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This paper critically evaluates potential barriers to employment opportunities for ethnic minority (EM) individuals in Scottish Local Authorities – both in terms of access to job and development opportunities. It provides a fundamental discussion of concepts around race and ethnicity, and the levels of social injustice, with an explicit focus on institutional racialisation, discrimination and segregation. The paper explores organisational approaches towards recruitment, including positive action and workforce development.

This paper adopts a subjectivist (ontology) and interpretivist (epistemology) stance, based on a small-scale, in-depth investigation. The data have been gathered through semi-structured interviews with equality diversity and inclusion (EDI) officers in four Scottish Local Authorities, utilising thematic analysis.

The finding suggests that participating local authorities have a long way to go to ensure the elimination of barriers to employment for EM people. This is largely based on concerns around limitations in the application of positive action and elimination of disadvantages in recruitment and access to career and development opportunities?

The paper aims to contribute by exploring the availability of employment opportunities for EMs through the eyes of EDI Officers in four local authorities. Their thorough understanding, over- and insight into potential equality issues from an employment perspective are invaluable, focussing on more tangible organisational issues and approaches.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the necessity of regulating European club football financially, in order to create a fair structure of sporting competition.

By deploying the soft budget constraint approach – originally developed by Hungarian Economist János Kornai in order to understand (public) business behavior in socialist and post‐socialist economies – and combining it with empirical analysis, the paper develops an understanding of why the majority of European top league clubs are loss‐makers and why regulation is needed. The paper rests on its application of the soft budget constraint approach to build its argument and uses existing empirical research in order to support it within the field of European professional football.

The paper finds substantial evidence of soft budget constraints in professional football clubs, and argues that softness punishes the few financially well‐managed clubs in sporting terms for balancing their books.

From a theoretical point of view, the new perspective of soft budget constraints takes political, cultural and emotional aspects into account in order to understand economic behavior among professional team sports clubs. This gives promising new insights into the discipline of sports economics and sports management.

The paper's findings demand action to be taken to secure financial fair play in order to deal with issues of equal sporting competition. It argues that this must be done through a central regulation scheme covering all European leagues, thus endorsing the new UEFA financial fair play program. At the same time, however, the paper recognizes the problems in implementing the program efficiently.

The originality and value of the paper is its application of a new theoretical approach that clarifies the problems of European professional football and the reasons why regulatory solutions are necessary to harden the budget constraints.

The present article analyses the effects of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBM&As) on targets' total factor productivity (TFP), employment, wages and intangible-asset investment. The author investigates whether the impact of CBM&As differs depending on the origin of the investing multinational (MNE). The author distinguishes between CBM&As from European countries, other developed countries and emerging countries.

The author makes use of a unique firm-level data set of foreign direct investment in the French manufacturing sector. The authors applies propensity score matching and difference in differences to estimate the effect of CBM&As.

The results show that the consequences of CBM&As differ strongly depending on the origin. CBM&As from European MNEs have a positive impact on TFP, wages and intangible-asset investment, and those from emerging countries seem to increase wages and intangible-asset investments. In contrast, CBM&As that originate from MNEs from other developed countries do not have a significant effect.

This article contributes to the growing literature on the effects of foreign direct investment that highlights the relevance of accounting for the MNEs' origin. In particular, it is the first to address the impact of emerging-country MNEs' CBM&As in Europe.