Born globals – presence,performance and prospects

The concept born global firms has gained a spectacular increase in interest from both academic and political circles. Rigorous quantitative treatment of born global firms are however rare in the international business/economics literature. Implementing unique data on all Swedish start-ups during 1998–2008 in the manufacturing sector, we conclude that born global firms are a very rare event, that their prevalence seems invariant to time, and that they perform similar to other matched “twin” firms with regard to profitability and productivity but report a considerably higher growth in employment and sales. These results are robust to a wider definition of born global firms and to the timing of performance measurements.     

Sex discrimination in advertising — A summary of the situation in Sweden

This report treats the way in which Sweden looks upon the phenomenon of sex discrimination, and how it has been handled by theConsumer Ombudsman and theMarket Court. The possibilities of legal intervention in such discrimination seem small at present, but may be increased as a result of current governmental and parliamentary enquiries. A Working Party appointed by the Consumer Ombudsman has tried to delineate the concept of sex discrimination in advertising, and the Working Party's classification of such discrimination into several distinct categories is presented in the paper, together with a series of examples of advertising regarded as discriminatory by this Party.     

Hedonic pricing and the spatial structure of housing data – an application to Berlin

Housing prices are largely determined by physical location. By applying the outsample prediction accuracy of rental prices as evaluation criteria, we examine whether the choice of the hedonic model additionally depends on the spatial structure of housing data, i.e. accounting for locational effects by either district fixed effects or spatial econometric modelling. Our results show that a generalised spatio-temporal model outperforms a district fixed effects model only if the spatial density – the weighted mean distance to nearest neighbours – is relatively small. Moreover, we use the required density thresholds to deduce a pseudo indifference curve, thereby showing that the ratio of the weighted spatial distance-to-the mean district diameter increases with the mean sample size per district. This emphasises the role of data structure and district choices for model selection. Differences in data can thereby serve as an explanation for contradictory findings in literature, whether spatial econometric methods or simple district fixed effects are used.     

Term structure modelling of defaultable bonds

In this paper we present a model of the development of the term structure of defaultable interest rates that is based on a multiple-defaults model. Instead of modelling a cash payoff in default we assume that defaulted debt is restructured and continues to be traded.The term structure of defaultable bond prices is represented in terms of defaultable forward rates similar to the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) (Heath et al., 1992) approach, and conditions are given under which the dynamics of these rates are arbitrage-free. These conditions are a drift restriction that is closely related to the HJM drift restriction for risk-free bonds, and the restriction that the defaultable short rate must always be not below the risk-free short rate. In its most general version the model is set in a marked point process framework, to allow for jumps in the defaultable rates at times of default.Financial Assistance by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Sonderforschungsbereich 303, at the University of Bonn and the DAAD is gratefully acknowledged.I thank Pierre Mella-Barral, David Lando and David Webb for helpful conversations, and the participants of the FMG Conference on Defaultable Bonds (March 1997) in London and the QMF 97 conference in Cairns for helpful comments. All errors are of course my own.     

Will the (German) NAIRU Please Stand Up?

Abstract. This paper deals with a critical assessment of the ‘non‐accelerating inflation rate of unemployment’ (NAIRU) for Germany. There are quite a few obstacles to perceiving the NAIRU as an easy‐to‐use analytical instrument: the possibility of a non‐vertical Phillips curve, the occurrence of shocks and hysteresis effects, and the (mis‐)measurement of important variables, cointegration issues and a time variability of the NAIRU. A new attempt is made to estimate a NAIRU for Germany using direct measures of inflationary expectations. However, by any method, the NAIRU is very hard to determine and subject to considerable arbitrariness.     

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.     

Factual and modal notions in social research

The article discusses a distinction between factual and modal notions, and corresponding generalizations, in social research. The discussion starts from the suggestion, made by Charles Ragin, that theoretical statements in social research most often can be formulated as statements about sets of cases and relations between such sets. In contrast to this view, it is argued that theoretical statements in social research often require modal notions referring to possibilities and probabilities which cannot be formulated as statements about sets of cases. In order to show this, the article reformulates Ragin’s set-theoretic approach in the conceptual framework of statistical variables. It is shown that this can be done for both crisp and fuzzy set versions of Ragin’s approach. The article then goes on to argue that social research is often interested in modal generalizations (probabilistic and deterministic rules) which require a fundamentally different conceptual framework. The article shows how such a framework can be defined, and finally indicates its usage for causal interpretations.     

Socialising employees’ trust in the organisation: an exploration of apprentices’ socialisation in two highly trusted companies

We present here our investigation into how corporate employers deliberately seek to foster and build employees’ trust in the organisation through socialisation tactics. Interestingly enough, such deliberate development of employees’ trust in the organisation has hitherto rarely been addressed in academic research. Using qualitative case study research methods, we have closely observed the trust socialisation process experienced by entrant employees, namely apprentices in two separate and highly trusted German companies. Our findings are consistent with former trust socialisation research in that they indicate the importance of high levels of perceived organisational support and of a convincing communication of organisational values and principles. However, our research emphasises further aspects of trust socialisation, such as psychological empowerment, the efficacy of formal organisational rules and especially sensegiving activities.