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Football players and asset manipulation: the management of football transfers in Italian Serie A
Get PDFResearch question: We consider player trading as one of the
distinctive features of football clubs’ business models and how
these models have been influenced since the implementation of
Financial Fair Play (FFP). Considering the Italian financial and
economic context in the football sector, we investigate whether
Serie A football clubs adopt earnings manipulation as a result of
trading players’ economic rights.
Research methods: The empirical analysis includes the football
clubs competing in the Italian Serie A from 2005 to 2018. Using
an unbalanced panel dataset composed of 275 club-year
observations (38 different clubs), our estimations are run by using
fixed effects OLS models. Clubs’ net capital income from sales of
football players is used as a proxy of earning manipulation. We
control for clubs’ football performance, size and reputation.
Results: and Findings: By applying Bartov’s model based on asset
sales, our results confirm the adoption of asset manipulation
behaviours in the football industry, wherein players’ economic
rights sales are a preponderant financial item affecting economic
performance. Specifically, net income from trading players is
significant and positively linked with Serie A clubs’ profitability,
while leverage is significant after the introduction of FFP and
especially for the most prominent Serie A clubs.
Implications: Our results confirm that Italian Serie A has been
chronically dependent on player trading to maintain their
financial sustainability. UEFA’s regulations could be assessed and
modified to enable them to prevent and reveal the real activities
and dynamics behind the player transfer market (profit
smoothing behaviours)
Single issue EU referendums: tying hands, domestic effects and the challenge of consentification
Get PDFSingle-issue referendums – which give voters a say on specific European Union (EU) policies or general questions of European integration – were rarely employed before the 2000s, but they have since become commonplace. Examples include Greece’s 2015 referendum on negotiations with the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF), Hungary’s 2016 referendum on the relocation of refugees between EU member states and the UK’s 2016 vote to leave the EU. This article asks why we are seeing more single-issue referendums in the EU. Surveying different theoretical perspectives on the conditions under which such votes occur, it considers single-issue referendums as being driven by (1) the search for strategic advantage in a two-level game, (2) domestic effects and (3) problems of consentification. Case studies of eight single-issue referendums show that domestic effects matter but offer limited evidence of hand tying. Most single-issue referendums, it finds, were called by governments wrestling with issues that could win legal approval but not political legitimacy. This instrument of direct democracy will remain a feature of EU politics, we contend, as member states wrestle with domestic effects and the challenge of (de)legitimating EU decisions through traditional means
An adaptive auto-scaling framework for cloud resource provisioning
Get PDFCloud computing emerged as a technology that offers scalable access to computing resources in conjunction with low maintenance costs. In this domain, cloud users utilize virtualized resources to benefit from on-demand and long-term pricing strategies. Although the latter consists of a more cost-efficient solution, it requires accurate estimations of future workload demands, which is a challenging task. Furthermore, clouds offer threshold-based auto-scaling rules that need to be manually controlled by the users according to application requirements. Still, tuning scaling parameters is not trivial, since it is mainly based on static scaling rules that may lead to unreasonable costs and quality of service violations. In this work we introduce ADA-RP, an adaptive auto-scaling framework for reliable resource provisioning in the cloud. ADA-RP uses historical time series data for training K-means and convolutional neural networks (CNN) to categorize future workload demands as High, Medium or Low based on CPU utilization. We auto-scale cloud resources in real-time based on the predicted workload demand to reduce costs and improve application performance. The experimental analysis is based on TPC-C runs on MySQL containers deployed on the Google Cloud Platform. Experimental results are prosperous, demonstrating the ability of ADA-RP (i) to reduce MySQL deployment costs by 48% in a single-tenant environment, and (ii) to double the executed queries per second in a multi-tenant environment considering user’s budget requirements
Advancing agroecology in international law
No full textProducing enough food is a basic human priority and a critical challenge in the face of a growing population and the deteriorating ecological health of the planet. Modern agricultural practices promise to maximise the productive efficiency of available land but are one of the main drivers of agro- and biodiversity loss. Agroecology, which places ecological sustainability and diversity at the heart of agriculture, is one response to these challenges. It presents agriculture not only as the process through which food is produced but as a dynamic socioecological phenomenon that exists through networks comprising natural and human stakeholders at global, national and subnational levels. Drawing on a combination of agroecological and legal literature, this book explores where there is space in international law to pursue agroecology. Using a range of case studies, it demonstrates how concepts, mechanisms and regulatory approaches in the law advance, and can be reformed to further advance, an agroecological legal framework that allows humanity to meet its agricultural needs in a way that protects the natural and cultural diversity that is fundamental to the ecological integrity of the planet
The politics of mentoring
Get PDFIn the dialogue below, Assistant Professor Alexander McClelland and PhD student Lizzie Hughes discuss their experience participating in the Surveillance Studies Network mentorship programme. Anyone interested in participating in the programme as mentor/mentee should email Mentorship Coordinator Oliver Kayas ([email protected]) to find out more
More social, more socially responsible? The impact of CEO social media use on corporate social performance
Get PDFNowadays, more and more firm chief executive officers (CEOs) are using social media to join online conversations and interact with stakeholders. As this social media presence shows their social participation tendencies, such CEOs have been described as ‘social CEOs’. Building on an upper-echelon perspective of corporate social responsibility (CSR), this study examines whether social CEOs and the implications of their social media engagement have an impact on corporate social performance by developing a needs–affordances–consequences approach. Our approach explores the motives and ability of social CEOs, suggesting the positive influence of CEO sociability on CSR and also the moderating effect of CEOs’ social evaluation. Using data on Chinese publicly listed firms from 2009 to 2020, we find that firms with social CEOs have a higher level of social performance than firms without, and higher CEO status or better CEO reputation can further amplify the positive impact of CEO sociability on corporate social performance. This work makes important contributions to research on the determ
Plants On The Edge project - final evaluation
Get PDFUpper Teesdale is one of the five most important botanical sites in the British Isles. Teesdale's Special Flora, known as the Teesdale Assemblage, is unique. It today faces an uncertain future, threatened by climate change, aerial pollution, eutrophication, changes to land management and recreational pressures. The Teesdale Special Flora Trust’s Plants on the Edge (POTE) project 2021-2023 was supported by a major National Lottery grant via the government’s Green Recovery Challenge Fund (GRCF). This Final Evaluation assesses (and celebrates) what has been achieved, identifies gaps and weaknesses and draws tentative conclusions about lessons learnt. It includes brief case studies, graphics and other illustrative material which should help serve as a permanent public record of the POTE project, of lessons that have been learnt and of what remains to be done
Registering the everyday: documents, bureaucracy, and the socio-legal
Get PDFThe special section that follows examines registration as a technology of governance regulating the everyday. The introduction illustrates the motivation for the special section, which was an interest in the changing shape of registration over time, as the COVID-19 pandemic saw registration come to the forefront of public life, calling for a re-examination of the ways in which registration produces populations and affects lives. We conclude by outlining the contributions and key themes of the special section
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