This paper examines the performance of smallholder crop farmers across different land ownership categories in Ghana. Using a metafrontier model, the study estimates technical efficiencies and productivity levels among farmers with formal land deeds, those without deeds, and non-landowners. The results show that land, labor, and capital significantly impact crop production across ownership categories, while social capital, income, and demographics influence managerial performance. Farmers with formal land deeds and those cultivating family-owned land exhibited superior production technologies. Enhancing access to extension services, credit, and farmer-based organizations, alongside collaboration with traditional chiefs and family heads, can improve land tenure security and productivity.

Work on the relationship between regulation and bribery suggests that bribes are a joint function of the demands of bureaucrats and the supply of business managers willing to pay them. However, due to biases in measurement, empirical work has concentrated on country-level, demand-side drivers, while research on factors that lead businesses to bribe remains theoretically rich but empirically underdeveloped. We contribute to the burgeoning work on the supply of bribery with a formal model that predicts poorly managed firms may strategically initiate bribes because resource constraints and/or poor service quality necessitate shortcuts in regulatory compliance. To test these theories, we present two connected studies. The first demonstrates that the predictions are consistent with cross-national business survey data. The second, a field experiment, randomly assigned firms to management training courses in Vietnam. Using detailed accounting books, we find that firms in the management course paid monthly bribes less than one-fifth the size ($227 less) of the placebo group, and, consistent with our predictions, had higher levels of regulatory compliance.

One of the most enduring problems in Spanish phonology has been the appearance of unstressed diphthongs in words with derivational suffixes. Despite robust conditioning of the diphthong alternation by stress, which predicts monophthongs in such words, derivational suffixes exhibit gradient tolerance for diphthongs. Moreover, speakers' intuitions appear to be keenly sensitive to this variability among suffixes. In this article we present corpus data identifying productivity as a crucial property of suffixes predicting the occurrence of diphthongs in extant Spanish derivations. This finding allows us to link the distribution of diphthongs to a more general, crosslinguistic tendency for words with productive morphology to be phonologically marked. We then present experimental results from lexical decision showing that this relationship between phonology and morphology drives not only Spanish speakers' intuitions but also their real-time processing of novel derivations. In addition to offering a solution to a long-standing problem in Spanish phonology, these findings have profound implications for our understanding of the phonology-morphology interface. Our corpus and experimental results conceptually motivate an argument that the contrasting demands of compositional and holistic processing of polymorphemic words play a crucial role in the increased incidence of marked phonology in particular morphological contexts.

There is a long-standing debate about the principles constraining the combinatorial properties of suffixes. Hay 2002 and Hay & Plag 2004 proposed a model in which suffixes can be ordered along a hierarchy of processing complexity. We show that this model generalizes to a larger set of suffixes, and we provide independent evidence supporting the claim that a higher rank in the ordering correlates with increased productivity. Behavioral data from lexical decision and word naming show, however, that this model has been one-sided in its exclusive focus on the importance of constituent-driven processing, and that it requires supplementation by a second and equally important focus on the role of memory. Finally, using concepts from graph theory, we show that the space of existing suffix combinations can be conceptualized as a directed graph, which, with surprisingly few exceptions, is acyclic. This acyclicity is hypothesized to be functional for lexical processing.

The pandemic crisis introduced an unprecedented supply-side shock that was global in scope. Despite historically high levels of prior sovereign debt and low bond yields, macroeconomic policy responses included monetised fiscal expansions of extraordinary magnitude. Conventional theory suggests that the combination of supply contractions with such expansions is inflationary, yet central bank discourse during the pandemic expressed little concern about inflation. Our theoretical analysis suggests the presence of strong inflation forces at the time, likely offset by continuing pessimism shocks, consumption constraints and expectations management. In prominent advanced countries over more than a century, monetised fiscal expansions are shown to have preceded inflation surges, most strongly following signature episodes like WWII.

While cross-linguistic studies suggest that palatalization is preferentially triggered by high and front vocoids, and that it targets coronals or dorsals, Xhosa has a process of palatalization that is triggered by [w], and that targets only bilabials. This paper presents a wug test experiment, showing that some Xhosa speakers do systematically generalize this phenomenon to nonce words. This suggests that for those speakers, labial palatalization is indeed learned as part of their phonological grammar. Additionally, our findings show that some other speakers systematically do not apply palatalization in nonce words, suggesting that they have learned it as a pattern in the lexicon, and not as part of phonology. Drawing on evidence from a separate wug test experiment, we show that the inter-speaker variation in our results cannot be explained away as a task effect. As such, our results show that different speakers can have fundamentally different grammatical representations of the same sound pattern. Though Xhosa's labial palatalization pattern is phonetically unnatural, that does not indicate that it is necessarily outside the domain of phonology proper.

The 60th anniversary of the Department of Government at the University of Essex provides an opportunity to reflect on its many achievements and why these have been possible. This article argues that research excellence is a collective outcome that cannot be reduced to individuals. Research institutions tend to be successful because they manage to create productive environments, which can make individual scholars better and create synergies. The thesis is backed up by examples from the history of the department and more general research on the role of environments for research. The article considers possible insights with regard to present challenges to academic institutions, why productive environments can be difficult to maintain, and how we can try to nurture them.

A widespread assumption in the language contact literature is that affixes are never borrowed directly, but only indirectly, that is, as part of complex loanwords. From such complex loanwords, affixes may eventually spread to native stems, creating hybrid formations, in a process of language-internal analogical extension. Direct borrowing is the extraction of an affix based on knowledge of the donor language, without the mediation of complex loanwords within the recipient language. This article suggests that direct borrowing can also be the only or primary process leading to productive loan affixes. Criteria are provided to assess instances of direct and indirect borrowing on the basis of the distribution of borrowed affixes across complex loanwords and hybrid formations. These are applied to corpora of various languages. A scale of directness of affix borrowing is proposed, based on the extent to which speakers of the recipient language rely (i) on their knowledge of the donor language (direct borrowing) and (ii) on complex loanwords within their native language (indirect borrowing).

Comprehending and producing words is a natural process for human speakers. In linguistic theory, investigating this process formally and computationally is often done by focusing on forms only. By moving beyond the world of forms, we show in this study that the discriminative lexicon (DL) model—operating with word comprehension as a mapping of form onto meaning, and word production as a mapping of meaning onto form—generates accurate predictions about what meanings listeners understand and what forms speakers produce. Furthermore, we show that measures derived from the computational model are predictive for human reaction times. Although mathematically very simple, the linear mappings between form and meaning posited by our model are powerful enough to capture the complexity and productivity of a Semitic language with a complex hybrid morphological system.

As many Ph.D. candidates appreciate, the reality of maintaining productivity during the course of your candidature often proves to be challenging. This article aims to provide a fresh way to view your Ph.D. candidature to aid productivity and learn skills which can be transferred over to future employment as an early career academic. The article presents a set of sub-skills and perspectives to deconstruct the task of writing a thesis and to establish skills which can benefit your future academic career.

Using the Irish experience of public investment and fiscal policy management over the last 25 years, we identify five core lessons. These concern (1) the need for sustained investment effort even when facing tough choices regarding public expenditure, (2) the importance of assessing the adequacy of public capital, (3) counter-cyclicality as an important principle of public investment, (4) crowding-in private investment and (5) the challenge for public investment caused by longer-term challenges such as the necessary climate transition. We also propose two overarching design suggestions for fiscal policy and investment management frameworks.

This article introduces the first of two international Themed Collections on gender and work, published as, Part A across Volumes 35(4) and 36(2), and as Part B in Volume 36(3) of The Economic and Labour Relations Review. In introducing the 11 Part A articles, we identify three main themes: contexts, impacts, and effects on gender status. Contexts include climate crisis, uncertain gender impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), and ongoing skill under-recognition in feminised ‘ancillary’ occupations. Impacts include increasing care load and violence in traditionally feminised teaching work, LGBTQ+ workers’ intertwined experiences of stigmatisation and job insecurity, and immigrant experience of unregulated care work in private households. Impacts on well-being, safety, and security include restricted access to nutrition, rest, creativity, life cycle, and community participation, and diminished status, agency, voice, and recognition of productivity contribution. An alternative productivity calculus is provided in articles documenting the benefits of Australia’s universal statutory 10 days’ family and domestic violence leave entitlement, a proposed Indian green jobs guarantee programme that could transition millions of women into the formal labour market, and an Australian calculation of the unrecognised GDP contribution of breastmilk. A Sub-Saharan African article shows that legally mandated maternity protections are inaccessible to women in informal labour markets. In the context of the United Nations’ key normative and programme role, and its stocktakes of equality and empowerment milestones, we foreshadow questions of official structure and grassroots agency to be addressed in the Part B exploration in (Volume 36(3)) of informal economy work, community agency, and intersectional voice.

This study investigates the influence of workplace conditions on job satisfaction, focusing on environmental, occupational safety, and social factors, paying particular attention to gender interactions. Drawing on the European Survey on Workplace Health, Wellbeing, and Quality of Work Life, data from 514 employees in local companies and public organizations across six Southern European countries were analysed using discrete choice regression models. The empirical findings identify ventilation, ergonomics, social spaces, and safety training as the strongest positive drivers of job satisfaction, while repetitive work negatively affects it. The results show that women, highly educated employees, and those with permanent contracts report higher job satisfaction, with female workers benefiting most from ergonomic improvements and safety equipment. Managers should therefore prioritize improvements in workplace conditions – particularly ventilation, ergonomics, safety training, and job stability – while integrating gender-sensitive approaches to strengthen both employees’ well-being and organisational performance.