Cross-country differences in the contribution of future migration to old-age financing

As life expectancy increases and fertility declines, population aging puts pressure on the financing of welfare states in Europe and other developed countries. Given that immigrant workers are younger than the domestic population, a continuous flow of immigrants reduces the old-age dependency ratio and improves financing. Existing general equilibrium estimates of the public finance contribution of migration, performed with different models, are not comparable across countries and sometimes differ even in sign. We use the same overlapping-generations model with a detailed representation of institutions and labor market activity to provide comparable estimates of the impact of immigration on public finance in four European countries. We find that future projected immigration flows are equivalent to 14.3 % points labor income taxes in Austria, 7.3 points in Germany, 6.2 points in the UK and 1.7 points in Poland in 2060. These differences are due to the projected volume of immigration and institutional setups, among other factors. For comparable volumes of immigration, future flows have largest impact in Germany and smallest in the UK.     

The iLUC dilemma: How to deal with indirect land use changes when governing energy crops?

Due to land use effects, bioenergy use may cause adverse effects on biodiversity, soil and water and may even fail to guarantee a GHG emissions reduction compared to fossil fuel use. Accounting methodologies and policy instruments were elaborated to prevent these effects, but there is still no sound and consensual methodology to take into account indirect land use change that substantially contributes to GHG emissions as well as a loss of biodiversity. While the iLUC hypothesis, that is the potentiality of adverse effects arising from indirect land use change related to biomass cultivation, is hardly subject to dispute, the quantification of these effects and especially their policy implications are however contentious. Hence, bioenergy policies worldwide face a dilemma: Neglecting iLUC effects that do in fact exist or taking them into account although no sound methodology is available? The article covers the current state of the discussion and also analyses the approaches developed for taking indirect land use change into account. Assessment criteria for coping with the iLUC dilemma are developed and policy recommendations are derived from that.     

Prioritising land to be preserved for agriculture: A context-specific value tree

In Belgium as in many other countries, agricultural land is under pressure for development of other land uses. This paper presents a method for setting priorities for preservation of land for agriculture. The method is based on a participatory approach through which a value tree is formulated. This results in a list of criteria to define farmland value, which is explicitly linked to the objectives for farmland preservation. The value tree allows the list of criteria to be determined in a structured and consistent way. The participatory process contributes to the development of a shared vision on farmland preservation. The approach also incorporates context specificity, as shown by its application for farmland preservation in Flanders.     

The pricing of lookback options and binomial approximation

Refining a discrete model of Cheuk and Vorst, we obtain a closed formula for the price of a European lookback option at any time between emission and maturity. We derive an asymptotic expansion of the price as the number of periods tends to infinity, thereby solving a problem posed by Lin and Palmer. We prove, in particular, that the price in the discrete model tends to the price in the continuous Black–Scholes model. Our results are based on an asymptotic expansion of the binomial cumulative distribution function that improves several recent results in the literature.     

Bridging the cultural divide: Trust formation in university–industry research collaborations in the US,Japan, and South Korea

Academia and industry increasingly work together, but this is not always an easy endeavor. In this article we investigate how relational mechanisms facilitate trust formation in university–industry research collaborations (UICs) in three countries and contribute to the understanding of international similarities and differences in UICs by considering institutional factors, specifically, the strength and maturity of UICs in each country. Analyzing survey data of 618 recent UICs in the US, Japan, and South Korea, we identify the activities of innovation champions as a critical trust building mechanism between firms and universities that complements initial trust formation through tie strength, partner reputation, and contractual safeguards. We find that partner reputation and champion behavior are more important for trust formation in South Korea than in the US and Japan, indicating that in ‘emerging UIC countries’ where most firms and universities have little collaboration experience, reputation and the leadership by innovation champions are more important for trust formation in UICs than in ‘advanced UIC countries’ with strong and mature UIC networks. From a public policy perspective, our findings suggest that networks between firms and universities should be generally strengthened and collaboration partners should be provided with effective contractual safeguards to enhance trust formation in UICs.