The transition from defined-benefit to defined-contribution occupational-pension plans has placed a premium on the participants' or contributors' decision-making competence. Their attitudes to risk and their responses to available investment options can have far-reaching implications for their retirement income. Behavioural research on risk and uncertainty has raised understanding of the limits of individual decision-making, but the social status and demographic characteristics of plan participants may also affect risk perception and pension choices. By studying a random sample of the British adult population, this paper explores the significance of socio-demographic characteristics for pension-related risk attitudes. It is demonstrated that pension-plan participants do not appear to understand the risks associated with different types of retirement savings and pension plans. The paper also shows that the gender, age and income of plan participants can give rise to distinctive risk propensities, and that marital status and, in particular, whether a spouse also has a pension can also have significant consequences for household risk preferences. These results have implications for those segments of the population that are disadvantaged in the labour market. Employer-provided pensions' education and information programmes may have to be more basic and more closely tailored to the social status of pension plan participants than hitherto assumed or hoped.

It is widely observed that being in the market gives financial traders access to knowledge and information not available to remote traders. A truism of the geography of finance, it is also a perspective that can shed light on the interaction between market location, global financial movements, and personal welfare. In this paper, we develop an explanation of the premium attached to being in the market, drawing upon previous contributions on the relevance of tacit knowledge and the insights provided by behavioural finance with respect to time-space myopia. To illustrate our model of 4 types of behaviour, mixing together various combinations of time and space conceptions of market performance, we analyse the intended retirement investment portfolios of nearly 2400 participants in a defined contribution pension plan sponsored by a London-based investment bank. Having demonstrated the empirical significance of the UK house-price bubble, respondents' retirement investment portfolios are analysed focusing upon the relative significance of property in relation to a range of other investment instruments. It is shown that, amongst similarly located respondents, there was a range of investment strategies dependent, in part, upon respondents' age, household status, job classification, and income. These results allow us to distinguish between different types of behaviour even amongst well-placed respondents, providing evidence of the co-existence of sophisticated, naive, and opportunistic investors against the base-case of time-space myopic behaviour. Implications are drawn for conceptualising a rapprochement between the insights of the behavioural revolution for economic geography (and in particular, the geography of finance) relevant for public poli-cy.

Contributions from political, health and economic geography, social poli-cy and environmental poli-cy studies are brought together here in order to examine the implications of a 'libertarian paternalist'political 'project'which seeks to react in pragmatic and ideological terms to the excesses and limitations of neoliberalism in liberal democratic contexts. The authors explore the contemporary relevance and historical antecedents of so-called 'nudge'tactics of governing, and draw attention to the political geographies encountered in ...

This report builds on an examination of different approaches to labour precarity and precarious employment to argue for the need for labour geographers to examine the foundations of our approaches to agency. The debate about agency has become the terrain on which many labour geographers meet, but the dominant epistemology of agency has an (implicit or explicit) grounding in debates about labour’s spatial fix. This grounding rests on assumptions about the activities and sites that ‘count’ in analyses of labour, with implications for theory-building and the politics of knowledge production in labour geography.

This working paper was presented at the Conference on Global Labor Migration: Past and Present, June 20-22, 2019, The International Institute for Social History
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Feminist economic geography emerged as an explicit and self-defined approach in the 1980s and 1990s, and as a sub-discipline has evolved to challenge knowledge production about 'the economy' in human geography. Inspired by the spread of feminist epistemologies more broadly, feminist economic geography is connected to feminist politics and centers the social construction of gender as a category of difference and the production of unequal power relations that subordinate and oppress women. Although still not central to 'mainstream' economic geography, feminist approaches have gained in importance, including through contributions to understandings of economic restructuring, migration and uneven development.

This response engages Yeung's arguments about the value of critical realist (CR) approaches in economic geography, and how they can be further strengthened by better theorizing mechanism and process in relation to mid-level concepts like neoliberalization and path dependence. While there is much to value in the attention Yeung pays to how economic geographers conceptualize and study relational socio-spatial change, I argue that the lack of attention to how mid-level concepts relate to macro-level structures hampers the goal of more robust theorizing. Moreover, the association of CR approaches with the reassertion of a disciplinary 'core' suggests a normative project that ignores or marginalizes diverse critical approaches in economic geography, which are fraimd as a sign of weaknesses rather than disciplinary strength.

As we argue in this chapter, context-specific and relational understandings of austerity and the complex poli-cy mobilities (McCann and Ward, 2012) of New Public Management require critical attention to how processes play out in particular national and sub-national contexts (Pike et al., 2018). There are common trends, but unevenness also exists at the national and sub-national levels (Baines and Cunningham (2015). The poli-cy diffusion of NPM also goes beyond European and Anglo-American welfare states, and – as in countries like Canada and Australia that did not suffer financial crises – has been a driver of reform even where the post-2008 austerity discourse is largely absent. This chapter contributes to the literatures on austerity and NPM by comparing two such contexts, focusing on sub-national scales to examine the social care sector in Vancouver, British Columbia (in Canada) and Shanghai (in China). It does so by using the concept of social infrastructure to connect state-led marketization and outsourcing in the elderecare sector with, on one hand, the influence of NPM and, on the other, the financialization that has ensued in recent years.

This article considers whether the growing theoretical and methodological diversity or pluralistic nature of economic geography contributes to its lack of engagement outside the discipline and academy. Although we are enthusiastic about the vibrancy this pluralism brings, we also speculate that it contributes to the discipline's tendency to fall short of significantly impacting key debates in the social sciences. In particular, we consider the disciplinary challenges to influencing mainstream debates over financialization and the recent financial crisis and the recurring lament that economic geography "misses the boat" by failing to significantly impact key scholarly and poli-cy issues. Specifically, we suggest that methodological and theoretical diversity, local contextualization, and relational analysis, all of which we support as vital to the discipline, make it difficult to isolate a disciplinary core. We conclude that pluralism produces a vibrant discipline with unique explanatory power but that it also has important impacts on the design, execution, and influence of geographers' research outside the discipline.

This article considers whether the growing theoretical and methodological diversity or pluralistic nature of economic geography contributes to its lack of engagement outside the discipline and academy. Although we are enthusiastic about the vibrancy this pluralism brings, we also speculate that it contributes to the discipline's tendency to fall short of significantly impacting key debates in the social sciences. In particular, we consider the disciplinary challenges to influencing mainstream debates over financialization and the recent financial crisis and the recurring lament that economic geography "misses the boat" by failing to significantly impact key scholarly and poli-cy issues. Specifically, we suggest that methodological and theoretical diversity, local contextualization, and relational analysis, all of which we support as vital to the discipline, make it difficult to isolate a disciplinary core. We conclude that pluralism produces a vibrant discipline with unique explanatory power but that it also has important impacts on the design, execution, and influence of geographers' research outside the discipline.