Permit markets,carbon prices and the creation of innovation clusters

Innovation clusters combining public and private effort to develop breakthrough technologies promise greater technological advances to slow down climate change. We use a multi-country model with an emission trading system to examine whether and how international climate policy can incentivize countries to create such innovation clusters. We find that a minimal carbon price is needed to attract applied research firms, but countries may nevertheless fail to invest in complementary research infrastructure. We construct a mechanism that leads to innovation clusters when emissions targets are set before uncertainty surrounding technological developments is resolved. It is a combination of low permit endowments for the country with the lowest costs to build the needed infrastructure, compensation for this country by profits from permit trade, and maximal possible permit endowments for the remaining countries. We outline how the EU-ETS can be further refined according to this mechanism.     

Post-script—Retail forecasting: Research and practice

This note updates the 2019 review article “Retail forecasting: Research and practice” in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the substantial new research on machine-learning algorithms, when applied to retail. It offers new conclusions and challenges for both research and practice in retail demand forecasting.     

Well-being effects of extreme weather events in the United States

The increase in weather and climate disasters in recent years has prompted an interest in analyzing their consequences and the mitigation and adaptation measures that can help minimize their potentially large impacts on individuals’ welfare. We match thirty-one billion-dollar disasters with individual survey data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to estimate the effect of extreme weather events on the subjective well-being of U.S. residents. Our results indicate that natural disasters have a negative and robust impact on subjective well-being in the affected communities, and that, on average, this impact peaks 6 months after the event, and then decays over time. We then investigate the attenuating impact of health care access, flood insurance, and governmental assistance programs and find a partial compensating role for risk-transfer and relief measures. We also find that stronger emotional and social support mitigates the negative impact of natural disasters.     

The influence of managers' awareness of climate change,perceived climate risk exposure and risk tolerance on the adoption of corporate responses to climate change

Uncertainties posed by climate change limit companies' ability to understand implications of global warming on business and society at large, hampering the adoption of tangible organizational responses to climate change. Understanding climate action thus requires to investigate influential factors of decision-making under uncertainty, which implies acknowledging managerial interpretations and perceptions about climate issues. Drawing insights from the literature on climate inaction and from corporate sustainability literature, the present study examines awareness of climate change and perceived exposure to climate risks as antecedents of corporate responses to climate change, drawing on a survey of managers of Italian manufacturing companies. In addition, the study tests the moderation of risk tolerance on the relation between perceived climate risk exposure and climate action, suggesting that risk attitudes are a significant factor of decision-making under climate uncertainty. The results support the hypothesis of the model and thus provide several contributions to the literature on business and climate change. Managerial implications and avenues for future research are also discussed.     

Impacts of intermediate trade on sector structure

Structural changes, i.e. long-run changes in the agriculture-manufacturing-services-structure, are a key property of growth and development processes with massive impacts on economy and society and are part of actual debates regarding policy in developing and developed economies. While traditional literature has attempted to explain structural changes by using autarkic models, recent literature has emphasised the importance of deriving theories of structural change using open economy settings. We elaborate on the impacts of intermediate trade on sector structure. In particular, we study how import of intermediate products, which is increasingly feasible due to improvements in transport technology and political integration, affects sector structure in a multi-sector growth model with capital accumulation. This topic has not been studied in the previous literature on structural change in open economies, despite the fact that intermediate imports and capital accumulation are central aspects of modern developing and developed economies. We show that the impacts of intermediate trade on sector structure depend on three factors: productivity gains from trade, specialisation in international trade and development stage. Depending on the constellation of these factors, intermediate trade may accelerate, decelerate or have no effect on structural change. Thus, the effects of intermediate trade may vary strongly across countries.     

Deunionization and job polarization – a macroeconomic model analysis for a small open economy

Declining unionization rates and job polarization are two important labor market developments of recent decades. A large body of literature has analyzed these phenomena separately, but little has been done to see whether there is a link between them. We employ a macroeconomic model for a small open economy with a large input–output core to analyze how deunionization may cause job polarization. Our analysis shows that medium-skilled workers are negatively affected by deunionization, mainly as a result of the heterogeneity of the elasticities of substitution between different types of labor. While the elasticities of substitution between high- and medium-skilled labor are relatively low, the elasticities of substitution between medium- and low-skilled are relatively high. As a result, when deunionization leads to increased wage dispersion, we find that demand for low-skilled increases at the expense of medium-skilled labor, thus yielding a more polarized labor market.     

新制度经济学视角下的中国农地制度变迁：回顾与展望

研究目的:分析总结中国农地制度变迁的路径特征、决定条件和影响因素,并展望进一步研究方向。研究方法:文献分析法。研究结果:(1)改革开放以来的中国农地制度变迁呈现出一个较清晰的路径,即改革始终沿着市场取向、明晰产权、稳定地权的方向演进;(2)农地使用权制度改革的成功源于诱致性变迁与强制性变迁的结合,即弹性的中央政策制定、渐进式的地方实施以及具有学习效应的农户认知三者的有机互动,并体现出制度变迁的"共生演化"特征及其蕴含的"适应性效率";(3)新制度经济学是解释中国经济改革和农地制度变迁的有效工具,然而由于经典的新制度经济学本质上的静态性以及国家理论的缺乏,难以对现实世界的各类制度变迁给出一般化的解释。研究结论:基于经典的新制度经济学,进一步整合行为经济学、机制设计理论、演化博弈论等理论工具,超越"强制性—诱致性变迁"二分法,构建一个真正动态的制度变迁模型是一个重要研究方向。     

Socio‐economic transitions and everyday life changes in the rural world: Pyrenean households and their contemporary economic history

This article focuses on understanding rural life and how agrarian everyday life changes as a consequence of the radical socio‐economic transformations that, across the world, have accompanied rural communities in their transition from economies of subsistence to industrial production, and, in some areas, from there to providers of service to the tourism‐oriented leisure economy. In the last century in the Alt Urgell District (Spanish Pyrenees), many communities went from a production model based on subsistence farming and livestock breeding first to a specialization in milk production and later to tourism. The industrialization of milk production, the radical transformation of the scale of their operations, and the monetization of life transformed the identity and structure of these communities. The subsequent transformation of many of these farms to accommodate the leisure industry changed the shape of these households again. This paper reflects on how science, governance, commodification, and technology played a role on the transformation of the rural mountain areas, their people, and their everyday life.     

Change within purchasing and supply management organisations – Assessing the claims from maturity models

It is a wide-held assumption that professional development and change within purchasing and supply management (PSM) organisations can be explained and guided by a maturity model. In this paper the guidance which the maturity model concept offers to understand a PSM organisation's performance is assessed. The methodology is based on the outcomes of a literature review of PSM maturity models, development of an organisational change framework and the learning from three qualitative case studies. An alternative understanding of the development of the PSM organisation is offered through an organisational change framework, composing 1) movement transitions, 2) scalability of change, 3) acceptability of change, and 4) the substantive element of change. The research found that extant PSM maturity models are too rigid for PSM managers to apply, and although maturity models are commonly accepted in PSM literature, in practice, they may produce the opposite effect of what is promised. The PSM maturity models suggest that their application will lead to increased status and influence of PSM within the organisation; expectations that may not be met. PSM organisations’ change processes are subjected to a range of situational and contextual power relations which must be considered in order to advance the specific PSM organisation roles and responsibilities.     

Knowing is half the battle: Seasonal forecasts,adaptive cropping systems,and the mediating role of private markets in Zambia

This paper examines how smallholders living in regions where a drought is forecasted adapt their farm practices in response to receiving seasonal forecast information. The article draws on a unique longitudinal dataset in Zambia, which collected information from farm households before and after a significant drought caused by the 2015/2016 El-Niño Southern Oscillation. It finds that farmers residing in areas forecasted to be drought-affected and receiving seasonal forecast information are significantly more likely to integrate drought tolerant crops into their cropping systems compared to similar households not receiving this information. Moreover, the probability that a farmer implements these adaptive farm management strategies in response to seasonal forecast information is found to increase substantially as the number of private grain buyers in the farmers’ village increases. This suggests that climate change adaptation and resilience strategies that integrate the generation and dissemination of weather information with agricultural market development can achieve greater impact on farmers’ adaptive responses than approaches that treat these activities in isolation.