Bulgaria's Long March Towards Meaningful Credit Contracts

This article is based on the hypothesis that the development of creditors' remedies and their actual practicability is a good yardstick for progress towards the rule of law. According to this measure Bulgaria achieved little progress throughout much of the 1990s, but this improved significantly after 1997. Legal reforms were only one among several factors driving this progress; among the others were macroeconomic stabilisation, privatisation, the disintegration of trade unions and the ultimate failure of attempts to keep most of the socialist giants alive. Only the recognition of this failure facilitated some crucial reforms; nevertheless these reforms have been too halfhearted to put creditors' rights on a secure footing. In actual fact debtors have remained a very well protected group.     

Sustainability seen from the perspective of consumers

An important step in promoting sustainable consumption is to find out how consumers understand the concept of sustainability. In this paper, we report on a study among Norwegian consumers in which we explored their understanding of sustainability at two levels. First, we investigated consumers' understanding of the general sustainability concept; specifically, we studied how important the following five sustainability dimensions are in consumers' conception of sustainability: the environmental, social, economic, temporal and the developmental dimension. Second, we investigated how consumers' understanding of sustainability manifests itself in consumption decisions: We studied consumers' opinions about how important various attributes are for sustainable products and which product labels they consider indicative of sustainable products. We found that all five sustainability dimensions occurred as elements of consumers' understanding of the sustainability concept. The environmental dimension, the social dimension and the developmental dimension were particularly outstanding. With regard to attributes that are important for sustainable products, consumers placed high emphasis on recyclability of the packaging, fair payment of producers, low energy use and low carbon dioxide emissions during production and shipping. Humane animal treatment was also considered an important attribute of sustainable products. The product labels that were considered most indicative of sustainable products were the Nordic Swan and the Norwegian Debio label. Consumers' judgments of how indicative the labels are of sustainable products were related positively to familiarity with the labels.     

Self‐Directed Pensions: Gender,Risk, and Portfolio Choices*

In this paper, I investigate gender differences in financial risk‐taking from a new perspective, and I show that gender plays a different role across the risk distribution. To evaluate risk‐taking, I exploit portfolio choices following a reform that entitles almost the entire Swedish workforce to choose a risk profile for a part of their public‐pension contributions. The novel finding is that portfolio risk does not differ much between the men and women who choose less risky portfolios, while the men who choose risky portfolios take on significantly more risk than do the women who choose risky portfolios. The findings are robust to investors choosing the default alternative, chasing past returns, rebalancing, and different measures of risk‐taking.     

Feature Article: A Resource‐Based Perspective on Business Strategies of Newly Founded Subsidiaries: The Case of German Pensionsfonds

Diversification by firms into unfamiliar areas of business is achieved either by acquisition of an existing business in the destination industry or a greenfield start‐up. This article focuses on the business strategy of greenfield start‐ups. We theorize and find that firms entering a market by establishing a new subsidiary rely solely on their own preexisting internal resources, making it favorable to align the business strategy of the start‐up with the firm's value‐generating competencies. Our empirical results, which are based on a sample of German Pensionsfonds and their parent companies, are consistent with the view that the business strategy choice of a newly founded subsidiary is substantially directed by the internal resources and competencies of the parent firm.