly after the interventions, financial confidence ratings from women assigned to either or both of the intervention conditions were about 6% higher than ratings in a control condition. This effect persisted one week later, though a month later the size of the effect had dropped to non-significance. Confidence was linked to better financial management behaviors and more savings. Results also showed that participants in all conditions reported higher financial confidence and better financial management behaviors at later vs. earlier surveys. We conclude that simply reporting on financial attitudes and behaviors over time can increase women’s financial confidence and recommend fostering discourse about finances to close the gender gap in financial confidence.

We develop a methodology for conducting inference on extreme quantiles of unobserved individual heterogeneity (e.g., heterogeneous coefficients and treatment effects) in panel data and meta-analysis settings. Inference is challenging in such settings: only noisy estimates of heterogeneity are available, and central limit approximations perform poorly in the tails. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition under which noisy estimates are informative about extreme quantiles, along with sufficient rate and moment conditions. Under these conditions, we establish an extreme value theorem and an intermediate order theorem for noisy estimates. These results yield simple optimization-free confidence intervals (CIs) for extreme quantiles. Simulations show that our CIs have favorable coverage and that the rate conditions matter for the validity of inference. We illustrate the method with an application to firm productivity differences across areas of varying population density. By analyzing the left tails of the productivity distributions, we find no evidence of stronger firm selection in more densely populated areas.

It is often thought that compulsory retirement funding gains support from paternalistic considerations. This paper examines this claim. I argue that compulsory retirement funding is more coherent when understood as an attempt at temporal smoothing than counterfactual insurance. An implication is that any paternalistic case for retirement funding faces problems that are more severe than they would be if compulsory retirement funding were insurance. I label these the problems of ‘inverted bias’ and of the ‘arbitrariness of income from labour’. The paper then makes some suggestions about how these points about paternalism bear on the problem of justice in retirement funding.

This article serves as an introduction to the Special Issue section “Measuring and Enhancing Resilience of United States Rural Communities in the Context of Climate Variability.” To set the stage for this section, we review how climate hazards impact rural areas and synthesize insights that emerge across the issue’s four papers, noting their policy relevance and highlighting opportunities for continued research. We argue that emerging data tools can help program designers and policy makers better support the resilience of rural areas, but that doing so remains complicated by heterogeneity in resources and vulnerabilities across rural areas.