The impact of advanced vocational education and training on earnings in Sweden

Researchers have established a relationship between greater education and training and higher earnings but it is difficult to infer that the former causes the latter if those with higher earnings tend to engage in more education and training. The present study attempts to control for ability and family background to see if stronger inferences can be made about education and training as the independent variable. The study focuses upon advanced vocational education and training (AVET) in Sweden. This is post‐secondary school education for individuals who are 20 years of age or older. The aim of this article is to estimate the effects of AVET on earnings by controlling for selection bias. We used various approaches such as instrumental variables, Hausman–Taylor estimates, fixed effects estimates and propensity score matching to achieve this aim. A panel, or longitudinal, data set for eight different labor markets in Sweden for the period 1996–2008 was used. The results indicate that earnings from AVET are higher than the return on investment in comprehensive education. The average effect on income is estimated to be in the range of 3–8 percent.     

Tournaments with Prize‐setting Agents*

In some tournaments, it is the contestants themselves who determine reward allocation. Union members bargain over wage distribution, and some firms allow self‐managed teams to freely determine internal resource allocation, incentive structure, and division of labor. We analyze, and test experimentally, a tournament where heterogeneous agents determine the spread between winner prize and loser prize. We investigate the relationship between prize spread, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and effort. We find that a large prize spread is associated with a low degree of uncertainty and a high degree of heterogeneity, and that heterogeneity triggers effort. By and large, our real‐effort experiment supports the theoretical predictions.     

Swedish Geopolitics: From Rudolf Kjellén to a Swedish ‘Dual State’

Early in the twentieth century, Swedish geopolitical scholar Rudolf Kjellén wrote of the nineteenth century nation-state as a state of ‘land and people’, but he also suggested that in the twentieth century various empires would eventually force Central Europe to unify into a bloc of states under the protection of a powerful Germany. This concept of ‘state-bloc’ resembles Carl Schmitt’s idea of Grossraum and is also very similar to what later became NATO, but now with the United States, not Germany, as its central protecting power. Within the individual state, this duality of nation-state and state-bloc was fused with what Hans Morgenthau called a ‘dual state’ with a regular state hierarchy of the nation-state versus a parallel security hierarchy, now linked to the central power. After the Second World War, Sweden, despite its ‘policy of neutrality’, was placed under the US nuclear umbrella, creating a duality that typified Morgenthau’s idea of the ‘dual state’. The regular ‘democratic hierarchy’ was confronted by the US-leaning ‘security hierarchy’, with the latter intervening in the event of emergency. In the 1980s, the strength and unpredictability of the Swedish Social Democratic government became worrisome to the US security network. In a crisis situation, the ‘dual state’ – or what we might call a ‘double sovereignty’ of the ‘democratic state’ and the ‘security state’ – might prove unacceptable. In the final analysis, the Schmittian ‘sovereign’ is undivided.     

Relationship development in Greenfield expansions

This paper investigates conceptually how new Greenfield subsidiaries develop relationships over time. We focus our analysis on the earliest start-up stage of new Greenfield subsidiaries, and on the dynamics of relationships development with five different groups of actors within the MNC and the local environment of the new Greenfield. We argue that relationship strength, or the intensity of interaction and resource exchange, depends on the new Greenfield's degree of dependence or interdependence within these relationships and develop propositions based on institutional theory, resource dependency theory and network approaches. In the concluding sections we suggest directions for future work to enhance understanding of the dynamics of relationship management in new Greenfield expansions.     

What Matters in Venture Capital? Evidence from Entrepreneurs’ Stated Preferences

We study how entrepreneurs evaluate the ability of different US venture capitalists (VCs) to add value to start-up companies. Analyzing a large data set of entrepreneurs’ stated preferences regarding VCs, we demonstrate that entrepreneurs view independent partnership VCs more favorably than other VC types (e.g., corporate, financial, and government sponsored VCs). Although entrepreneurs are able to correctly identify VCs with better track records, they do not believe them to be more desirable investors. We also find that an entrepreneur's rankings are affected by their overall exposure to VCs, emphasizing the role of experiential learning in the venture capital market.     

Workers’ participation in regional economic change following establishment closure

This article analyses if and when workers affected by economic destruction in the form of establishment closures move to more productive or newly started establishments in the region, become self-employed, leave the region or become displaced. Results from multinominal probit models show that the majority of these workers face destructive employment outcomes from a Schumpeterian point of view compared to a matched sample of workers not subject to a closure. However, we do find indications of a creative destruction as a small, albeit significant, share become employed in young establishments. Different types of human capital influence the likelihood of triggering positive or negative regional outcomes. While higher education significantly decreases the risk for unemployment, high-income earners more often become engaged in creative outcomes. Firm tenure increases the likelihood of becoming employed in younger establishments. There are significant spatial differences where metropolitan regions excel as loci of creative change, whereas smaller and peripheral regions face far less creative outcomes of economic transformation.

     

The opening of the North–South divide: Cumulative causation,household income disparity and the regional bonus in Taiwan 1976–2005

During the last decades regional income divergence seems to have reappeared in both developed and developing countries. In Taiwan – a renowned case of growth with equity – regional per capita income was converging until the early 1990s after which it began to diverge. With the help of modeled annual household survey data from 1976 to 2005 we indicate the magnitude of a regional bonus and discuss reasons behind the re-opening of the North–South income divide in Taiwan. Our analysis suggests that this process is a consequence of cumulative causation connected to the advent of the rise of ICT industry in conjunction with changes in Taiwan's political economy which provided relatively more advantageous economic opportunities for the industrial structure of the leading region.     

Explaining the choice of accounting standards in municipal corporations: Positive accounting theory and institutional theory as competitive or concurrent theories

Municipal corporations exist in an institutional twilight area, being both private and public, a characteristic, which presumably would be reflected in their choice of accounting standards. The literature of accounting choice does not, however, live in a twilight area, but is fragmented into two main divisions: positive accounting theory (PAT) and institutional theory (IT); only in a very few cases do the theories meet or cross-fertilize. We use both theories in this paper and derive hypotheses from them to explain accounting choices made by municipal corporations. Through testing the hypotheses on a sample of 545 Swedish municipal corporations, we indicate the empirical relevance of both PAT and IT. We conclude by suggesting an integrative approach of PAT and IT in an eclectic alternative.     

‘Because of poverty,we had to come together’: collective action for improved food security in rural Kenya and Uganda

Agricultural productivity in East African smallholder systems is notoriously low and food production faces multiple challenges, including soil degradation, decreasing land availability, poor market integration, disease burdens and climate change impacts. However, recent evidence from an in-depth study from two sites in Kenya and Uganda shows signs of new social dynamics as a response to these multiple stressors. This paper focuses on the emergence of local social institutions for collective action, in which particularly women farmers organize themselves. Although previous research on collective action has largely focused on common-pool resource management, we argue that collective action is one potential pathway to livelihood and sustainability improvements also in a setting of private land ownership. Trust building, awareness raising and actions to improve livelihood security through risk sharing and pooling of labour and other limited assets have given people more time and resources available for diversification, preventative activities, experimentation and resource conservation. It thereby strengthens farmers’ capacity to cope with and adapt to change, as well as contributes to the agency at the local level.     

UML modelling concepts of HAZOP to enhance the ability to identify emerging risks

Unified Modelling Language (UML) has a graphical notation for 13 different types of diagrams and can be used as a general modelling tool. Well-known examples of diagram types are class diagrams for modelling classes that can be instanced into objects, state machine diagrams for modelling states in systems and activity diagrams for modelling process flows. A literature survey shows that UML has been used to model concepts and methodologies of risk assessment and risk management. One example is the Coras Framework. The international standard CEI IEC 61882 Hazard and operability (HAZOP) studies describes concepts for investigating and detecting possible hazards in systems. In CEI IEC 6882, guide words like ‘More’ and ‘Less’ are applied to system parameters to invoke deviations in the system and assess possible hazards due to the deviation from the design intent. In this paper, we have used UML to model concepts of CEI IEC 61882 Hazards and operability studies. Diagrams of UML were used to show dependencies and relations between parts of the target system and concepts of CEI IEC 61882. Extensions of UML are suggested to better capture and display the concepts of CEI IEC 61882, the results of a HAZOP study and emerging risk. These extensions are referred to as UML for emerging risks (UML-ER).