Monthly wood supply behavior of associated forest owners in Austria—Insights from the analysis of a micro-econometric panel

This paper examines the wood supply from non-industrial private forest owners in Austria. The main novelty of this study is threefold. First, the underlying dataset is based on monthly wood supply. This enables an analysis of seasonal supply behavior, which is found to be different in relation to the size of the forestland. Second, it represents an original study with a dataset from a Central European country whose forest owners are apparently much more fragmented than their Scandinavian or North American counterparts. And third, the study introduces a windfall variable that effectively corrects for a market-relevant storm event. With respect to methodology, a random effects Tobit model is applied. Additionally, a Chamberlain-like term is included in the regression to deal with a possible bias generated through the correlation of regressors and unobserved heterogeneity.     

MUNICIPAL CONTRACTING OUT: GOVERNANCE CHOICES,MISALIGNMENT AND PERFORMANCE IN SWEDISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT

In this paper we apply a Transaction Cost Theory framework to analyse the use and effects of contracting out in Swedish local government. During the last decade Swedish local authorities, like in many other countries, have, to a larger extent, started to contract external subcontractors to fulfil their responsibilities towards its citizens. It is not only in the traditional subcontracting sectors such as housing, infrastructure, and technical services that this trend is evident, but also in policy areas like education, social care, and elderly care. In fact, very little is known about the overall effects of, and the mechanisms underlying, governance choices. The overall results corroborate transaction cost reasoning. Supplier competition and specificity have anticipated effects on municipal de‐integration. Too little, but not too much, use of contracting out, in relation to theoretical predictions, worsens performance. The latter aspect is not fully in accordance with TCE‐propositions.     

Herstellung von Wettbewerb durch Übertragung der Alterungsrückstellung in der Privaten Krankenversicherung

The system of individual prospective aging reserve enables the insured persons irrespectively of their individual risk to change their Private Health Insurance. Besides the presentation of an implementation concept it is shown that there is no inducement to miscalculate the extent of the individual prospective aging reserve on purpose.     

Survey on Competing in Network Industries: Firm Strategies, Market Outcomes, and Policy Implications

We review the recent literature on market structure, firm strategies and public policy in network industries. In particular, we focus on the latest applied work, including case studies and empirical work as well as refinements of the established theoretical results. We group each set of results along two dimensions: Static (within-generation) and dynamic (across-generations).     

Determinants of market beta: the impacts of firm-specific accounting figures and market conditions

This article examines and extends research on the relation between the capital asset pricing model market beta, accounting risk measures and macroeconomic risk factors. We employ a beta decomposition approach that nests competing models with different business risk proxies and allows to frame cross-model comparison. Because model tests require estimated independent variables resulting in measurement error, we empirically estimate three comparable model specifications with instrumental variable estimators and for the first time provide thorough instrument diagnostics in this setting. Correcting for the heretofore neglected weak instruments problem we find that growth risk (i.e., the risk of firm sales variations that are inconsistent with the market wide trends), is the business risk that explains cross-sectional variations in market beta best.     

Social welfare effects of tax-benefit reform under endogenous participation and unemployment: an ordinal approach

This paper analyzes the social welfare effects of tax-benefit reforms in a framework integrating endogenous labor supply and unemployment. We adopt an ordinal approach to social welfare comparisons by searching for “socially desirable” reforms that would improve social welfare for an entire class of social welfare functions. In the model, there is a discrete distribution of individuals’ productivities and individuals are heterogeneous with respect to leisure preferences (or disability of work). Labor supply decisions are limited to the participation decision. Unemployment is modeled in a search and matching framework with individual wage bargaining. For the social welfare analysis, the model is calibrated for Switzerland. Starting from a situation with an unemployment benefit scheme, the introduction of in-work benefits is shown to be a “socially desirable” reform: it would be unanimously preferred to the current situation according to all social welfare functions based on the criteria of Pareto, anonymity, and the principle of transfers. This result holds for two different types of preference heterogeneity (leisure preferences or disability of work) and also for the case where job search effort cannot be monitored.