Costs and Benefits of Recycling Liquid Board Containers

Recycling of packaging material has become more or less mandatory in many European countries, including Norway. Through so-called voluntary agreements quantitative targets are set for the proportion of total waste to be recycled. At the same time the strategic objective for Norwegian waste policy is that there should be a socio-economic balance between different waste treatment options. On the basis of a cost-benefit analysis it is questioned whether the Norwegian recycling policy for liquid board containers really is cost-effective. The calculations show that the net social costs of the recycling system in 1999 amounted to EUR3.5 million. The high cost is due to the fact that these containers constitute a small fraction of total waste from the household and that it is costly to separate it from other waste. The environmental costs from landfilling or incineration are small compared to the costs of recycling. The best alternative, according to our analysis, is to incinerate the containers with energy recovery.     

Small firms,business dynamics and differential development of economic well-being

In recent years a growing stream of research has examined the relationships between structural characteristics of regions and their levels of new firm formation. This empirical study aims at supplementing such findings with analyses that include other forms of business dynamics, and also the possible well-being effects of such dynamics. From a unique and comprehensive data set that tracks all births, deaths, expansions, and contractions of commercial business establishments in Sweden 1985–89, six groups of regions with different patterns of dynamics are extracted by means of cluster analysis. The clusters' structural characteristics and their development of economic well-being are also compared. The results suggesta) that the patterns of business dynamics are contingent on the structural characteristics of regions,b) that high formation and turnover of establishments are associated with a relative increase in economic well-being, andc) that small, autonomous firms have a vital role in this process.     

The Division of Labor Under Homogeneity: A Critique of Mises and Rothbard

A bstract .   Even the most passionate defenders of free trade, such as Mises and Rothbard, claim that trade cannot occur under conditions of strict homogeneity of land, labor, and capital. We show that specialization, trade, and the division of labor can emerge even when resources are initially homogenous, due to "natural heterogeneity," economies of scale, and learning.     

Gestaltung der Abschlussprüferhaftung – Implikationen theoretischer Modelle

Business scandals such as Enron, WorldCom or Parmalat have sparked intense discussions on the quality of corporate governance as well as the trustworthiness of statutory auditors. It is therefore no surprise that regulators have issued a large number of new regulations concerning auditing. The civil liability of external auditors has not changed in Germany, but such changes have already been announced by the German government. An increase in the existing liability cap in cases of negligent misconduct and extended third-party liability are planned. As a consequence, the results of analytical research on this topic are highly relevant. This paper summarises and comments on prior analytical research, in particular its assumptions and results, and focuses on important elements for the design of a liability regime. To this end, the paper addresses the questions of joint–and-several vs. proportionate liability rules, negligent vs. strict liability regimes, the extent of third party liability, and limited vs. unlimited liability.     

The flypaper effect and political strength

Simple models of local government behavior predict equal effects of private income and unconditional federal grants on local government expenditures. Numerous empirical analyses, however, find that the effect of grants is larger than the income effect. We argue that this flypaper effect may be a result of weak political leaderships in multi–issue and multi–party decision–making environments. In multi–issue institutions, a strong political leadership may reduce inefficiency due to interest group influence and inter–party bargaining in the local council. Utilizing data for Norwegian local governments in the 1930s, we find that political strength reduces the size of the flypaper effect. When the local council consists of only one political party, we cannot reject absence of a flypaper effect, while the flypaper effect is large in fragmented local councils. Received: June 2000 / accepted: February 2001     

Money and insurance in a turnpike environment

Summary We study the effects of introducing a feasible insurance market into the spatial separation model of money described in Mitsui and Watanabe (1989). We show that the insurance contract may or may not drive out money. We also show that, depending on the degree of risk aversion, the additional market can reduce welfare for all agents, increase welfare for all agents, or increase welfare for some agents and reduce it for others.The authors would like to thank Ed Green, Preston Miller, Ed Prescott and Neil Wallace for valuable comments.     

How Often to Sample a Continuous-Time Process in the Presence of Market Microstructure Noise

In theory, the sum of squares of log returns sampled at highfrequency estimates their variance. When market microstructurenoise is present but unaccounted for, however, we show thatthe optimal sampling frequency is finite and derives its closed-formexpression. But even with optimal sampling, using say 5-minreturns when transactions are recorded every second, a vastamount of data is discarded, in contradiction to basic statisticalprinciples. We demonstrate that modeling the noise and usingall the data is a better solution, even if one misspecifiesthe noise distribution. So the answer is: sample as often aspossible.