Enough is Enough: Cognitive Antecedents of Workaholism and Its Aftermath

Workaholism is commonly conceptualized as a compulsive inner drive to work excessively hard. This study investigates to what extent rigid personal beliefs—i.e., performance‐based self‐esteem (self‐esteem that is contingent upon good performance) and an enough continuation rule (continuing with work until one feels one has done enough)—contribute to exhaustion through workaholism. To examine these potential antecedents and consequences of workaholism, data of a two‐wave longitudinal survey study with a six‐month time interval was used (n = 191). Results of structural equation modeling provided support for our hypotheses. Taken together, our findings show that rigid personal beliefs at T1 predicted primarily working compulsively at T2, and working compulsively at T1 influenced exhaustion at T2. Moreover, reciprocal relationships were found between applying the enough continuation rule and working compulsively, and between working compulsively and exhaustion. These results suggest partial mediation from cognitive antecedents (personal beliefs) through workaholism to exhaustion. In practical terms, the results indicate that cognitive antecedents may provide a good starting point for interventions for preventing exhaustion and workaholism. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Is the EU ETS a Just Climate Policy?

The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is in dire straits. Prone to design problems and suffering from the effects of the economic crises the scheme is criticised for its poor achievements. In this paper we will analyse some of the features of this situation from an ethical perspective. The major part is dedicated to the complications within each phase of the EU ETS and to the recent developments it has undergone. We will briefly discuss the remedies suggested by prominent commentators. Furthermore, any policy tool to tackle climate change should be evaluated in view of the profound equity issues that are inherent to the climate problem. We will evaluate the EU ETS according to two justice-based criteria, related to effectiveness and the distribution of the duties involved in climate change, respectively. We will conclude that the EU ETS, in its current form, clearly lacks fairness on both criteria. However, the biggest problem is the unwillingness of EU leaders to mend, what could be, a commendable climate policy tool. To that extent, we argue, those leaders are acting unjustly.     

The Impact of Land-Use Change on Ecosystem Services,Biodiversity and Returns to Landowners: A Case Study in the State of Minnesota

Land-use change has a significant impact on the world’s ecosystems. Changes in the extent and composition of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems have large impacts on the provision of ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation and returns to landowners. While the change in private returns to landowners due to land-use change can often be measured, changes in the supply and value of ecosystem services and the provision of biodiversity conservation have been harder to quantify. In this paper we use a spatially explicit integrated modeling tool (InVEST) to quantify the changes in ecosystem services, habitat for biodiversity, and returns to landowners from land-use change in Minnesota from 1992 to 2001. We evaluate the impact of actual land-use change and a suite of alternative land-use change scenarios. We find a lack of concordance in the ranking of baseline and alternative land-use scenarios in terms of generation of private returns to landowners and net social benefits (private returns plus ecosystem service value). Returns to landowners are highest in a scenario with large-scale agricultural expansion. This scenario, however, generated the lowest net social benefits across all scenarios considered because of large losses in stored carbon and negative impacts on water quality. Further, this scenario resulted in the largest decline in habitat quality for general terrestrial biodiversity and forest songbirds. Our results illustrate the importance of taking ecosystem services into account in land-use and land-management decision-making and linking such decisions to incentives that accurately reflect social returns.     

Robust estimation of intraweek periodicity in volatility and jump detection

Opening, lunch and closing of financial markets induce a periodic component in the volatility of high-frequency returns. We show that price jumps cause a large bias in the classical periodicity estimators and propose robust alternatives. We find that accounting for periodicity greatly improves the accuracy of intraday jump detection methods. It increases the power to detect the relatively small jumps occurring at times for which volatility is periodically low and reduces the number of spurious jump detections at times of periodically high volatility. We use the series of detected jumps to estimate robustly the long memory parameter of the squared EUR/USD, GBP/USD and YEN/USD returns.     

Incomplete Markets and Security Prices: Do Asset-Pricing Puzzles Result from Aggregation Problems?

This paper investigates Euler equations involving security prices and household-level consumption data. It provides a useful complement to many existing studies of consumption-based asset pricing models that use a representative-agent framework, because the Euler equations under investigation hold even if markets are incomplete. It also provides a useful complement to simulation-based studies of market incompleteness. The empirical evidence indicates that the theory is rejected by the data along several dimensions. The results therefore indicate that some well-documented asset-pricing puzzles do not result from aggregation problems for the preferences under investigation.     

Diversification revisited

Many investment companies hold diversified asset portfolios and frequently try to mirror or outperform a market index for each asset class such as stocks and bonds. As Wibaut and Wilford (2009) show, often the same issuers appear in each of those indices and this may lead to undesirable results such as during a crisis period. Our research further explores the topic of diversification with a special focus on the financial crisis period of 2007 through 2009. Our results indicate that there is benefit in terms of correlations from holding bond and stock portfolios. Interestingly, these findings show the benefit is most pronounced during times of market stress.     

Adjustment costs and time-to-build in factor demand in the U.S. manufacturing industry

In order to explain cyclical behavior of factor demand, the static neoclassical model of the firm has been extended to include either adjustment costs (e.g. Lucas (1967)) or time-to-build considerations as in Kydland and Prescott (1982). This paper presents an intertemporal factor demand model which accounts for adjustment costs and gestation lags. The closed form solution of the model is a highly restricted vector ARMA-process that is estimated using quarterly data for the manufacturing industry in the U.S., 1960–1988. The main conclusion is that both sources of dynamics of factor demand are identifiable and found to be empirically of importance.     

Consumption-leisure nonseparabilities in asset market participants’ preferences

We use panel data to estimate nonlinear Euler equations for preferences that are nonseparable in consumption and leisure. This approach departs from existing panel data studies that investigate linearizations and/or separable preferences. Intuitively plausible estimates are obtained only when excluding nonassetholders from the sample, which indicates the importance of asset market participation. For market participants, estimated parameter values are intuitively appealing, but differ from existing estimates. They also differ from parameter values commonly used in computational experiments. These findings have implications for the extensive literature in macroeconomics and finance that studies models of intertemporal decision-making, and they confirm the importance of market incompleteness.     

Abstracts

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