Accounting for the wealth of Denmark: a case study of Smithian growth using the emergence of modern accounting in Danish dairying

Abstract

The idea of “Smithian growth” rests on a “natural” development out of agriculture through capital accumulation, and the division of labour. We confront these concepts with an “historical experiment” and the case of Danish agriculture in the nineteenth century. Specifically, we look at how accounting was used to promote specialization, ultimately in butter production, leading to the massive increases in productivity that Smith predicted. We also observe the emergence of Smithian “philosophers”. This ultimately led to the capital-intensive industrialization of Danish agriculture through butter factories, and general development. We argue that this establishes the historical relevance of Smith’s theories.     

Die Ver?nderung des abschlusspolitischen Potenzials durch das BilMoG im Lichte der?Entscheidungsnützlichkeit der Rechnungslegung

Mit dem Bilanzrechtsmodernisierungsgesetz wollte der Gesetzgeber unter anderem eine im Verh?ltnis zu den IFRS gleichwertige, d. h. ebenso entscheidungsnützliche, aber einfachere und kostengünstigere Alternative bieten. Um dieses Ziel zu erreichen, wurden verschiedene Wahlrechte gestrichen, Bilanzierungsverbote aufgehoben und Bilanzierungsmethoden ver?ndert. Aus Sicht der Abschlusspolitik wurden damit einerseits explizite Wahlrechte verringert und andererseits implizite Wahlrechte geschaffen. Zudem bergen auch die übergangsvorschriften abschlusspolitisches Potenzial. Nach einer Einordnung der Abschlusspolitik und der Herausarbeitung der konkreten Potenziale werden die Konsequenzen in Bezug auf die Entscheidungsnützlichkeit diskutiert und die m?glichen Auswirkungen der ge?nderten Rechnungslegungsnormen am Beispiel der Bilanzierung von Pensionsverpflichtungen deutscher IFRS-Anwender empirisch belegt.     

The Impact of Eco-regions in Austria on Sustainable Rural Livelihoods

This paper provides a closer look into the concept of eco-regions in Austria. The idea behind the eco-region is to merge organic farming and rural development into a territorial strategy. The actors proposing this are farmers as well as various stakeholders in regional development. A survey of current manifestations of eco-regions in Austria provides an overview and a base for a preliminary classification. It also indicates the eco-region concept as a potential answer to individual problem situations. The ‘Eco-region National Park Hohe Tauern’ serves as a specific case to assess the impact of this concept using the sustainable rural livelihood (SRL) framework. The case study proves that the concept of eco-regions delivers a range of improvements in the livelihood of small organic farms in less favoured regions. Moreover it supports the forging of new alliances, which can extend the principles of sustainability inherent to organic farming to other actors and sectors in the region. Thus it provides the framework for a territorial application of the principles of organic farming. But the case study also reveals potential dangers, especially from powerful market partners who use the concept for their purposes, dominating further development and creating new dependencies. Finally some general conclusions on the preconditions necessary to establish eco-regions are presented.     

Patent pools,vertical integration,and downstream competition

Patent pools are commonly used to license technologies to manufacturers. Whereas previous studies focused on manufacturers active in independent markets, we analyze pools licensing to competing manufacturers, allowing for multiple licensors and nonlinear tariffs. We find that the impact of pools on welfare depends on the industry structure: whereas they are procompetitive when no manufacturer is integrated with a licensor, the presence of vertically integrated manufacturers triggers a novel trade‐off between horizontal and vertical price coordination. Specifically, pools are anticompetitive if the share of integrated firms is large, procompetitive otherwise. We then formulate information‐free policies to screen anticompetitive pools.     

Risk management,corporate governance,and bank performance in the financial crisis

The recent financial crisis has raised several questions with respect to the corporate governance of financial institutions. This paper investigates whether risk management-related corporate governance mechanisms, such as for example the presence of a chief risk officer (CRO) in a bank’s executive board and whether the CRO reports to the CEO or directly to the board of directors, are associated with a better bank performance during the financial crisis of 2007/2008. We measure bank performance by buy-and-hold returns and ROE and we control for standard corporate governance variables such as CEO ownership, board size, and board independence. Most importantly, our results indicate that banks, in which the CRO directly reports to the board of directors and not to the CEO (or other corporate entities), exhibit significantly higher (i.e., less negative) stock returns and ROE during the crisis. In contrast, standard corporate governance variables are mostly insignificantly or even negatively related to the banks’ performance during the crisis.     

Forecasting the past: the case of US interest rate forecasts

This study evaluates 10-year US government bond yield forecasts and three-month US Treasury bill rate forecasts for the period between October 1989 and December 2004. In total, 136 forecast time series with approximately 13,800 forecast data were scrutinized, making this the most extensive analysis of interest rate forecasts to date. Not one of the forecast time series proved to be unbiased. In the majority of cases, information from the past was not efficiently integrated into the forecasts. The sign accuracy is significantly better than random walk forecasts in only a very few of the forecast time series. The modified Diebold–Mariano test for forecast encompassing reveals that the information content of most of the forecast time series is lower than that of the naïve forecasts, the simple ARIMA models, the implicit forward rates, or average interest rate expectations. The forecasting process is dominated by the present and past market situation.     

Future images of meat consumption in 2030

The issue of meat consumption has been a subject of interest that has been looked at from environmental, animal and human perspectives. This paper contributes to the discussion by clarifying the diversity of views with regard to the future of meat consumption. Two round Delphi expert interviews and a consumer survey were conducted in order to collect information. Five coherent future images were constructed: Traditional Approach, Business as Usual, Humans First, Wellness and Vegetarian Society. The discussion part of the paper presents possible ways of influencing meat consumption according to the holders of these different images of the future.     

On the competition enhancing effects of exclusive dealing contracts

Antitrust scholars have argued that exclusive contracts have anticompetitive, or at best neutral effects, if no efficiencies are generated. In contrast, this paper shows that exclusive contracts can have procompetitive effects, provided buyers are imperfect downstream competitors and contract breach is feasible. In that case, an efficient entrant is not necessarily foreclosed through exclusive contracts but induces buyers to breach. Because breaching buyers have to pay expectation damages to the incumbent, the downstream profits they obtain when breaching must be large enough. Therefore, the entrant needs to set a lower wholesale price than absent exclusive contracts, leading to lower final consumer prices and higher welfare.     

Home-field advantage or a matter of ambiguity aversion? Local bias among German individual investors

This paper investigates whether familiarity induced by ambiguity aversion can help explaining the local bias phenomenon among individual investors. Using geographic closeness as a proxy for investor familiarity, we find that investors pull out of (unfamiliar) remote stocks and pour into (familiar) local stocks during times of increased market uncertainty. Moreover, the magnitude of this ‘flight to familiarity’ increases in the spread of an investor's ambiguity (about expected returns) between local and remote stocks. Our results prove robust to a number of alternative explanations of local bias. Specifically, we rule out a ‘home-field advantage’, where investors are able to translate information advantages about nearby companies into excess returns on their local stockholdings. We conclude that individual investors’ local bias is induced by ambiguity aversion in the portfolio selection process rather than a trading strategy based on superior information about local companies.