Why Give up Money for the Baltic Sea? – Motives for People's Willingness (or Reluctance) to Pay

A contingent valuation survey about a reduction of the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea provided data about respondents' motives for their answers to the willingness to pay question. A categorization of the motives allowed an identification of protesters against the valuation scenario. The categorization also illustrated that a teleological ethical perspective is not shared by all respondents and that some respondents perceive human indirect use of ecosystems.     

Wage Formation and Bargaining Power during the Great Depression*

We present an econometric analysis of wage behaviour in Norway during the interwar years. The analysis is based on a panel of manufacturing industry data using GMM estimation methods. Our empirical analysis shows that wage formation in the interwar period can be understood with the help of modern bargaining theory and well‐established wage equations. We estimate a long‐run wage curve that has all the standard features of being homogeneous in prices, proportional to productivity, and with a negative unemployment elasticity. We also present some new Monte Carlo evidence on the properties of the estimators used.     

Anchoring and cognitive ability

We find that the actual willingness to pay for various consumer goods can be manipulated by an uninformative anchor, replicating Ariely et al. (2003). We furthermore demonstrate that the anchoring effect decreases but does not vanish with higher cognitive ability.     

Is There a Hold‐up Problem?

We report on a hold‐up experiment in which unilateral investment is followed by bilateral bargaining according to Nash’s demand game. Without communication, investment is low and coordination is poor. Unilateral communication facilitates coordination, but not perfectly. Successful coordination predominantly entails “fair” outcomes. Perhaps surprisingly, sellers (investors) do at least as well under buyer communication as under seller communication.     

Industrial Policy and Firm Heterogeneity

Our concern in this paper is with firm-specific industrial policy. When R&D subsidies or taxes are differentiated among firms, the question arises as to which firms in an industry should receive such support. We analyze a situation where firms differ in their R&D technologies in two distinct ways: in the costs of performing R&D activities and in the output obtained from such activities. We find that the optimal firm-specific industrial policy is affected differently by the two sources of firm heterogeneity. Furthermore, a change in a firm's R&D productivity has an ambiguous effect on the optimal policy towards the firm.
JEL classification: O 31; L 52; F 13     

Can limits-to-arbitrage from bounded storage improve commodity term-structure modeling?

This paper develops and estimates a two-factor competitive storage model for the purpose of pricing commodity futures. The empirical relevance of the model is evaluated for US natural gas and crude oil futures by comparing the pricing performance to reduced form models. Results suggest jump models, both reduced form and economic, improve modeling due to incorporating pricing discontinuities. Furthermore, the economic model precludes carry arbitrage, which appears relevant for pricing natural gas futures. For crude oil, the reduced form models produce superior pricing under nonstationary market conditions, and the economic model produces superior long-dated futures pricing under stationarity.     

Natural Resources Damage from Chernobyl: Further Results

This note reports the extent of somecomponents of natural resources damage from theChernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, primarily lossesin producer surplus in the reindeer industry inLapland, Sweden. The damage suffered by Swedish moosehunters has been estimated earlier. The result is alower boundary of natural resources damage amountingto SEK 736 million, or about SEK 112 per adultSwede.     

The Effects of Culture and Structure on Strategic Flexibility during Business Model Innovation

This study uses responses from 107 multinational firms to reveal CEO perceptions of the drivers of strategic flexibility during business model innovation. While the positive effect of creative culture is confirmed, partner reliance reduces strategic flexibility during business model innovation. Further, structural change is disaggregated into efforts that either focus managerial attention on core activities or reconfigure existing activities. CEOs perceive that structural flexibility requires structural simplification while retaining control of non‐core functions. We find that the relative magnitude of business model innovation effort moderates the effect of reconfiguration on strategic flexibility. The implications for theories of organizational design and dynamic capabilities are discussed.     

Maximum likelihood estimation of partially observed diffusion models

This paper develops a maximum likelihood (ML) method to estimate partially observed diffusion models based on data sampled at discrete times. The method combines two techniques recently proposed in the literature in two separate steps. In the first step, the closed form approach of Aït-Sahalia (2008) is used to obtain a highly accurate approximation to the joint transition probability density of the latent and the observed states. In the second step, the efficient importance sampling technique of Richard and Zhang (2007) is used to integrate out the latent states, thereby yielding the likelihood function. Using both simulated and real data, we show that the proposed ML method works better than alternative methods. The new method does not require the underlying diffusion to have an affine structure and does not involve infill simulations. Therefore, the method has a wide range of applicability and its computational cost is moderate.     

Commissioning Design: Evidence from the Furniture Industry

Design is defined as a strategic competency that can be utilized in order to create new objects, artifacts (i.e. products), systems and services, starting with some idea about customer needs. Since the products and services from the design process are of strategic importance to the company, design knowledge itself can become a strategic asset. Although one might expect design to be an internal resource from the point of view of transaction costs, most companies only possess some design competencies and acquire creative design skills from design consultants. The important issue is how they delineate what is strategic and what is not strategic, but skills. The article is based on two case studies from the furniture industry in which the companies have found different solutions. In the paper we therefore explain the differences in terms of the resource-based view on strategy. This indicates different conceptions of design resources, operating in different, but comparable contexts.