Property Prices and Exposure to Multiple Noise Sources: Hedonic Regression with Road and Railway Noise

This study examines the effect of road and railway noise on property prices. It uses the hedonic regression technique on a Swedish data set that contains information about both road and railway noise for each property, and finds that road noise has a larger negative impact on the property prices than railway noise. This is in line with the evidence from the acoustical literature which has shown that individuals are more disturbed by road than railway noise, but contradicts recent results from a hedonic study on data of the United Kingdom.     

欧元挑战美元:失去的机会

早在10年前,在欧元创立之初,欧元的国际地位就被提上了国际议程。随着全球金融危机的爆发,对美元的全球角色的质疑日渐增多,欧元受到了进一步关注。然而,当美元的国际地位备受审查时,欧盟及其货币还没有承担起任何积极主动的角色。本文探讨的是,欧元是否能逐渐成为国际货币,不仅在欧盟及其他国家的贸易中,还要在第三国之间的贸易中被使用,即欧元是否能挑战美元的当前地位,在国际货币体系中成为主要储备货币。     

Contents Volume 22, 2002

Volume Contents

Contents Volume 22, 2002     

Some general results for moments in bivariate distributions

The purpose of this paper is to present a closed formula to compute the moments of a general function from the knowledge of its bivariate survival function. The result is derived by utilizing an integration by parts formula for two variables, which is not readily available in the literature. Many of the existing results are obtained as special cases. Finally, two examples are presented to illustrate the results. In both the examples, mixed moments as well as moments for the series system and parallel system are obtained. The integration by parts formula in two variables, derived here, is of interest in its own right and we hope that it will be useful in other investigations. The integration by parts formula in two variables is derived as a special case of a general formula in n variables.     

The cause of Danish unemployment: Demand or supply shocks?

We study the Danish unemployment experience 1905–92 using a common trends model with cointegration constraints. To justify the identifying assumptions about the cointegration vectors and the common trends we present a simple macroeconomic model of the labor market. The model determines the long run behavior of labor productivity, employment, unemployment, real product and real consumer wages. The empirical results give support for three cointegration relations and two common trends. Based on the economic model the trends are interpreted as representing labor productivity (technology) and labor supply. With unemployment being nonstationary, the common trends analysis indicates that labor supply shocks is the primary source for explaining the behavior of unemployment. First Version Received: August 1999/Final Version Received: June 2000     

Grazing into the future: Policy making for South African communal rangelands

This article reports on a symposium held at Fort Hare University in July 1998. Its objective was to assess the current state of knowledge on communal rangelands and identify issues important for policy making. This was done in the light of concerns about recent policy reform. Uncontrolled access to resources and the lack of services were identified as the main constraints on socio‐economic development in the communal rangelands, and inadequate forage during the dry season was recognised as a general constraint on livestock production, irrespective of mean annual rainfall. Government policies must recognise these issues and the social and ecological heterogeneity of communal rangelands in South Africa. The conclusion with the most far‐reaching implications, however, was that degradation has occurred in some, but not all, communal rangelands and is most likely to occur in arid areas. This finding is in direct contrast to the current base for agricultural policies in South Africa, which assumes that livestock have little impact on rangelands.     

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.     

IQ and Audit Quality: Do Smarter Auditors Deliver Better Audits?

This study examines the role of an individual auditor's cognitive ability in delivering high‐quality audits. Our results from analyzing archival data from Sweden show that audit partners' IQ scores obtained from psychological tests are positively associated with going‐concern audit reporting accuracy and audit fee premiums. We also find some, albeit weak, evidence that audit partners' IQ scores are negatively associated with the income‐increasing abnormal accruals of the client. These results suggest that, although audit services are standardized through various control mechanisms and audits are conducted by teams rather than by individual auditors, the cognitive ability of audit partners responsible for an audit remains important in delivering high‐quality audit services.