How Productive Is Workplace Health and Safety?

In this paper, we investigate the causal impact of workplace health and safety practices on firm performance, using Danish longitudinal matched employer–employee data merged with unique cross‐sectional representative firm survey data on work environment conditions. We estimate standard production functions, augmented with workplace environment indicators, addressing both time‐invariant and time‐varying potentially relevant unobservables in the production process. We find positive and large productivity effects of improved physical dimensions of the health and safety environment, specifically, “internal climate” and “monotonous repetitive work”.     

The impact of culture and ecology on cooperation in a common-pool resource experiment

Context affects decision-making in many ways. In this paper we explore differences in cooperation behaviour between communal farmers in Namibia and South Africa, who share the same ethnic origin but have had different historical and ecological constraints. We report on a series of field experiments based on a common-pool resource model. Our experimental design is framed according to the grazing situation in semi-arid rangelands. Dependent on the behaviour in previous rounds, participants are facing different states of resource availability with varying need to cooperate, coordinate and to be patient. While only 4% of the grazing areas in South Africa remain in good quality, Namibians achieve a level of 42%. We analyse the different experimental states and find that Namibians behave in all states more cooperatively. We argue that the large difference between the two regions is due to a combination of different historical developments and ecological preconditions: Namibian resource users have a longer experience in cooperative resource management and intact traditional norms. Moreover, the real-life payoffs to cooperation are higher in Namibia stemming from ecological factors.     

Are Social Costs the Outcome of Struggles over Truth?

Abstract:

This article critically examines the institutional economics theory of social costs by way of reviewing The Dark Places of Business Enterprise: Reinstating Social Costs in Institutional-Economics (2019). In particular, the article assesses the proposal to re-root institutional economics in the theoretical synthesis of “Veblen-Kapp-Mirowski” to better understand the social costs of neoliberalism. One of the findings is that while such a synthesis seems justified on the grounds of significant commonalities and the merits of deeper insights, it nevertheless runs into difficulties due to divergent philosophical foundations. One of the conclusions is that further philosophic clarification is needed on how an alternative economy would understand the relationship between “social costs” and Truth.     

Overcoming consumer resistance to innovations – an analysis of adoption triggers

Traditionally, innovation adoption research has focused on the determinants of the states ‘adoption’ and ‘nonadoption’. Aiming at a more detailed understanding of innovation adoption and resistance behavior, this study takes a different perspective and analyzes the transition stage between the nonadoption state and the adoption state to investigate triggers that overcome initial consumer resistance. The study seeks to answer three questions within this novel perspective: (1) What are triggers that lead nonadopters to become adopters? (2) Do adopters and nonadopters differ in their assessment of adoption triggers? and (3) How do adoption triggers relate to innovation adoption barriers? We apply a qualitative exploratory approach that relies on 160 face‐to‐face interviews with both adopters and nonadopters about nine different innovations to generate a framework of adoption triggers. The results reveal that adoption triggers fall into three broad categories: ‘increasing innovation attraction’, ‘reducing barriers’ or ‘tilting the system’. In addition, we find that adopters and nonadopters differ significantly in their assessment of (potential) adoption triggers. Nonadopters mention performance improvements more frequently as crucial adoption triggers than adopters do. In contrast, adopters indicate knowledge acquisition and a social system push significantly more often than nonadopters do. However, adoption triggers and corresponding adoption barriers do not appear to be linked in a systematic way. Instead, adoption triggers such as a social system push exert influence independent of the existing adoption barriers. We suggest strategies for pre‐ and postlaunch strategies to facilitate adoption triggers. We also discuss the implications of our findings for theory and present further research opportunities.     

Reflections on the Euro Area Fiscal Stance

Avoiding the mistakes of the past, when the good times were not used to build buffers, will be crucial to avoid countries again being forced to engage in a pro-cyclical fiscal tightening in the next downturn.     

Reconsidering Media Discourses on Food Crisis from a Quantitative Perspective

In 2007–2008, when food prices started to increase dramatically, purchasing power parity of consumers, especially the urban poor, started to decrease automatically. High food prices were argued to cause poverty, hunger, and food riots among urban populations. Henceforward, “food crisis” became a new storyline in the current debate. In contrast, in the pre-2007 period, when rural farmers had been facing negative welfare effects of low food prices for many years, there were no crisis talks. This article analyzes different media coverage of urban consumers and rural producers under changes in relative incomes for the 2000–2013 period and propounds media bias on the food crisis debate by using content analysis and the OLS regression model.     

Brand Attachment and Consumer Emotional Response to Unethical Firm Behavior

Attaching consumers to a brand is a cornerstone of relationship marketing as attachment increases loyalty. This research investigates another possible benefit of attachment, its potential and limits for shielding brands from firms’ ethical missteps. Merging motivated reasoning and attachment theories, two studies focus on how brand attachment influences consumer judgments of firm ethics and the emotional and behavioral consequences developing from those. A field study indicates that attachment attenuates judgments of unethical behavior, contributes to emotional ambivalence, and affects purchase intentions. A subsequent experiment corroborates these findings and shows that the buffering role of attachment is limited to conditions when the information about firm ethics is moderately rather than extremely negative. Implications focus on advancing research on ethics and emotional ambivalence in consumer brand relationships and on managerial implications.     

Exchange rate determination: a theory of the decisive role of central bank cooperation and conflict

Economists’ faith that variable exchange rates benevolently equilibrate has been empirically disconfirmed. That faith is here tackled at its theoretical core with an exchange rate model that although ultra abstract, includes the undeniable fundamentals of market power and differential goals of central bankers and large-scale private players. It permits a game theoretic analysis under the assumption that all agents maximize their payoffs. The paper then relaxes the assumption of maximising agents, allowing for a more complex and thus realistic second version of the model that is interpretable within SKAT, the Stages of Knowledge Ahead Theory of risk and uncertainty. In an experimental setting, this second version of the model points to: a) the inability of agents in central banks, governments and the private real and financial sectors to operate in maximising ways; b) destructive central bank conflict; and c) the widely discrepant outcomes arising from the dynamics of individual personality differences. The paper’s theoretical and empirical findings thus both point to the merits of a single world currency.