ESG Investing in Emerging and Frontier Markets

The authors discuss the benefits of considering material environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors when investing in emerging and frontier markets. Companies that operate in these markets face a myriad of operating challenges, and management teams that respond to such challenges effectively can achieve superior financial performance over time. They are able to grow faster, achieve higher profitability, reduce their cost of capital, and manage exogenous risks better than their peers. For investment managers, integrating sustainability into the analysis process provides a differentiated lens to identify companies that possess strong competitive advantages that can drive value creation over time. At the same time, it can help investment managers avoid companies that have embedded risks in their business model or operations that may not be entirely visible to the market. Finally, given the early‐stage nature of many of these markets and the sometimes uneven understanding of sustainability issues at a company level, the authors argue that active ownership can be an important driver of alpha generation by fund managers. Engaging constructively with board members and management teams to improve a company's ESG profile can help drive operational improvements, strengthen the risk management function, and upgrade investors’ perception of the quality of the management team.     

Building Structure Design as an Integral Part of Architecture: A Teaching Model for Students of Architecture

This paper explores the place of structural design within undergraduate architectural education. The role and format of lecture-based structure courses within an education system, organized around the architectural design studio is discussed with its most prominent problems and proposed solutions. The fundamental concept of the current teaching model in the Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) is quite appropriate for the education of future architects. If we consider that the main occupation of an architect is to design, then, naturally, the design studio should be at the center of the curriculum. Since the act of designing cannot be realized without artistic skills and scientific and theoretical knowledge it is also suitable that the activities in design studios are backed up with relevant lecture courses. On the other hand, the importance of effective structural design knowledge for an architect is emphasized within the context of a country that encountered major earthquakes in the past.     

The Significance of Working Time Arrangements Accompanying the Introduction of Teamworking: Evidence from Employees

A study is reported where the introduction of teamworking was accompanied by negotiated changes in working time patterns, involving some employees transferring to a 5‐shift, 8‐hour pattern, others to a 5‐shift, 12‐hour pattern. Employee attitude surveys before and after the changes show those moving to 12‐hour working much more satisfied with both working time and other changes, compared with those remaining on 8‐hour shifts. The creation of extra non‐work days was seen as the major advantage of the longer shifts, which compensated for the harder work regime identified under teamworking and the greater rigidity of the 5‐shift system. The findings underline the potential significance of working hours for employee support for broader changes in working practices. Possible explanations of why the longer shift pattern met with considerable support at one research site, but failed to gain support at a similar site elsewhere, are also explored.     

Further evidence on the credit view: the case of Finland

The present paper provides further empirical evidence on the credit view (i.e., bank credit availability has a positive impact on macroeconomic activity) by investigating the case of Finland. The Finnish economy suffered a severe recession in the early 1990s that was marked by widespread banking crisis and extensive government intervention. Using monthly data for the 1980–1996 period, unrestricted and restricted vector autoregression (VAR) models with GDP, money supply, consumer prices, bank credit, and exports were estimated. It is found that, while money supply had the largest effect on economic output, bank credit exhibited a fairly strong effect on output that exceeded price effects for the most part. Exports had little impact on fluctuations in GDP but did help to explain industrial output changes over time. Based on these results, it is concluded that there is empirical support for the credit view in Finland. By implication, government intervention in Finland to restore safety and soundness during the banking crisis likely limited further damage to the macroeconomy associated with disruption of credit intermediation services.     

What is in a surname? The role of ethnicity in economic decision making

This article reports results from two experiments that investigate possible incidence of discrimination against people with foreign backgrounds in Sweden. In the first experiment, participants played the trust game and the dictator game with co-players of different ethnic affiliation. The family name of the players was exposed to their co-players. Results for the trust game showed no significant discrimination against co-players with foreign backgrounds. On the other hand, the results for the dictator game showed a statistically significant discriminatory behaviour by men against co-players with non-European backgrounds. The discriminatory behaviour was solely a male phenomenon. In the second experiment, the dictator game was replicated to check the stability of the results in the first experiment. The second experiment also examined whether people with foreign backgrounds discriminate against other people with foreign backgrounds; that is, the purpose was to discover whether discrimination is systematic. The observations in the second experiment underlined the results found in the first experiment: foreign co-players are discriminated against by Swedish players. However, we did not find that people with foreign backgrounds discriminated against other people with foreign backgrounds.     

Spatial patterns and economic contributions of mining and tourism in biodiversity hotspots: A case study in China

Mining activities and tourism are both growing fast in biodiversity intense areas globally. However, the dynamic and interactions between mining and tourism when they both occur in biodiversity hotspots, and how they together may impact the economy and environment in these biodiversity rich areas, remain unclear. This paper examined how the two industries interact in terms of their economic contributions and spatial patterns in a biodiversity hotspot, Yunnan, China. We used correlation analyses to measure the relationships between mining activities, tourism visits and local gross domestic productions. We also employed a distance-based technique to investigate the nature of any dependency between mining and tourism sites. Results showed that mining activities tend to be in relatively fluent areas while tourism tends to occur in less developed areas. Our results showed that the location of tourism and mining sites are likely to be close to one another but the two industries usually perform better economically when they are apart from each other. These findings can provide insights on how mining and tourism together may impact the economy and environment in biodiversity rich areas, and provide important information for managers and planners on balancing mining and tourism development in these areas.     

On Hayek's road to serfdom: 60 years later

Stimulated by recent work of Levy–Peart–Ferrant, Rosser and McPhail, I read The Road to Serfdom by projecting it onto four registers—security and freedom, impersonal forces and the market, rules and the rule of law, and language and education—and identify in each the need for judgement, hopefully balanced but inevitably arbitrary beyond an analytical threshold, a need exacerbated by incomplete and dispersed knowledge. My larger project is to understand the role of the expert, theoretician if one prefers, in a ‘free’ society.     

Countercyclical pricing: A consumer heterogeneity explanation

We show that a seasonal good could be priced countercyclically due to the heterogeneous seasonal shifts in consumer valuations. We provide empirical support for our explanation based on two product categories (canned soup and tuna) studied in the literature.