Young people with intellectual disabilities and sport as a leisure activity: notions from the Finnish welfare society

Although disability sports have recently received positive attention, little concern has been directed towards them in youth research. In this article, we discuss the free-time sports in which youth with intellectual disabilities engage as a part of their leisure and their association with their peers. We maintain that every young person has a principal right to leisure and question what kinds of access youth with intellectual disabilities have to local sports communities in the Finnish context. Our empirical data consist of notes collected during sports training; interviews with young sports participants, their supervisors, and their parents; and online survey responses. Almost all sports are equally accessible to everyone; however, practical engagement in sports is not equally easy for everyone because long distances, lack of transportation, unsuitable sporting occasions and teams, or incapable coaches limit individuals’ participation possibilities. Furthermore, symbolic structures, such as neglectful attitudes, restrict the visibility of youth with intellectual disabilities in leisure sports. In many ways, supporting networks become significant when access to sport is under scrutiny. The most important enabling and restricting factors are families’ symbolic and material capital, as well as the unequal, poorly guided, and occasional leisure possibilities in different localities.     

VALUATION OF BARRIER OPTIONS VIA A GENERAL SELF‐DUALITY

Classical put–call symmetry relates the price of puts and calls under a suitable dual market transform. One well‐known application is the semistatic hedging of path‐dependent barrier options with European options. This, however, in its classical form requires the price process to observe rather stringent and unrealistic symmetry properties. In this paper, we develop a general self‐duality theorem to develop valuation schemes for barrier options in stochastic volatility models with correlation.     

An Insight into the Personal and Emotive Context of Wildlife Viewing at the Penguin Place,Otago Peninsula,New Zealand

The personal and emotive context of visitors’ experiences has been neglected in much sustainable tourist attraction management. This paper applies ASEB demi-grid analysis as a consumer-orientated management tool to facilitate an understanding of the beneficial experiences gained by international visitors to a penguin-watching tourism attraction on the Otago Peninsula, New Zealand. Forty in-depth interviews with visitors showed that the main beneficial experiences gained included reported enhanced environmental awareness (cognition) and ‘mood’ benefits (affection). In addition, several consistent themes emerged from the beneficial experiences reported by tourists, including issues related to viewing, proximity, authenticity and wonder. Findings thus included the perceived importance of visitors to be able to view endangered penguins ‘up close’ in their natural habitat to elicit feelings of exploration and privilege, to appreciate the simplicity and naturalness of the setting and to increase their knowledge of the species through interaction with an experienced guide.     

Grundsteuerreform in Deutschland: eine unendliche Geschichte?

For many years property tax in its current form has been exhibiting increasing problems. There are three reform models currently being discussed that differ in their respective tax bases using either property values or areas, or both. They create different individual tax burdens and amounts of tax revenue in each state compared to the current property tax amount which alters local tax capacity within the fiscal equalisation system among the 16 states. The calculations on regional local tax revenue prove that the value-based models which promote greater equity are being neglected by the financially strong states. This is because they would be forced to provide higher transfer payments to the financially weaker states.     

The value of extended delegation in dynamic agency

One of the main advantages of delegation is that specific department level information is used. Its main disadvantage is probably that central management looses direct control over certain actions. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted trade-off. We show that delegation might be favorable even if specific knowledge is completely absent. We consider a firm that lives for two periods. Due to its organizational structure part of the tasks and decision rights is inevitably delegated to a subordinate (agent). The agent performs the tasks assigned to him, tantamount to personal effort, in each of the two periods. Besides this effort the decision to implement a particular project has to be made at the beginning of period two. With regard to the project choice, central management can decide to delegate it to the agent (decentralization). Alternatively it can make it personally (centralization). If the project choice is decentralized it remains unobservable for central management. Along with second period effort it must be motivated via an incentive contract written on period output.We analyze two different contracting regimes: long-term commitment and long-term renegotiation-proof contracts. With full commitment we find that centralization is indeed favorable as compared to delegation if no informational advantage exists. This confirms conventional wisdom. However, the result does not necessarily hold with renegotiation-proof contracts. Renegotiation-proofness may force central management to set too low second-period incentives. Delegation counteracts this effect as it allows central management to implicitly commit to a higher second-period incentive rate. This arises as both, personal effort and the project choice, rather than effort alone need to be motivated. A necessary condition for too low second-period incentives, and thus for delegation to be favorable, is a negative intertemporal correlation of output.     

Islamic investing

Using a large international sample of 35 developed and emerging markets, we analyze whether Islamic indices exhibit a different performance to conventional benchmarks. While there is no compelling evidence of performance differences in robust Sharpe ratio tests and after controlling for market risk, we find a significantly positive four-factor alpha for the aggregate developed markets region. This outperformance stems, however, mainly from the U.S. and is largely attributable to the exclusion of financial stocks in Sharia-screened portfolios. As the extensive downturn of financials is related to the recent financial crisis, we do not argue that this outperformance will continue over time. The style analysis reveals that Islamic indices invest mainly in growth stocks and positive momentum stocks. This, for a passive portfolio intriguing result can, however, be explained by the strong sector allocation towards energy firms and their strong momentum characteristic during the sample period.     

Blanket guarantee,deposit insurance and restructuring decisions for multinational banks

This paper examines blanket guarantee, deposit insurance and restructuring decisions with respect to a multinational bank (MNB) using Nash bargaining when the threat of a bank panic motivates countries to make decisions quickly. Failure of the bank would unevenly distribute externalities across countries, influencing the restructuring incentives. In equilibrium, the bank is either liquidated or one of the countries – or both – recapitalizes it. A partition of the recapitalization costs is sensitive to the country-specific benefits and costs from recapitalization, panic and liquidation. The home regulator benefits from the advantage that it is the only entity that can legally liquidate the MNB. Rational expectations regarding the bargaining result affect the incentives to declare a blanket guarantee.     

How to deal with dissent among experts. Risk evaluation of EMF in a scientific dialogue

This article describes the results of a scientific discourse which aimed at exploring the reasons for differences in expert health risk assessment of radio frequency electromagnetic fields of mobile telephony.

It starts with describing the structure of the discourse. Then, the reasons for the conflicting risk assessments are discussed. Differences are due to the selection and evaluation of relevant scientific studies by applying different scientific quality standards, to the methods used for generating a research synthesis and an overall risk evaluation. Consensus could be achieved regarding the selection of and the quality requirements for the scientific studies used for risk assessment as well as their significance for risk evaluation. However, dissent remained about the synthesis of scientific evidence into an overall risk evaluation and about the relevance of the precautionary principle for risk evaluation and its implications for the risk assessment framework.

Based on the analysis of these problems, a transparent, consistent and rational procedure for risk assessment is suggested to facilitate a risk characterization which better meets the demands of policy making and the public for an appropriate risk evaluation.     

ERP in action — Challenges and benefits for management control in SME context

ERP systems have fundamentally re-shaped the way business data is collected, stored, disseminated and used throughout the world. However, the existing research in accounting has provided only relatively few empirical findings on the implications for management control when companies implement ERP systems as the technological platform. Especially scarce are the findings concerning the production phase, after implementation, when the information processes, related work practices and the new information contents can be seen as established. In this paper we explored and theorized the benefits, challenges and problems for management control when an ERP system is in use, four years after the implementation. Our findings also illustrate why and under what circumstances these challenges and benefits may exist. For a holistic view of the organization our findings, based on a qualitative case study, are constructed from the viewpoints of people at different levels and functions of the organization. Top management expected a new strategic control system, but due to the many challenges it ended up with merely financial accounting based control. At the operational level, serious challenges lead to inadequate usage of the ERP system. Management control produces the financial basic data and must contend with many practical problems caused by ERP implementation.     

Semiparametric diffusion estimation and application to a stock market index

The analysis of diffusion processes in financial models is crucially dependent on the form of the drift and diffusion coefficient functions. A new model for a stock market index process is proposed in which the index is decomposed into an average growth process and an ergodic diffusion. The ergodic diffusion part of the model is not directly observable. A methodology is developed for estimating and testing the coefficient functions of this unobserved diffusion process. The estimation is based on the observations of the index process and uses semiparametric and non-parametric techniques. The testing is performed via the wild bootstrap resampling technique. The method is illustrated on S&P 500 index data.