How Should the Allocation of Resources Adjust to the Baby Bust?

We analyze the impact of a drop in fertility on the optimal allocation of resources in an overlapping generations economy where old workers care about leisure. We also characterize optimal dynamics and study the decentralization of the optimum by means of inter‐generational transfers and/or public debt. We conclude that the policy recommendations of postponing retirement is fragile and depend on preferences and technologies. Also, even when the optimal adjustment of public debt goes into the expected direction in the long run—i.e., public debt should decrease—this may not be the case during the transition.     

The Global System of Finance

A bstract .   In the last decades, revolutionary changes in financial markets, instruments, and institutions have stimulated empirical and theoretical investigations into the interaction of the financial and the "real" side of economic systems. While a considerable body of empirical investigations seems to provide evidence of positive correlations between stock market development and economic growth, there is no consensus in other social sciences as to whether there are two-way linkages, and if so, how to conceive a possible mechanism of interaction. Particularly, the hypergrowth and ubiquity of financial markets has triggered controversial debates on how to understand today's economic landscape. With the objective of clarifying the relationship between finance and economy, this article restructures the present debate through the lenses of Talcott Parsons's and Niklas Luhmann's theories of social systems. Basic system-theoretical ideas on social aspects of finance and economy as well as on uncertainty and risk hint at new insights into the global system of finance that might go far beyond explanatory models of causality.     

A performance analysis of participating life insurance contracts

Traditional life insurance products, in particular participating life insurance contracts, are often criticized. Their performance is often said to be poor compared to other investment alternatives. Interestingly, this perception appears to persist although very little research has been conducted into the performance of participating life insurance contracts. But are participating life insurance contracts actually bad for policyholders? We conduct a performance analysis based on contracts offered in the German market, in order to provide evidence to support decision making by policyholders.     

Asset Write‐downs: Evidence from 2001–2008

Accounting for asset write‐downs has received substantial media attention throughout the Global Financial Crisis and has been the subject of academic debate and numerous accounting regulations during the past three decades. This study provides evidence of the magnitude and frequency of quarterly asset write‐down activities for a sample of US firms between 2001 and 2008 and examines whether reported asset write‐downs mirror market and economic indicators during the sample period.     

Governance and resource interaction in networks. The role of venture capital in a biotech start-up

This paper examines venture capital (VC) governance in innovation processes. The VC literature often presents the relationship between a VC firm and a start-up as dyadic and analyzes it with agency theory. In contrast, this paper deploys the resource interaction framework presented in Håkansson and Waluszewski (2002) to governance and innovation in networks. The paper reports an in-depth case study of Pyrosequencing, a Swedish biotech firm financed with VC. The results from this study reveal how the relationship between a VC and a start-up company is embedded in a wider network and how the governance of the VC spreads in the surrounding network and influences a start-up's possibilities to develop organizational and technical resource interfaces to critical counterparts such as suppliers and customers.     

Estimation and pricing under long-memory stochastic volatility

We treat the problem of option pricing under a stochastic volatility model that exhibits long-range dependence. We model the price process as a Geometric Brownian Motion with volatility evolving as a fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. We assume that the model has long-memory, thus the memory parameter H in the volatility is greater than 0.5. Although the price process evolves in continuous time, the reality is that observations can only be collected in discrete time. Using historical stock price information we adapt an interacting particle stochastic filtering algorithm to estimate the stochastic volatility empirical distribution. In order to deal with the pricing problem we construct a multinomial recombining tree using sampled values of the volatility from the stochastic volatility empirical measure. Moreover, we describe how to estimate the parameters of our model, including the long-memory parameter of the fractional Brownian motion that drives the volatility process using an implied method. Finally, we compute option prices on the S&P 500 index and we compare our estimated prices with the market option prices.