Integration in the Norwegian pulpwood market: domestic prices versus external trade

Pulpwood from Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst) traded domestically in Norway, imported to Norway, or exported from Norway is investigated with respect to commodity homogeneity and market integration. The prices imply that pulpwood from Norway spruce is a homogenous commodity, and the three price series are analyzed with respect to market integration. Using the cointegration estimator two cointegrating vectors are found within the system, and the weak Law of One Price can be imposed on domestic- and import prices. Imports are weakly exogenous to the two other variables, indicating that international pulpwood prices leads the domestic market.     

How Do Different Types of Investors React to New Earnings Information?

Abstract:   The purpose of this study is to investigate how different types of investors react to new earnings information. Using the extremely comprehensive official register of share holdings in Finland, we find that the majority of investors are more likely to sell (buy) stocks in a company after a positive (negative) earnings surprise and that they are biased towards buying after the disclosure of an annual report. Large investors show behaviour opposite to that of the majority of investors. We consider several possible explanations for this heterogeneous investor behaviour, of which differences in investor overconfidence emerges as the strongest candidate.     

THE OUTPUT OF THE SWEDISH EDUCATION SECTOR

The output of the Swedish education sector is defined as the addition to lifetime incomes generated by the schooling system. Using cross-sectional information on wages, employment rates, working hours, school-participation and leisure time, all by years of schooling, we compute new output-based measures of the education sector. Measures that include and exclude leisure, and that are counted before and after taxes are computed for the years 1967, 1973, 1980 and 1990. Our most important conclusion is that the output-based measure differs so markedly from conventional input-based ones that a replacement of the latter with the former would change the picture of the overall performance of the Swedish economy over the period.     

The global arms trade network 1950–2007

Using SIPRI data on all international transfers of major conventional weapons 1950–2007, we study the relationship between differences in polity and arms trade. To study whether states tend to trade arms within their political vicinity we estimate gravity models of the likelihood of trade at the bilateral level and study the evolution of the global network over time. We find a stable negative relationship between differences in polity and the likelihood of arms trade for the duration of the Cold War, but not in recent years. In line with these results, the global arms trade network changes drastically over the sample period in several respects: it grows more dense, clustered and decentralized over time. The differences between the NATO and Warsaw Pact sub-networks that we find corroborate the common perception that the Warsaw Pact was more strongly centralized around the USSR than NATO around the UK, the US and France.     

You care about me,but can I count on you? Applying a psychological contract perspective to investigate what makes employees willing to be internally employable

Abstract

For this study, we adopted a psychological contract-based perspective to investigate whether the fulfillment of perceived developmental promises made to employees is positively related to their willingness to accept internal job-related changes when needed by the organization, a construct we refer to as the willingness to be internally employable. We also examined the role played by line managers in facilitating employees’ willingness to be internally employable by fulfilling perceived developmental promises. We tested our conceptual model with data collected from ninety-eight recently hired employees in a Norwegian organization under an initiative emphasizing employee development. We found that developmental promise fulfillment is more important for employees’ willingness to be internally employable in this context than any perceived provision of developmental inducements in isolation. Further, we found that employee perceptions of the developmental support provided by their line manager related positively to their willingness to be internally employable by way of developmental promise fulfillment; however, this was not the case with perceived developmental inducements. Our findings support the importance of developmental promise fulfillment in fostering employee willingness to be internally employable and the critical role played by line managers in fulfilling developmental promises that employees believe have been made by their organization.     

On the relation between linearity‐generating processes and linear‐rational models

We review the notion of a linearity‐generating (LG) process introduced by Gabaix and relate LG processes to linear‐rational (LR) models studied by Filipovi? et al. We show that every LR model can be represented as an LG process and vice versa. We find that LR models have two basic properties that make them an important representation of LG processes. First, LR models can be easily specified and made consistent with nonnegative interest rates. Second, LR models go naturally with the long‐term risk factorization due to Alvarez and Jermann, Hansen and Scheinkman, and Qin and Linetsky. Every LG process under the long forward measure can be represented as a lower dimensional LR model.     

Social and economic exchange relationships and performance contingency: differential effects of variable pay and base pay

Abstract

In this study, we tested hypotheses derived from social exchange theory by investigating the relationships between employees’ base and variable pay and their social and economic exchange relationships with their employer. In a cross-lagged study of approximately 30 months duration including 488 respondents, the amount of accumulated base pay was positively related to a social exchange relationship, whereas the accumulated amount of variable pay was positively related to an economic exchange relationship. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and propose future research on the relationship between pay and social and economic exchange relationships.     

Do people make strategic commitments? Experimental evidence on strategic information avoidance

Game theory predicts that players make strategic commitments that may appear counter-intuitive. We conducted an experiment to see if people make a counter-intuitive but strategically optimal decision to avoid information. The experiment is based on a sequential Nash demand game in which a responding player can commit ahead of the game not to see what a proposing player demanded. Our data show that subjects do, but only after substantial time, learn to make the optimal strategic commitment. We find only weak evidence of physical timing effects.