Personal Taxation and Investment Incentives in a Small Open Economy

A simple portfolio model is used to investigate the effects of personal taxes on real investment incentives in a small open economy with large and small firms. When shares in large firms can be traded internationally and their rate of return is exogenously determined on international equity markets, a tax on the return on riskless bonds will induce a portfolio shift from bonds to shares in large firms. This shift reduces the impact of the bond tax on the required rate of return on shares in domestically owned small firms, provided that returns on shares in small and large firms are positively correlated. The total impact of the bond tax may even change from a negative to a counter-intuitive positive one if the “beta” between the returns on small and large firms is above unity. A personal tax on equity returns does in general have an ambiguous impact on the pre-tax rate of return requirement of domestically owned firms. An exogenous rate of return on large company shares is shown to enhance the possibility for the equity tax to reduce the required pre-tax rate of return in small domestic firms. A sufficient condition for a negative relationship is again that the “beta” between the returns in small and large firms is above unity. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The effect of police intelligence on group violence: Evidence from reassignments in Sweden

This paper isolates the causal effect of policing on group violence, using unique panel data on self-reported crime by soccer and ice hockey hooligans. The problem of reverse causality from violence to policing is solved by two drastic reallocations of the Stockholm Sport Intelligence and Tactical Unit to other activities following the 9/11 terrorist attack in September 2001 and the Tsunami catastrophe in December 2004. Difference-in-difference analysis reveals that Stockholm-related hooligan violence increased dramatically during these periods.     

Boundary conditions for the sustainable use of major fish stocks in the Baltic Sea

The history of the management of Baltic fishery resources suggests that both biological and non-biological factors influence management decisions and that both types of information are essential for management which promotes sustainability. There is a direct link between the exploitation level and the risks for fishing as an economic activity due to fluctuations in the resource. This paper analyses the sustainability of the present catch levels of major Baltic fish stocks. By examining the rate of fishing mortality and recruitment variability, the possibility of sustaining present catch levels can be investigated. Current catch levels of Baltic cod and some salmon stocks are not sustainable whereas sprat and herring catches are. High rates of fishing mortality of cod and salmon may endanger stocks if a drop in the recruitment causes an increase of the fishing mortality rates in order to sustain short-term catches. By analysing the trade off between exploitation level and risk of stock decline, managers can obtain a basis for quota negotiations.     

Extensions and intensions of management control—The inclusion of health

Interest in management control of intangibles has grown remarkably during the last decades and now includes managing employee health. Research in this field is so far in the early stages: few empirical studies have been undertaken and fewer studies take into consideration the implications of such systems. In this paper we wish to contribute to the field with a qualitative study of instances of management control of health in ten Swedish organizations.Many good intentions lie behind the idea of making health and ill-health a subject for management control and the expected results are very positive—lower sick-leave rates, reduction of costs and human suffering. Such intentions stand for an intension, i.e. the ideas, properties or state of affairs that are connoted by a word or symbol, in this case what can be connoted by the concept of management control of health, its conceptual position. An intension, however, is not given insofar as a word or concept may be associated to more than one. Thus we set out to interpret management control of health in terms of two conceptual positions, modernism and postmodernism, in order to bring forth two very different intensions of management control of health: one where the practice is seen as an investment with a purpose to visualize ill-health and increase efficiency by putting in place measures to increase employee health; the other where the practice is seen as a means to make the individual accountable in order to be able to intensify control and colonize leisure.     

Home versus School Learning: A New Approach to Estimating the Effect of Class Size on Achievement

The effects of class size on scholastic achievement are estimated using a seasonal feature of the school system. The fact that schools are in session during the school year and out of session during the summer makes it possible to control for non‐school influences on both the level of and changes in achievement. Using Swedish data, smaller classes are found to generate higher test scores and this effect is larger for immigrants. The results are also compared with those from applying the same data to the widely used value‐added model.     

Socio-economic evaluation of mental health as a basis for financing health care in Sweden

The objective of this paper is to examine hypotheses about the relationships between socio-economic factors, risk factors in working life, and the occurrence of mental illness, together with the degree of quality of life and consumption of health care, costs for health care, and costs for social insurance. This is a prospective and longitudinal study of 1,347 individuals of an active working age, 18–64 years, who have been on sick leave for more than 30 days. The group is characterized by the prevalence of risk factors in their work environment and welfare losses, such as multiple health problems, poor quality of life, inability to work, and dependency on society's support from health care and social insurance. The costs for health care were just over 2.8 million SEK, or 30 percent higher for those with psychological distress as compared to the group without. The payments from social insurance also increased by approximately 15 percent. The relatively greater weighting of health care costs and sickness cash benefits were motivating factors to study whether this group had an optimal amount and quality of health care, or if the resources available for health care should be distributed in another way that better satisfies the needs of the group.     

Analysis of the mechanism of injury in non-fatal vehicle-to-pedestrian and vehicle-to-bicyclist frontal crashes in Sweden

The aim of this paper is to analyse and compare injuries and injury sources in pedestrian and bicyclist non-fatal real-life frontal passengercar crashes, considering in what way pedestrian injury mitigation systems also might be adequate for bicyclists. Data from 203 non-fatal vehicle-to-pedestrian and vehicle-to-bicyclist crashes from 1997 through 2006 in a city in northern Sweden were analysed by use of the hospitals injury data base in addition to interviews with the injured. In vehicle-to-pedestrian crashes (n = 103) head and neck injuries were in general due to hitting the windscreen frame, while in vehicle-to-bicycle crashes (n = 100) head and neck injuries were typically sustained by ground impact. Abdominal, pelvic and thoracic injuries in pedestrians and thoracic injuries in bicyclists were in general caused by impacting the bonnet. In vehicle-to-pedestrian crashes, energy reducing airbags at critical impact points with low yielding ability on the car, as the bonnet and the windscreen frame, might reduce injuries. As vehicle-to-bicyclist crashes occurred mostly in good lighting conditions and visibility and the ground impact causing almost four times as many injuries as an impact to the different regions of the car, crash avoidance systems as well as separating bicyclists from motor traffic, may contribute to mitigate these injuries.     

Fundamentals and Technical Trading: Behavior of Exchange Rates in the CEECs

We incorporate technical trading into the monetary approach to exchange rates, and estimate the model for four Central and Eastern European countries that introduced the policy of free floating in the late 1990s; the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We find that past exchange rates contribute significantly to the determination of the spot exchange rate. We also find a feedback behavior driving the exchange rate to its fundamental value although the mean reversion parameter is small. Overall, this means that these currency markets have developed a complex structure of different trader types, which already is documented for developed countries.     

The competitive enforcement of property rights in medieval Japan: The role of temples and monasteries

Medieval Japanese governments only haphazardly enforced claims to scarce resources. Necessarily, this presented landholders with a void. To obtain the enforcement they needed, many turned to institutions affiliated with the fractious Buddhist faith instead. Temples and monasteries enjoyed an exemption from tax on their lands and controlled an array of financial and human resources with which they could adjudicate and enforce claims to scarce resources. To obtain access to that exemption and those resources, landholders “commended” their rights in land to them, and paid them a share of the harvest. In exchange, the temples and monasteries exempted them from tax, adjudicated disputes internal to the estate and protected their estates against external threats. Effectively, the temples and monasteries competed in a market for basic governmental services.By helping to secure basic claims to property, the temples and monasteries helped to promote investment and growth; by competing against the government itself, they helped to forestall the crippling effect of a predatory monopolistic state.