Politics of Precarious Childhood: Ill Treatment of Palestinian Children under the Israeli Military Order

This paper examines the corollaries of the exceptional treatment of Palestinian children under the Israeli military rule. It is shown how the widespread and systematic ill treatment of Palestinian children accrues from exceptional provisions and lack of legal cover of the Israeli military law. Such lack constitutes a precarious condition under which Palestinian children are not treated as children but as a security threat legally accountable for their acts, in many respects with ways similar to adults. Precarity, the paper argues, is produced through three conditions. First, the lack of protection is institutionalised through the legal, territorial and population-regulating techniques internal to state channels. Second, the lack of protection delegates significant power to the discretion of what Judith Butler calls the ‘petty sovereigns’ – to the soldiers, interrogators, police officers, etc., who are asked to rely on their own judgment when making decisions on the fundamental matters regarding the order and justice, even life and death of children. Third, the use of discretionary power is not only encouraged by the legal system and its exceptions; it also works in tandem with the institutional culture of impunity that accepts the violent disciplining, even torture, of Palestinian children.     

TUG‐OF‐WAR,MARKET MANIPULATION,AND OPTION PRICING

We develop an option pricing model based on a tug‐of‐war game. This two‐player zero‐sum stochastic differential game is formulated in the context of a multidimensional financial market. The issuer and the holder try to manipulate asset price processes in order to minimize and maximize the expected discounted reward. We prove that the game has a value and that the value function is the unique viscosity solution to a terminal value problem for a parabolic partial differential equation involving the nonlinear and completely degenerate infinity Laplace operator.     

Some Aggregate Effects of Heterogeneity in Information Processing

This paper analyzes the equilibrium of an economy where economic agents differ with respect to their information gathering and processing abilities. Our results depend on the magnitude of the relative risk aversion. We show that the unsophisticated (with respect to their information processing abilities) agents are disproportionately important in the cases of both large and small risk aversion. In the case of the relative risk aversion measure being greater than unity volatility of aggregate consumption is reduced. This supports the view that observed consumption in many countries fluctuates less than predicted by models with fully rational agents only.     

Determinants of audit report modifications in Finnish municipalities

Although municipalities are major economic and social actors in most countries, remarkably little is known about their audits, particularly the determinants of their audit report modifications. The existing evidence is ambiguous at best and scarce, which provides opportunities for further accounting studies in this area. Therefore, based on an agency theory framework, we fill this important research gap by exploring three determinants of audit report modifications in municipalities: (1) economic performance, (2) decentralization of decision-making across different decision-making bodies, and (3) political competition between political parties in local councils. These determinants are examined based on a large panel of data on Finnish municipalities for the period from 2009 to 2013, covering virtually all of the country’s municipalities. We find that a striking 33 percent of audit reports had modifications during this period, which raises serious concerns about the state of municipal management, accounting, and auditing in Finland. Regarding the above determinants, the following conclusions can be made based on our analyses. First, we find partial evidence that weak economic performance increases the likelihood of audit report modifications. Second, the lower the competition among political parties in a local council, the lower the likelihood of audit report modifications. Finally, the more decentralized decision making is across the different decision-making bodies under the local council, the higher the probability of audit report modifications. These results are consistent with agency theory’s explanations regarding the value of auditing.     

When Does a Firm Support Substitute Open Source Programming?

Software firms are observed to support programmers' communities, which develop rival open source programs. A firm selling a copyright program has an incentive to support substitute copyleft programming when support creates compatibility between the programs and programs exhibit network effects. Costly compatibility benefits the firm as its consumers gain access to the community's services but may also hurt the firm because it cannot profit from the valuation difference between incompatible networks. The incentive arises under a weak network effect even when the consumers' benefit is small. Standardization and enlarging the open source programmers' community do not always increase welfare.     

A monitoring and feedback service as a way to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of consumption

This paper explores and assesses the acceptability of an Internet‐based greenhouse gas emission monitoring and feedback service and its possibilities for motivating households to voluntary change their consumption behaviour towards a more climate‐friendly direction. We studied consumers' experiences and assessments of the acceptability of such a service and its potential to promote the desired behaviour in a Finnish Climate Bonus research project wherein a demonstration version of the service was developed and tested. In total, 35 pre‐selected consumers tried out and evaluated the service in day‐to‐day life for a period of 4 weeks. Online questionnaires, focus groups and an online discussion forum were used to collect their feedback. The results indicated that the service was well received among the participating consumers. Above all, the consumers regarded the service interesting and useful because it offered concrete feedback on the emissions caused by their own household consumption. All in all, the study indicated that a well‐designed, easy‐to‐use and consumer‐empowering monitoring and feedback service might be a potential tool to motivate people to reduce their consumption‐based emissions voluntarily.     

The productivity effects of stock option schemes: evidence from Finnish panel data

In this study we investigate the productivity effects of employee stock option schemes. We estimate Cobb-Douglas production functions by using new panel data for all Finnish publicly listed firms during 1992–2002. The data enable us to distinguish broad-based option plans, for which all employees are eligible, from those selectively allocated to particular employees. For both type of schemes, our baseline fixed effects estimators consistently find statistically insignificant associations with firm productivity. When endogeneity of production inputs and option-schemes are taken into account we continue to find no evidence of a link with firm productivity. Our main findings are consistent with hypotheses that predict negligible effects of option plans for enterprise performance, such as those based on free riding, psychological expectancy theory, accounting myopia, or rent-seeking. We consider reasons why our empirical findings on the impact of broad-based options differ from those found in earlier studies.     

Foresight — balancing between increasing variety and productive convergence

Extensive involvement of social actors and perspectives is an increasing trend in foresight. Simultaneously, however, the theoretical literature suggests that there is a trade-off between increasing variety and productive convergence. The paper examines, through a sample of recent foresight exercises, how European foresight balances between variety and convergence. The findings support the existence of a trade-off, and suggest that it can be classified in two sub-categories: one between involvement and instrumentality, the other between creativeness and stakeholding. The study offers several options for reconciling and counterbalancing the mutually exclusive inclinations in the organising of foresight.