Community–Industry Contracting over Natural Resource use in a Context of Weak Property Rights: The Case of Indonesia

Decentralization in Indonesia has resulted in an increased influence of local communities over the terms of logging agreements with timber companies. The outcomes of such community–company negotiations vary significantly across communities. What are the conditions that cause this variation, and how can the outcomes be more effectively and efficiently influenced by third-party actors such as the local government or NGOs? This paper addresses these questions by developing a game-theoretic model to illustrate the strategic interactions between communities and companies. The model allows for endogeneity of de facto property rights and bargaining positions. We show that third-party actions to improve the community’s bargaining position by raising its reservation utility may result in an increase in the area logged and thereby harm the environment. Our results indicate that the strategy of intervention matters. In particular, strategies that raise the sensitivity of interventions to local logging threats are likely to be more cost-effective in supporting communities and reducing forest degradation than more indiscriminatory strategies. The model will be relevant to other situations where communities negotiate contracts over natural resource use with outside actors in a context of weak property rights, a situation increasingly observed in other developing countries.     

Municipal visions: Reflexive futures between paradigm and practice

How does the reflexive knowledge we develop about institutions and environments influence the expectations we might have about the future? The paper addresses this question in the context of Foresight in local governance. It describes a project aiming at creating visions for a Norwegian municipality by inviting schoolchildren to contribute with their ideas of the future. The focus is on how the interactions between project owners and participants produced certain forms of resistance and led to visions best described as idealistic conformism. Introducing the idea of ‘reflexive futures’, I suggest that that a broader understanding of reflexivity as containing both enabling and constraining features can help to unlock certain paradoxes of current Foresight and provide a renewed inquiry into the practise of visioning for strategy and long-term planning.     

Global food demand,productivity growth,and the scarcity of land and water resources: a spatially explicit mathematical programming approach

In the coming decades, an increasing competition for global land and water resources can be expected, due to rising demand for food and bio‐energy production, biodiversity conservation, and changing production conditions due to climate change. The potential of technological change in agriculture to adapt to these trends is subject to considerable uncertainty. In order to simulate these combined effects in a spatially explicit way, we present a model of agricultural production and its impact on the environment (MAgPIE). MAgPIE is a mathematical programming model covering the most important agricultural crop and livestock production types in 10 economic regions worldwide at a spatial resolution of three by three degrees, i.e., approximately 300 by 300 km at the equator. It takes regional economic conditions as well as spatially explicit data on potential crop yields and land and water constraints into account and derives specific land‐use patterns for each grid cell. Shadow prices for binding constraints can be used to valuate resources for which in many places no markets exist, especially irrigation water. In this article, we describe the model structure and validation. We apply the model to possible future scenarios up to 2055 and derive required rates of technological change (i.e., yield increase) in agricultural production in order to meet future food demand.     

Der Intra-Extra-Media-Vergleich — ein wenig genutztes Analyseinstrument und seine methodischen Anforderungen

The article addresses the methodological demands which allow drawing conclusion about a potential change in news selection from a comparison of content analysis data and extra-media statistics. Based on arguments by Karl Erik Rosengren, the design and admissibility of such studies is discussed. Then the demands for the events to be analyzed, for the content analysis data and for the extra-media statistics are dealt with. The application of the standards developed and some problems in empirical procedures are illustrated with a small study. It asks whether news selection has changed over the past fifty years in a way that accidents and damage have drawn more attention to themselves in news coverage. With respect to some relevant events, data from a content analysis of three German national newspapers are related to external statistics. The analyses show that news selection in the papers studied has temporarily changed for the events under consideration, but that no long-term trend — primarily no trend towards increasing negativism — could be made out.     

The optimal-drift model: an accelerated binomial scheme

We introduce the optimal-drift model for the approximation of a lognormal stock price process by an accelerated binomial scheme. This model converges with order o(1/N), which is superior compared to today??s benchmark methods. Our approach is based on the observation that risk-neutral binomial schemes converge to the lognormal limit independently of the choice of the drift parameter. We verify the improved order of convergence by an asymptotic expansion of the binomial distribution function. Further, we show that the above result on drift invariance implies weak convergence of the binomial schemes suggested by Tian (in J. Futures Mark. 19, 817?C843, 1999) and Chang and Palmer (in Finance Stoch. 11, 91?C105, 2007).     

Auditors' and governmental financial officers' views on expanding the Sarbanes–Oxley Act provisions to state and local governments

This paper examines whether certain provisions of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX, 2002) should be expanded to include state and local governmental entities. Surveying governmental financial officials (GFOs) and their external auditors to gauge support for SOX-like legislation for governmental entities, we find the strongest support for auditor independence rules similar to SOX, management assessment of, and reporting on, internal controls, and severe penalties for destruction of records, fraud, and failure to report fraud.     

Attraction of marketing and sales professionals in the financial services industry: An analysis of pre-, during and post-financial crisis job postings

Attracting talent is key to a successful sales force, and financial services firms have long used online recruiting to achieve this. However, little is known about how firms attract financial services marketing and sales professionals. In this study, we present a content analysis of job postings for sales and marketing positions in the financial services industry that were posted before, during and after the financial crisis of 2008. Specifically, job postings in the United Kingdom and United States in 2006, 2009 and 2013 were examined. Implications for financial services firms are discussed.