The Environmental Outcome of Emissions-intensive Economic Growth: A Critical Look at Official Growth Projections for Sweden up to the Year 2000

Implications for carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions from the Swedish government's medium-term economic projections are assessed, considering Sweden's environmental goals. Data from the first environmental accounting matrix of Sweden are exploited within the framework of the interindustry model to give emission multipliers for various components of aggregate demand. In view of these emission multipliers, it is evident that the outlined macro-economic development does not conform with Sweden's environmental goals. The oil price and the structural changes assumed in the economic projections stress still further the need for strong environmental policy measures to attain the emission goals. The allocation of total expenditure is shown here to be a critical factor for bringing down the emissions to accepted levels.     

Climate change policy, market structure, and carbon leakage

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change obliges the industrialized countries to initiate the international effort of abating anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If such an initiative is to be taken, the associated competitive effects may lead to significant relocation of developed countries' energy-intensive production. This paper examines this issue. I adopt an oligopolistic structure combined with increasing returns to scale production technologies to represent the strategic interaction among the firms producing energy-intensive products. This representation is then embedded within a multi-regional computable general equilibrium model, which in turn is used for quantifying these relocational effects. The results suggest that significant relocation of energy-intensive industries away from the OECD may occur, depending on the type of market structure, with leakage rates as high as 130%, in which case GHG control policies in the industrialized countries actually lead to higher global emissions.     

Allocation effects of uncertainty on resources in Japan

This paper provides evidence of a negative association between macroeconomic uncertainty and the cross sectional dispersion of investment rate for a panel of Japanese manufacturing firms. We show that an increase in uncertainty leads to the narrowing of the cross section dispersion of investment rate and vice versa. This finding suggests that firms’ fixed capital investment behavior becomes more homogeneous in times of increased uncertainty.     

Emerging Market Exposures and the Predictability of Hedge Fund Returns

We examine emerging market and global macro hedge funds and find a significant positive relation between hedge funds’ future returns and their exposure to both emerging market equities and emerging market currencies. We present evidence that the strong predictive power of emerging market betas is related to the superior market‐timing ability of these fund managers. Results are robust after controlling for commonly used hedge fund factors, the emerging market equity index, lagged fund returns, liquidity risk, and fund characteristics. Our results suggest that hedge funds can earn positive excess returns by timing their exposure to emerging market securities.     

User,Use & Utility Research

Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public ad-ministrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires putting the human perspective – the digital user – at the very heart of the new digitized service-led economy. BISE faces not just a temporary trend but a complex socio-technical phenomenon with far-reaching implications. The challenges are manifold and have major consequences for all stakeholders, both in information systems and management research as well as in practice. Corporate processes have to be re-designed from the ground up, starting with the user’s perspective, thus putting usage experience and utility of the individual center stage. The digital service economy leads to highly personalized application systems while organizational functions are being fragmented. Entirely new ways of interacting with information systems, in particular beyond desktop IT, are being invented and established. These fundamental challenges require novel approaches with regards to innovation and development methods as well as adequate concepts for enterprise or service system architectures. Gigantic amounts of data are being generated at an accelerating rate by an increasing number of devices – data that need to be managed. In order to tackle these extraordinary challenges we introduce ‘user, use & utility’ as a new field of BISE that focuses primarily on the digital user, his or her usage behavior and the utility associated with system usage in the digitized service-led economy. The research objectives encompass the development of theories, methods and tools for systematic requirement elicitation, systems design, and business development for successful Business and Information Systems Engineering in a digitized economy – information systems that digital users enjoy using. This challenge calls for leveraging insights from various scientific disciplines such as Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Sociology. BISE can provide an integrated perspective, thereby assuming a pivotal role within the digitized service led economy.     

Capitalism and democracy at a crossroads: the civilizational dimension

This paper evaluates Schumpeter's grand vision as reflected in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, and elaborates it in conjunction with the so-called “globalization” trends characteristic of the wake of the twenty-first century. In addition to the evolutionary nature of his methodology, the institutionalist dimension of Schumpeter's definitions are brought to light. A case is made for a fundamental process of “uncreative destruction” as far as the institutional setup of the economy is concerned. The contention of this paper is that there is ample support in Schumpeterian analysis for a counterpoint to the liberal thesis that envisages the worldwide spread of individualism, market economies, and democratic forms of government.