Children's Recreational Physical Activity

This study explored children's participation in recreational (physical) activities and the extent to which this participation was influenced by individual and household socio-demographics and characteristics of the social and physical environment. Travel and activity diaries were used to collect data on out-of-home recreational activities for a random sample of 4,293 children in primary schools in the Netherlands. These data were investigated in relation to measures describing the social and physical living environment. Specifically, a Bayesian belief network was proposed because it derives and represents simultaneously all direct and indirect relationships between the selected variables. Results indicated that participation in various types of recreational activities was directly related to the socio-economic status of the household, the perceived safety of the neighborhood, the size of agricultural area in the neighborhood, travel distance, and day of the week. Planners and designers are recommended to find a good land use mix, and specifically make sure that they focus their attention on safety issues, as these factors stimulate children's participation in recreational physical activities.     

Performance Payments for Groups: The Case of Carnivore Conservation in Northern Sweden

This paper presents a first empirical assessment of carnivore conservation under a performance payment scheme. In Sweden, reindeer herder villages are paid based on the number of lynx (lynx lynx) and wolverine (gulo gulo) offspring certified on their pastures. The villages decide on the internal payment distribution. It is generally assumed that benefit distribution rules are exogenous. We investigate them as an endogenous decision. The data reveals that villages’ group size has a direct negative effect on conservation outcomes and an indirect positive effect which impacts conservation outcomes through the benefit distribution rule. This result revises the collective action hypothesis on purely negative effects of group size.     

Die Finanzierung der Hochschulbildung in Deutschland

Hochschulbildung wird in der Regel aus ?ffentlichen und privaten Quellen finanziert. Die Studienf?rderung umfasst dabei h?ufig mehr Leistungsarten, als auf den ersten Blick zu erkennen ist. Wie ist die deutsche Finanzierung der Hochschulbildung im internationalen Vergleich zu bewerten? Inwieweit sollte sie verbessert werden?     

Corporate Ethics in Norwegian Business and Industry

How can a confederation of business and industry influence companies and make them more aware of ethical issues? This article examines the work of Norwegian Business and Industry (NHO), and the results it has achieved. The author is Assistant Director of NHO, P.b. 5250, Majorstua, 0303 Oslo, and she has been responsible for its business ethics programme for the past three years. This article comes to us through the agency of our Associate Editor for Norway, Dr Heidi von Weltzien Høivik, of the Norwegian School of Management, who has recently been instrumental in founding a Norwegian Centre for Business Ethics.     

Regulation and pricing of pharmaceuticals: Reference pricing or price cap regulation?

We study the relationship between regulatory regimes and pharmaceutical firms’ pricing strategies using a unique policy experiment in Norway, which in 2003 introduced a reference price (RP) system called “index pricing” for a sub-sample of off-patent pharmaceuticals, replacing the existing price cap (PC) regulation. We estimate the effect of the reform using a product level panel dataset, covering the drugs exposed to RP and a large number of drugs still under PC regulation in the time before and after the policy change. Our results show that RP significantly reduces both brand-name and generic prices within the reference group, with the effect being stronger for brand-names. We also identify a negative cross-price effect on therapeutic substitutes not included in the RP system. In terms of policy implications, the results suggest that RP is more effective than PC regulation in lowering drug prices, while the cross-price effect raises a concern about patent protection.     

Inequality aversion and the house money effect

In this paper, we analyse if individual inequality aversion measured with simple experimental games depends on whether the monetary endowment in these games is either a windfall gain (“house money”) or a reward for a certain effort-related performance. We then examine whether the way of preference elicitation affects the explanatory power of inequality aversion in social dilemma situations. Our results indicate that individual inequality aversion measured by the model of Fehr and Schmidt (Quarterly Journal of Economics 114(3):817–868, 1999) is not generally robust to the way endowments emerge. The inequality aversion model has only low predictive power for individual behaviour. It performs best when the endowment is house money and relatively small.     

Do public banks have a competitive advantage?

Public banks are often blamed to possess an unfair competitive advantage in the form of lower funding costs due to a state guarantee on their deposits. However, public and private banks tend to differ not only in their funding costs, but also in the way they deal with borrowers in financial distress. The model presented in this paper shows that if banks differ in these two characteristics, a separation of borrowers may result, with public banks lending to risky firms and private banks lending to safe firms. This separation can explain differences in the lending behavior and performance of public and private banks as observed in the market. Interestingly, the separation may persist even when funding costs are equal, implying that an abolition of state guarantees will not necessarily lead to identical performance of the two types of banks.