Collective self-governance in a marine community: expedition cruise tourism at Svalbard

Collective self-governance is gaining attention in the literature for maintaining the quality of key attractions and promoting sustainable tourism. The long-term success of collective self-governance is dependent on both its internal organization and its embeddedness in external state and non-state regulations. This paper presents the marine community concept, consisting of a policy and a user community, as a framework for investigating the internal and external dynamics of collective self-governance and its ability to steer toward sustainable cruise tourism. As methodology, a case study design was chosen which was primarily studied by means of interviews with a spectrum of relevant actors concerning expedition cruise tourism at Svalbard. By applying the marine community to Svalbard expedition cruise tourism governance, we draw the following conclusions: (1) collective self-governance complements governmental regulation through access to knowledge, conflict resolution and rule-compliance based on disclosure, traceability and trust; (2) collective self-governance's increasing role in the policy community alienates the expedition crew from the user community; and (3) informational overflow by co-existence of collective self-governance and state-governance challenges sustainable cruise tourism. Collective self-governance would, therefore, benefit from reflection, especially regarding the role of the user community that functions as an intermediary between state and self-governance regulations.     

The optimal trade-off between interest rate risk and annual return of bond ladders

Bond laddering is a popular fixed-income investment strategy. The main purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology for determining private investors’ most interest rate risk (IRR)-return-efficient investment horizon for bond ladders (BLs), which are virtually free of credit risk. Two IRR measures of a continuously rolling and homogenous BL (CRHBL) are analytically derived under the assumption that interest rates are martingales. The first measure is the modified duration, which assumes a flat term structure of interest rates. However, this assumption is not fully supported by the empirical data and, thus, an additional IRR measure is proposed. Under each of these two measures, the ratios between the annual return in excess of the demand deposit rate and IRR of CRHBLs with different investment horizons are calculated. As expected, CRHBLs with rather low IRR are most risk-return-efficient. The results for the theoretical CRHBLs also apply to “real-world” discrete BLs. Thus, the proposed methodology can help private investors construct IRR-return-efficient discrete BLs.     

Optimal Sharing of Interest‐Rate Risk in Mortgage Contracts: The Effects of Potential Prepayment and Default

Much of the literature on the economics of mortgage markets has studied the fixed vs. adjustable‐rate mortgage choice made by individual borrowers. However, to decide if the outcome of such a choice is efficient or approximately so, it is necessary to explore the question of optimal risk‐sharing in mortgage contracts. But because only a small literature has studied this question, more research is clearly warranted. The present article helps fill this gap by developing a simplified version of Arvan and Brueckner's model, using it to characterize optimal contracts in the absence of mortgage termination, and then exploring how termination via prepayment or default affects optimal risk‐sharing. The broad conclusion of the analysis is that potential mortgage termination makes higher risk exposure for borrowers optimal.     

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: A MICROECONOMIC REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This paper provides a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Depending on whether an individual can be considered as selfish, or whether she has also social preferences, motives for CSR, can be explained in different ways. Furthermore, we explicitly highlight the influence of different Corporate Governance System on CSR as well as the relationship between firms' size and social commitment. Because it is difficult to distinguish between different theories in empirical studies, we argue that an experimental approach might be suitable to test theories of CSR.     

Concept‐Based Bayesian Model Averaging and Growth Empirics

In specifying a regression equation, we need to specify which regressors to include, but also how these regressors are measured. This gives rise to two levels of uncertainty: concepts (level 1) and measurements within each concept (level 2). In this paper we propose a hierarchical weighted least squares (HWALS) method to address these uncertainties. We examine the effects of different growth determinants taking explicit account of the measurement problem in the growth regressions. We find that estimates produced by HWALS provide intuitive and robust explanations. We also consider approximation techniques which are useful when the number of variables is large or when computing time is limited.     

Corporate Responsibility and the Collegial Field

This article is based on 21 interviews of informants actively engaged with corporate responsibility in Sweden. The article introduces a new concept—the “collegial field”—which is helpful in understanding the course of events. With systems that are more open to other organizations, horizontal groupings with common interests become more influential. Collegial fields can also be relevant for understanding other activities in organizations than corporate responsibility.     

Prospect Theory in the Heterogeneous Agent Model

Using the Heterogeneous Agent Model framework, we incorporate an extension based on Prospect Theory into a popular agent-based asset pricing model. This extension covers the phenomenon of loss aversion manifested in risk aversion and asymmetric treatment of gains and losses. Using Monte Carlo methods, we investigate behavior and statistical properties of the extended model and assess how our extension is manifested in different strategies. We show that, on the one hand, the Prospect Theory extension keeps the essential underlying mechanics of the model intact, but on the other hand it considerably changes the model dynamics. Stability of the model is increased and fundamentalists may be able to survive in the market more easily. When only the fundamentalists are loss-averse, other strategies profit more.