THE CHANGING VOLATILITY OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN ECONOMY

During the last decade economic literature explored the presence of and reasons for what became known as “the great moderation” in the US and other G7 countries. “The great moderation” describes the decrease in economic volatility experienced in many of the G7 countries. This paper finds that in South Africa volatility is also not constant (it even finds that there are autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic effects present) and that volatility also decreased, particularly since 1994. Following the literature, the paper explores several reasons for this decrease and finds that smaller shocks, better monetary policy and improvements in the financial sector that place less liquidity constraints on individuals and allow them to manage their debt better are some of the main reasons for the reduction in the volatility of the South African economy. The literature on the G7 also suggests that better inventory management contributed to the lower volatility. However, this seems not to be true for South Africa.     

Principles for sustainability rating of investment funds

During the last decade, the idea of sustainable investments hit the market. Investors both private and institutional started to supplement financial considerations with social and ecological ones. Meanwhile the supply of mutual funds in the ‘green’ investment sector increased enormously. Currently in Europe about 300 mutual funds are available that are managed according to sustainability and social responsibility. Potential investors face the difficulty of keeping track of the various funds and choosing among them based on a reliable comparative assessment. This paper outlines the basic principles and methods on which such a comparative sustainability rating is based. The method was designed to be analogous to rating of the funds financially. The sustainability rating is based on assessment of the research processes in the fund management as well as investigation of the fund portfolio in terms of composition and sustainability performance. It should support investors in their investment choices by offering them a third party view. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Gender differences in time preferences

This paper reports the results from a large online experiment in which we examine gender differences in time preferences. Subjects choose in different situations between receiving an immediate payment and receiving a different sum later. We find that more men than women are impatient and choose to receive the immediate payment, at least if the implicit interest rate of the “late” option is neither too high nor too low.     

PRODUCTIVITY AND THE LABOR MARKET: COMOVEMENT OVER THE BUSINESS CYCLE*

The productivity‐driven Mortensen–Pissarides model predicts that labor productivity is strongly correlated with labor market variables whereas these correlations were argued to be much weaker in the data, especially since the 1980s. We first document that the size of these discrepancies between the data and the model becomes substantially smaller if employment data from the Current Population Survey is used in measuring productivity instead of the commonly used employment data from the Current Employment Statistics. Second, we show that incorporating time to build and a stochastic value of home production helps reconcile the quantitative performance of the model with the data.     

KNOWLEDGE CREATION AS A SQUARE DANCE ON THE HILBERT CUBE*

This article presents a micromodel of knowledge creation through the interactions among a group of people. The model features myopic agents in a pure externality model of interaction. Surprisingly, for a large set of initial conditions we find that the equilibrium process of knowledge creation converges to the most productive state, where the population splits into smaller groups of optimal size; close interaction takes place within each group only. This optimal size is larger as heterogeneity of knowledge is more important in the knowledge production process. Equilibrium paths are found analytically; they are a discontinuous function of initial heterogeneity.     

Efficient risk sharing,non-marketable labor income and fixed-wage contracts

This paper seeks to explain fixed-wage labor contracts. The traditional rationale that fixed wages represent an implicit sale of ‘wage insurance’ by risk-neutral firms to risk-averse workers is rejected as being incompatible with the fact that firms are owned by risk-averse investors. Instead, it is shown that fixed-wage contracts might arise from the non-marketability of labor income. When human capital is not marketable, it becomes optimal to shift all the risk in production onto the firm, since trading in equity markets enables efficient allocation of the uncertainty. The fixed-wage contract shifts the risk to equity owners and in fact replicates the first-best equilibrium that would emerge if individuals were paid their realized marginal product and allowed to trade shares in human capital.     

Highlighting the Darker Side of Liberal Internationalism for a Counter-Colonizing Consumerism

By embracing counter-colonialism at large, this article challenges the subordination and eventual complicity of management and marketing studies with the dark(er) side of liberal internationalism pasts. We show how the official history of consumerism in marketing overlooks important events related to the US liberal internationalism project during and before the Cold War period, which are closely associated by other areas of knowledge in the United States with the hegemonic plans of the United States in becoming the sole global power in the post-World War II, at the expense of the Third World movement that aimed to bring independence to the Global South.