The making of an expert

Popular lore tells us that genius is born, not made. Scientific research, on the other hand, reveals that true expertise is mainly the product of years of intense practice and dedicated coaching. Ordinary practice is not enough: To reach elite levels of performance, you need to constantly push yourself beyond your abilities and comfort level. Such discipline is the key to becoming an expert in all domains, including management and leadership. Those are the conclusions reached by Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University; Prietula, a professor at the Goizueta Business School; and Cokely, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, who together studied data on the behavior of experts, gathered by more than 100 scientists. What consistently distinguished elite surgeons, chess players, writers, athletes, pianists, and other experts was the habit of engaging in "deliberate" practice--a sustained focus on tasks that they couldn't do before. Experts continually analyzed what they did wrong, adjusted their techniques, and worked arduously to correct their errors. Even such traits as charisma can be developed using this technique. Working with a drama school, the authors created a set of acting exercises for managers that remarkably enhanced executives' powers of charm and persuasion. Through deliberate practice, leaders can improve their ability to win over their employees, their peers, or their board of directors. The journey to elite performance is not for the impatient or the faint of heart. It takes at least a decade and requires the guidance of an expert teacher to provide tough, often painful feedback. It also demands would-be experts to develop their "inner coach" and eventually drive their own progress.     

The development of the management accountant's role revisited: An example from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency

This study traces the development of the management accountant (MA) role at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SIA). In 2012, the agency began a reformation by implementing the Lean management system in hopes of increasing customer trust. The results of this study show that the authority of the MA rests on decentralization and the proximity of MAs to managers, as previous research has shown, and more specifically on a definitional and a moral prerogative that may or may not be awarded to MAs enabling them to act as de facto managers. The study shows how the role of the SIA's operative level MAs changed into a helpdesk function with the role of assisting other groups to help themselves, in this case operative‐level teams that had begun performing management accounting tasks. Thus, this study bears witness not to the expansion and hybridization of existing MA roles, but to the reduction in authority and de‐hybridization of the MA role, from business partner to a pedagogical role on a consultative basis.     

States and persons—on the interpretation of some fundamental concepts in the theory of justice as fairness

In this paper we discuss the ability of persons to compare the ‘positions’ of different individuals, which is fundamental for the theory of equity and justice as fairness, through the use of a state structure involving states, persons, consequences, preferences and mappings between sets of these objects.It is shown that a type of identity axiom implies a complete identity axiom. Such a complete identity axiom will hold if properties and preferences are dependent and all persons have the same properties, or properties are part of consequences. It is argued that the latter case provides a rationale for the complete identity axiom but demands great abilities of comparison on behalf of the persons involved.     

Portfolio returns and manager activity: How to decompose tracking error into security selection and market timing

We develop a new method for detecting portfolio manager activity. Our method relies exclusively on portfolio returns and, consequently, avoids the pitfalls associated with disclosed portfolio holdings. We investigate the link between activity and performance of actively managed U.S. equity funds from 2000 to 2007 and document robust evidence that future performance is positively related to past stock picking and negatively associated with past market timing. Finally, we find that portfolio manager activity is highly persistent over time, which supports the conclusion that stock picking increases performance while market timing decreases performance.     

The rise in female employment and the role of tax incentives. An empirical analysis of the Swedish individual tax reform of 1971

Sweden reached the 2009 OECD average level of female labor force participation already in 1974. Before 1971 spouses were taxed jointly. This meant that the wife’s financial gain of working was a function of the husband’s income. The higher income of the husband, the lower was the wife’s work incentive ceteris paribus. After the reform, the link between the husband’s income and the wife’s participation tax rate was, in principle, abolished. This paper exploits a rich longitudinal register data source and the large variation provided by the individual tax reform to analyze the evolution of female employment in Sweden in the years surrounding the 1971 reform. I provide clear evidence that employment grew considerably more among women married to high-income earners in the years following the announcement of the reform, especially among households with kids. Estimated participation elasticities are in the range 0.5–1 for the total sample.     

An analysis of dynamic risk in the Greater China equity markets

This study looks at the time-varying nature of systematic risk in the Greater China equity markets. The Shanghai and Shenzhen markets both have a low average systematic risk when measured against the world market. The short outbursts in systematic risk for these two markets seem to be directly related to policy shifts. The Hong Kong and Taiwan markets are more integrated with world markets and they show signs of large variations in systematic risk over time. Furthermore, conditional betas in the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets are stationary, while the Hong Kong and Taiwan betas are integrated of order one. In addition, long memory tests show that all four markets exhibit a long-run dependence in their conditional betas. While the two mainland China market betas are covariance stationary, the Hong Kong and Taiwan betas are not.     

东欧金融危机的回顾与分析

【彼德森国际经济研究所2009年6月】在这次大萧条以来最严重的全球金融危机中,中东欧受到的打击超过了任何其他地区。预计2009年该地区GDP将下降4％左右,拉脱维亚和乌克兰两国GDP都可能出现两位数的负增长。     

Short‐run and long‐run dynamics of farm land allocation: panel data evidence from Denmark1

This study develops and estimates a dynamic multi‐output model of farmers’ land allocation decisions that allows for the gradual adjustment of allocations that can result from crop rotation practices and quasi‐fixed capital constraints. Estimation is based on micro‐panel data from Danish farmers that include acreage, output, and variable input utilization at the crop level. Results indicate that there are substantial differences between the short‐run and long‐run land allocation behaviour of Danish farmers and that there are substantial differences in the time lags associated with different crops. To our knowledge, this is the first dynamic micro‐model of land allocation estimated on data from the temperate climate zone. Since similar farming conditions are found in northern Europe and parts of the United States and Canada, this result may be of wider interest.     

Exchange Rate Pass-through in a Small Open Economy: the Importance of the Distribution Sector

The degree of exchange rate pass-through to domestic goods prices has important implications for monetary policy in small open economies with floating exchange rates. Evidence indicates that pass-through is faster to import prices than to consumer prices. Price setting behaviour in the distribution sector is suggested as one important explanation. If distribution costs and trade margins are important price components of imported consumer goods, adjustment of import prices and consumer prices to exchange rate movements may differ. We present evidence on these issues for Norway by estimating a cointegrated VAR model for the pricing behaviour in the distribution sector, paying particular attention to exchange rate channels likely to operate through trade margins. Embedding this model into a large scale macroeconometric model of the Norwegian economy, which inter alia includes the pricing-to-market hypothesis and price-wage and wage-wage spirals between industries, we find exchange rate pass-through to be quite rapid to import prices and fairly slow to consumer prices. We show the importance of the pricing behaviour in the distribution sector in that trade margins act as cushions to exchange rate fluctuations, thereby delaying pass-through significantly to consumer prices. A forecasting exercise demonstrates that exchange rate pass-through to trade margins has not changed in the wake of the financial crises and the switch to inflation targeting. We also find significant inflationary effects of exchange rate changes even in the short run, an insight important for inflation targeting central banks.