What makes businesses commit to nature conservation?

To halt the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, various actors including companies need to engage, but it is not yet clear what drives voluntary business commitments. We explore leverage points that might increase corporate action for conservation. We apply a structural equation model based on the theory of planned behaviour to analyse data from 618 German companies, collected through an online-survey in 2019. We show that a favourable attitude, driven by perceived business relevance and benefit prospects, fosters engagement. Perceived difficulties, such as lacking finances and knowledge, hinder the engagement. Customers, employees and the general public are presently the only stakeholder groups that drive corporate conservation engagement. Nevertheless, the expectation levels of virtually all stakeholders were found to be quite low and as such inadequate for the ecological crisis we face. We discuss how political will and goal setting can encourage more widespread business support for the natural environment.     

The association between individual audit partners’ risk preferences and the composition of their client portfolios

We explore whether audit partners’ attitude towards risk, as measured by their personal criminal convictions, are reflected in the composition of their client portfolios. Analyzing a unique dataset of Swedish audit partners’ criminal convictions, we find that the clients of audit partners with criminal convictions are characterized by greater financial, governance, and reporting risk than those of audit partners without criminal convictions. Also, clients of audit partners with criminal convictions pay larger audit fees, on average, than those of auditors without criminal convictions.     

New product portfolio performance in family firms

This study investigates the relationship between top management team (TMT) innovation orientation and new product portfolio performance in small and medium-sized family firms by exploring two family firm-specific sources of TMT diversity as moderators: the number of generations involved in the TMT and the ratio of family members in the TMT. Results indicate that family-induced diversity in the TMT has opposing moderating effects. Although a positive relationship exists between TMT innovation orientation and new product portfolio performance when multiple generations are involved in the TMT, TMT innovation orientation and new product portfolio performance experience a negative relationship when the ratio of family members in the TMT is high. The study discusses theoretical and managerial implications of the findings and develops avenues for future research.     

Entrepreneurship: Origins and returns

We examine the origins and outcome of entrepreneurship on the basis of exceptionally comprehensive Norwegian matched worker-firm-owner data. In contrast to most existing studies, our notion of entrepreneurship not only comprises self-employment, but also employment in partly self-owned limited liability companies. Based on this extended entrepreneurship concept, we find that entrepreneurship tends to be profitable. It also raises income variability, but the most successful quartile gains much more than the least successful quartile loses. Key determinants of the decision to become an entrepreneur are occupational qualifications, family resources, gender, and work environments. Individual unemployment encourages, while aggregate unemployment discourages, entrepreneurship.     

The effect of ambiguous risk, and coordination on farmers' adaptation to climate change — A framed field experiment

The risk of losses of income and productive means due to adverse weather can differ significantly among farmers sharing a productive landscape, and is of course hard to estimate, or even “guesstimate” empirically. Moreover, the costs associated with investments in reduced vulnerability to climatic events are likely to exhibit economies of scope. We explore the implications of these characteristics on farmer's decisions to adapt to climate change using a framed field experiment applied to coffee farmers in Costa Rica. As expected, we find high levels of risk aversion, but even using that as a baseline, we further find that farmers behave even more cautiously when the setting is characterized by unknown or ambiguous risk (i.e. poor or non-reliable risk information). Secondly, we find that farmers, to a large extent, coordinated their decisions to secure a lower adaptation cost, and that communication among farmers strongly facilitated coordination.     

Transparency, Integration, and the Cost of International Real Estate Investments

This paper investigates the importance of market institutions for the performance of international property investors during the 1996?C2007 period. The results show that international property companies underperform local property companies in the early years of the sample period. This underperformance is driven by the political environment, the level of economic integration, and the transparency of the real estate market in target countries. The underperformance of internationals disappears in the later years of the sample period, and so does the significance of the aforementioned factors in explaining performance differences among international companies. These findings suggest that the increased transparency of the global real estate industry has leveled the playing field for foreign property investors.     

Attitudes and Donation Behavior When Reading Positive and Negative Charity Appeals

This article tries to clarify whether negative charity appeals (i.e., advertisements emphasizing the bad consequences of not helping) or positive charity appeals (i.e., advertisements emphasizing the good consequences of helping) are more effective. Previous literature does not provide a single answer to this question and we suggest that one contributing reason for this is that different studies have operationalized appeal effectiveness in different ways (e.g., actual behavior, self-rated helping intentions, or expressed attitudes about the ad or the organization). Results from four separate studies suggest that positive appeals are more effective in inducing favorable attitudes toward the ad and toward the organization but that negative appeals are more effective (in studies 1A and 1B) or at least equally effective (in studies 1C and 1D) in eliciting actual donations. Also, although people’s attitude toward the appeal (i.e., liking) was a good predictor for the expected effectiveness in increasing donation behavior (in Study 2), it was a poor predictor of actual donation behavior in all four main studies. These results cast doubt on marketing theories suggesting that attitudes toward an advertisement and toward the brand always lead to higher purchase behavior.     

The use of macroeconomic models in economic policy making: The Norwegian experience

Planning in Norway has a long tradition. The use of models is an integral part of short- and medium-term economic policy administration. A large-scale input-output model, MODIS IV, is used as the short- and medium-term forecasting and planning model. The use of the model secures consistency when analysing the economy. The model is very open in the sense that important interrelations in the economy are left out. The model contains only ‘good’ relations in the Leif Johansen sense of the word. Smaller aggregate and more closed versions of the model are used for analysing policy alternatives. These models contain both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ relations. The use of macroeconomic models is an important aid for proposals regarding economic policy in the Ministry of Finance. Because the whole ministry (with expert help from other ministries) takes an active part in the model work, MODIS IV serves as the centralizing mechanism. It helps to make economists from many ministries go around the same centre, speak the same ‘language’ and organize all relevant information and judgements in a consistent way. Experience shows that ‘numbers discipline’ and force the different arguments on to a higher level of precision.