The Thin Line Between Advanced and Conventional New Technology: A Case Study on Paper Industry Management

The case study evidence in this paper suggests that management of technological change is more complicated than the existing literature has acknowledged. Rather than merely introduce or not introduce new technology, managers have to choose between more or less advanced technologies whose implications are difficult to assess. Moreover, the choice between advanced and conventional production technologies seems to be influenced more by situational determinants than by the habitual actions of managers or changes in management characters. Taking these situational determinants and firm-specific critical incidents seriously is essential, especially for an understanding of why managerial actors alter their approach to managing technological change. By adopting a longitudinal firm-in-sector perspective to technological change this paper demonstrates how coinciding increases in material resources and competitive pressures encourage management to adopt advanced instead of conventional technology. To justify this argument, the paper compares two consecutive technological change projects in the same firm and describes the background of their profoundly different degrees of sophistication.     

IQ and Audit Quality: Do Smarter Auditors Deliver Better Audits?

This study examines the role of an individual auditor's cognitive ability in delivering high‐quality audits. Our results from analyzing archival data from Sweden show that audit partners' IQ scores obtained from psychological tests are positively associated with going‐concern audit reporting accuracy and audit fee premiums. We also find some, albeit weak, evidence that audit partners' IQ scores are negatively associated with the income‐increasing abnormal accruals of the client. These results suggest that, although audit services are standardized through various control mechanisms and audits are conducted by teams rather than by individual auditors, the cognitive ability of audit partners responsible for an audit remains important in delivering high‐quality audit services.     

Institutional Path Dependence in Competitive Dynamics: The Case of Paper Industries in Finland and the USA

Prior research on competitive dynamics has failed to offer tools to understand distorted patterns of competition that emerge from distinct institutional and historical contexts. Our analysis suggests that a joint effect of institutional rules, governance structures, and shared cognition plays a pivotal role in firm‐level competitive behavior and capability development. We show how globally significant market positions can result from specific institutional arrangements between firms and governments, especially if coupled with interfirm contractual commitments. Our results call for more attention to these interfirm commitments that are built on formal rules and governmental support, but whose impact they yet exceed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The consequences of perceived risk and objective knowledge for consumers’ investment behavior

Knowledge and risks have a focal role in consumer behavior. However, studies on consumers’ perceive risks in decision situations and the influence of objective knowledge and experience on risk perceptions, consumers’ attitudes and behavioral intentions are scarce. This paper introduces and tests a novel conceptual model that shows how consumers’ objective financial knowledge and investing experience affect their future investment intentions mediated by perceived risks, and attitudes toward investing. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The proposed model fits the data and accounts for attitudes and intentions to investing. This study advances knowledge by directly measuring the behavior-related objective knowledge and experience. We also suggest new insights into the risk concept by showing that consumers perceive five types of risk in investing context and objective financial knowledge and investment experience has varying effects on different risks types, attitudes and intentions. The results also show significant gender differences.     

Seeking External Evidence to Assess Benefit Transfers for Environmental Policy

The cost and time required to produce original benefit estimates makes benefit transfers a highly valuable component of the process of assessing the benefits and costs of environmental improvements. Because of the great variety of benefit estimates, conducted at different times with different data sources and different techniques, there is concerted effort to understand the validity of transfers. The research in this paper approaches the validity issue of benefit transfers by asking whether there is indirect evidence of the benefits. The premise of the paper is that policies that give significant benefits should induce expected and unexpected behavioral changes. We look for evidence of potential indirect evidence by by estimating the effect of differences air pollutants on activities such as outdoor recreation and work, as found in the American Time Use Survey.     

Why do growth rates differ? Evidence from cross-country data on private sector production

We estimate standard production functions with a new cross-country data set on business sector production, wages and R&D investment for a selection of 14 OECD countries including the US. The data sample covers years the 1960–2004. The data suggest that growth differences can largely be explained by capital deepening and the ability to produce new technology in the form of new patents. We also find strong evidence of complementarity between patents and openness of the economy, but little evidence of increasing elasticity of substitution over time.     

Geopolitics of Humour: The Muhammed Cartoon Crisis and the Kaltio Comic Strip Episode in Finland

Humour and cartoons are commonly perceived as practices of innocent entertainment, but the crisis following the publishing of twelve cartoons of the prophet Muhammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten finally proved what serious matters popular culture, cartoons and humour can be. One repercussion of this notorious cartoon crisis was the publication in Kaltio, a minor cultural journal produced in northern Finland, of a comic strip in which various questions concerning the Muhammed cartoon episode and the political hypocrisy of the Finnish government were discussed satirically. This precipitated another, albeit minor, crisis which was noted widely around the world. Through these two interlinked incidences, the present paper discusses how humour functions as a ‘tool’ giving impetus to various forms of geopolitical processes and discussions in a range of contextual circumstances and at different spatial levels, resulting in both politically affirmative and destructive effects. It also discusses how the geopolitical order, discourses and codes can divert the reception and interpretation of humour.     

Experience and the unexpected: risk and mitigation issues for operating underground storage silos for coal-fired power plant

Observed autoignition events and extinguishing the resulting smouldering fires in an underground storage system of a coal-fired power plant have provided insight into the array of contributing variables, and some experience on quantifying the risk with alternative scenarios of event initiation, progress and potential mitigation. Although the first attempts to quantify the risk suggest high sensitivity to the sequence of action taken after fire alarm, and no similar storage sites really exist, some recommended preventive, corrective and other mitigating activities can be at least partly defined and improved by using the cumulative experience and parallel efforts in other closed or underground storage sites. However, there are also so-called black (or at least grey) swans: unexpected events for which the facility may be poorly prepared for. In the case of the underground storage silos, such an event was experienced when incoming cold coal during a harsh winter season froze the sewer system that normally protects the stored coal from seepage water. With blocked normal bypass, the seepage water found its way to the coal silos and created large clumps of icy coal that blocked the coal conveyors. Although freezing weather is not unusual at high-latitude power plants, the common methods to combat freezing of coal are mainly useful for open storage sites and above-ground transport. Options for mitigation are discussed, as well as the event chain leading to an event that had never previously occurred. The case is discussed from the point of view of options to prepare for rare or unforeseen events.     

The Information Content of Cash Flows and the Random Walk: Evidence from the Helsinki Stock Exchange

Using a sample from the Helsinki Stock Exchange, this paper examines whether observed market reactions to unexpected cash flows are sensitive to the random walk assumption of cash flow behaviour. We consider the random walk (with drift) model commonly used in related literature, and we consider cash flow expectations generated with individually estimated parsimonious univariate time series models and an index model. Market reactions to unexpected cash flows are indiscernible under the random walk assumption, while significant market reactions are found when expectations of cash flows are measured with models which better capture their time series properties. Prior studies that rely on the random walk assumption have probably been biased against finding a significant market reaction to cash flow information.     

Utilizing financial market information in forecasting real growth,inflation and real exchange rate

In this paper we build an open economy extension of the Gordon (1962) valuation model that suggests a simple forecasting system for three macroeconomic variables; the real growth, inflation and real exchange rate. All the forecasting equations in our system utilize current financial market information in the form of dividend yields and short-term interest rate. Our empirical results indicate that these simple forms of financial market information are relevant for forecasting the time-varying underlying trends in the macroeconomic data for the U.K., Eurozone and Japan, when treating the U.S. as the world market.