Technological advances are changing many aspects of business activity and in particular the meaning of distance and geography. Such changes are likely to have profound impact on firms whose activities take place over distance, namely MNEs. Using the motivations for FDI identified in the literature as a theoretical framework, this study examines the motivations of firms producing and selling pro...

We illustrate research run within the EU project IM-CLeVeR (“Intrinsically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots”) that aims to investigate learning of actionoutcome associations based on intrinsic motivations, and action recall based on outcome re-activation. The research is based on: (a) the implementation of a “mechatronic board” suitable to investigate learning based on intrinsic m...

Many scholars have offered structural and ideational explanations for the fertility changes occurring around the world. This paper focuses on the influence of developmental idealism-a schema or set of beliefs endorsing development, fertility change, and causal connections between development and fertility. Developmental idealism is argued to be an important force affecting both population polic...

Studies of the causes of fertility levels and their changes often seek to measure directly the impact of socioeconomic factors on fertility. Such procedures have a broad appeal to policymakers, offering as they do to pinpoint mechanisms susceptible to manipulation by official policy. Despite this appeal, such approaches are considerably more problematical in their application. Not infrequently,...

BACKGROUND Research on fertility differentials between eastern and western Germany after German reunification in 1990 has focused on the fertility of women. Trends in the fertility of men are rarely studied due to data constraints and methodological challenges. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to close this gap by analyzing fertility differentials between eastern and western German males over the peri...

Using a mobile-phone-based experience-sampling technology in a sample of 378 individuals ranging from 14 to 86 years of age, we investigated age differences in how people want to influence their feelings in their daily lives. Contra-hedonic motivations of wanting either to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect were most prevalent in adolescence, whereas prohedonic mot...

This article examines the relationship between cultural affiliation and deaf adults' motivations for genetic testing for deafness in the first prospective, longitudinal study to examine the impact of genetic counseling and genetic testing on deaf adults and the deaf community. Participants (n = 256), classified as affiliating with hearing, Deaf, or both communities, rated interest in testing fo...

Despite the impact that influential American political bloggers have had on public policies and the mainstream media agenda in recent years, very little research is currently available on the most widely read political bloggers. Through a survey of 66 top American political bloggers, the present study examines this elite group by analyzing their initial and current motivations for blogging as w...