The economic legacy of gothic cathedral building: France and England compared

Conclusion The accomplishments of the Gothic cathedral builders are immense. They are usually examined in terms of technical and artistic achievement, however, This seems shortsighted in view of their economic ramifications. The legacy of these works can be seen in technology, specialization and mobility of labor, and procedures in accounting. They thus served as a vehicle for the transformation of feudal society to the early capitalism which generated our modern world.     

“‘Sink or swim’: buoyancy and coping in the cognitive test anxiety – academic performance relationship”

This study explores the relationship between students’ self-report levels of cognitive test anxiety (worry), academic buoyancy (withstanding and successfully responding to routine school challenges and setbacks), coping processes and their achieved grades in high-stakes national examinations at the end of compulsory schooling. The sample comprised 325 English students in their final year of secondary school preparing for high-stakes examinations. While controlling for prior attainment and gender, higher worry predicted lower examinations scores. This was partially mediated by less use of effective pre-exam coping strategies. Academic buoyancy moderated the indirect relationship such that the indirect negative relationship from worry to examination performance was stronger when academic buoyancy was lower. The paper concludes that providing in-school training in task-focus and orientation and how to withstand academic pressures may help to ameliorate the influence of performance-interfering worries, and potentially enhance performance among students inclined to worry about examinations.     

Diversity in diversification: an analysis of shopping trips in six-week travel diary data

Diversification in shopping, a long-pursued subject in consumer behavior analysis, is approached from a broad perspective of the diversity in daily travel patterns, which may or may not involve shopping trips, as well as the diversity in shopping locations and frequency. The focus of this analysis is on the heterogeneity across individuals in the ways in which they each diversify their respective shopping behavior. This study explores differences across individuals in the variations of their shopping travel patterns across days. Treating the day-of-the-week evolution of shopping travel patterns as a stochastic process, characteristics of diversification are quantified for respective individuals. Finally, heterogeneity across individuals is identified using an array of statistical methods. The analysis, based on results of a six-week travel diary survey in Germany with geo-coded activity locations, reveals the effects of individual, household, and urban attributes on diversification in shopping behavior, including that full-time workers with medium incomes (4000–4999 Deutsche Mark per month) tend to have more variations in their shopping engagement.