Non-standard Employment in Sweden

In Sweden, as in many other countries, marginal groups tend to be overrepresented in non-standard employment. A decomposition of the employment rate of full-time workers on permanent contracts reveals that non-standard employment contributes to a substantially weaker labour market attachment for females and the foreign born than suggested by conventional employment figures alone. Our econometric analysis shows that the negative wage premia associated with fixed-term employment are considerably smaller in Sweden, both for natives and foreign born, than those that have been found for other countries. This may be due to a highly compressed wage structure and extensive coverage of collective bargaining in Sweden. On the whole, the type of fixed-term contract seems not to matter for the estimated wage premia.     

Investment-Specific R and D and the Decline in the Relative Price of Capital

The relative price of capital has declined at a rapid rate in the postwar period.This article provides a candidate explanation for this relative price decline—research and development that are embodied in new, more efficient investment goods. The model mimics the secular aspects of the data, and it has the property that the long-run growth rate of consumption is nontrivially determined as a function of the R and D efforts. Because growth is driven by investment in durable goods in the present model, it seems natural to assume that R and D is product-specific and that the firms producing these goods are long-lived profit centers that internalize the dynamic gains from R and D. A result of this assumption is that the growth rate in the decentralized economy is too low: the so-called business stealing effects that may cause the equilibrium growth rate to be too high in other models is internalized here in the form of planned obsolescence.     

Pre-auction offers in asymmetric first-price and second-price auctions

We consider first-price and second-price auctions with asymmetric buyers, and examine whether pre-auction offers to a subset of buyers are profitable. A single offer is never profitable prior to a second-price auction, but may be profitable prior to a first-price auction. However, a sequence of offers is profitable in either type of auction. In our model, suitably chosen pre-auction offers work because they move the assignment when bidder valuations are “near the top” closer to the optimal, revenue-maximizing assignment.     

Culture,legal heritage and the regulation of labor

According to cross-cultural psychologists, cross-country differences in individualism vs. collectivism constitute an important dimension of cultural variation. Legal-economic theorists argue that legal philosophies such as common law and civil law have developed differently over centuries and have persistent effects. In this paper, we argue that the effects of culture and institutions should not be analyzed in isolation from each other, as this disregards their interactions. We merge the two separate literatures on cultural attributes and legal origin theories, and derive a hypothesis regarding their joint effects on labor market regulations. We hypothesize that the effect of individualism on the political determination of labor regulations should be particularly pronounced in more market-oriented economic systems (as in British common law countries) compared to more rigid and bureaucratic state-centered systems (as in French civil law countries). Market oriented economies give individual effort and ability greater room to flourish, which in individualistic cultures yields weaker labor regulations. The effect of individualism should be smaller in state centered systems. Using data on the average rigidity of labor regulations during the years 1950–2004 in 86 countries, we find that the negative effect of individualism on the rigidity of labor regulations is enhanced by the presence of a common law legal system. In fact, individualism has no effect on the rigidity of labor market regulations in civil law countries. Analogously, the negative effect of common law legal origin on labor market regulations is found to be conditional on the level of individualism. Individualism and common law legal systems are complements in the determination of labor regulations.     

EVALUATING HEDGING ERRORS: AN ASYMPTOTIC APPROACH

We propose a methodology for evaluating the hedging errors of derivative securities due to the discreteness of trading times or the observation times of market prices, or both. Utilizing a weak convergence approach, we derive the asymptotic distributions of the hedging errors as the discreteness disappears in several situations. First, we examine the hedging error due to discrete-time trading when the true strategy is known, which generalizes the result of Bertsimas, Kogan, and Lo (2000) to continuous Itô processes. Then we consider a data-driven strategy, when the true strategy is unknown. This strategy is free of parametric model assumptions, therefore it is expected to serve as a benchmark for the evaluation of parametric strategies. Finally, we consider a case study of the Black-Scholes delta-hedging strategy when the volatility is unknown in the proposed framework. The results obtained give us a prospect for further developments of the framework under which various parametric strategies could be compared in a unified manner.     

How Entrepreneurs Deal with Ethical Challenges – An Application of the Business Ethics Synergy Star Technique

Entrepreneurs typically live with the ever-present threat of business failure arising from limited financial resources and aggressive competition in the marketplace. Under these circumstances, conflicting priorities arise and the entrepreneur is thus faced with certain dilemmas. In seeking to resolve these, entrepreneurs must often rely on their own judgment to determine “what is right”. There is thus a need for a technique to assist them decide on a course of action when no precedent or obvious solution exists. This research paper examines how entrepreneurs experience and deal with these dilemmas. The research is based on interviews with seven entrepreneurs in established service-oriented ventures, which gave rise to 26 dilemmas. These dilemmas were analyzed by making use of the Synergy Star technique, which is introduced here as a tool that is useful in defining any dilemma, isolating the ethical component, and resolving the dilemma in a way that is congruent with the entrepreneur’s personal world-view. Dr. David Robinson lectures in Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics at Queensland University of Technology and Bond University in Australia and is Visiting Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. Himself an entrepreneur and director of companies with varied business interests, he holds a Master of Science from Brunel University, London, an MBA from Newport University, California and a Ph.D. from Rhodes University, South Africa. Dave is a past surfing and lifesaving champion and is known around the world as ‘Dr. Dave - the Surfing Professor’. Per Davidsson is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Director of Research at Queensland University of Technology, Australia and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Jonkoping International Business School in Sweden. Hennie van der Mescht is Associate Professor and Head of the Education Department at Rhodes University, South Africa. Philip Court is Associate Professor and Head of the Management Department at Rhodes University, South Africa.     

Market‐specific Sunk Export Costs: The Impact of Learning and Spillovers

Firms may face sunk costs when entering an export market. Previous studies have focused on global or country‐specific sunk export costs. This study analyses the importance of market‐specific sunk export costs (defining ‘market’ as a product–country combination). We also study how market‐specific export costs can be affected by various kinds of learning and spillover effects. We use firm‐level panel data for Norwegian seafood exports distributed on products and countries. The results lend support to the hypothesis of market‐specific sunk costs. We also find evidence of learning and spillover effects, particularly within the same product group.     

Vision Zero--a road safety policy innovation

The aim of this paper is to examine Sweden's Vision Zero road safety policy. In particular, the paper focuses on how safety issues were framed, which decisions were made, and what are the distinctive features of Vision Zero. The analysis reveals that the decision by the Swedish Parliament to adopt Vision Zero as Sweden's road safety policy was a radical innovation. The policy is different in kind from traditional traffic safety policy with regard to problem formulation, its view on responsibility, its requirements for the safety of road users, and the ultimate objective of road safety work. The paper briefly examines the implications of these findings for national and global road safety efforts that aspire to achieving innovative road safety policies in line with the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020, declared by the United Nations General Assembly in March 2010.     

Scott A. Shane: winner of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research

Scott A. Shane is the 2009 winner of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. In this article we discuss and analyze Shane’s most important contributions to the field of entrepreneurship. His contribution is extraordinarily broad in scope, which makes it difficult to pinpoint one or a few specifics that we associate with Shane’s scholarship. Instead, they can be summarized in the following three points. First, he has influenced what we view as central aspects of entrepreneurship. Shane has been a leading figure in redirecting the focus on entrepreneurship research itself. Second, he has influenced how we view entrepreneurship. Shane’s research is arguably theory driven and it applies and develops theoretical lenses that greatly improve our understanding of entrepreneurship. Third, he has contributed to how we conduct entrepreneurship research. Shane has been a forerunner in examining relevant units of analysis that are difficult to sample; research designs and databases specifically designed for studying entrepreneurial processes; and sophisticated analytical methods. This has contributed to advancing the methodological rigor of the field. Summing them up, the contributions are very impressive indeed.

Panel studies of new venture creation: a methods-focused review and suggestions for future research

Longitudinal panel studies of large, random samples of business start-ups captured at the pre-operational stage allow researchers to address core issues for entrepreneurship research, namely, the processes of creation of new business ventures as well as their antecedents and outcomes. Here, we perform a methods-orientated review of all 83 journal articles that have used this type of data set, our purpose being to assist users of current data sets as well as designers of new projects in making the best use of this innovative research approach. Our review reveals a number of methods issues that are largely particular to this type of research. We conclude that amidst exemplary contributions, much of the reviewed research has not adequately managed these methods challenges, nor has it made use of the full potential of this new research approach. Specifically, we identify and suggest remedies for context-specific and interrelated methods challenges relating to sample definition, choice of level of analysis, operationalization and conceptualization, use of longitudinal data and dealing with various types of problematic heterogeneity. In addition, we note that future research can make further strides towards full utilization of the advantages of the research approach through better matching (from either direction) between theories and the phenomena captured in the data, and by addressing some under-explored research questions for which the approach may be particularly fruitful.