Expectations,substitution, and scrapping in a putty-clay model

The paper presents a framework for analyzing the effect of changing expectations about future prices on a firm's choice of technique, and on its anticipated scrapping of capital equipment. Assuming a putty-clay technology, particular attention is paid to the way in which the scrapping age depends on the degree of ex ante input substitution. Numerical illustrations — based on data for Norwegian manufacturing for the years 1964–1983, an ex ante technology represented by a Generalized Leontief cost function in materials, energy, labor, and capital, and an ARMA representation of the price expectation mechanism — are presented. The results indicate that the price changes in this period may have had a substantial impact on planned scrapping, and on the chosen production techniques.     

Consumer Bankruptcy: A Right or a Privilege? The Role of the Courts in Establishing Moral Standards of Economic Conduct

The Norwegian Consumer Bankruptcy Act was passed 17 July 1992 to give persons with "serious debt problems (. . .) the possibility to gain control over their economy." The Act contains provisions for negotiations between the debtor and the creditors, for court rulings on repayment plans, and for a discharge of the debts not covered by the plan. The origin of the Act was a social welfare approach to the problem of overindebtedness. However, the Act embodies an inherent contradiction in that it also includes moral elements in order to prevent it from exerting a negative influence on the perceived obligation to pay one's debts. This contradiction has given the courts a wide scope of discretion in the application of the Act. As a result, cases are treated differently in different jurisdictions. Some judges put more emphasis on moral evaluations than others. This situation also gives room for strategic action from creditor groups who typically are repeat players in cases of consumer bankruptcy. In this way the more objective, social welfare approach of the Act is undermined.     

Redefining Local Government Roles In Public Services

County officials in the seven-county metropolitan area of the State of Minnesota's Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul were seeking to redefine county roles in service delivery. This article reports on a process model that was piloted on two services. The model was commissioned by officials; was based upon and informed by literature and comparative experience; began with an examination of functions performed; involved participants in focusing the study; was context-focused; and involved local stakeholders in projecting the implications of alternative county roles. These characteristics complicated the research management process because the process took more time, involved more actors, and required more coordination than traditional research. However, having stakeholders identify alternatives and bring factual material to the process was critical to the success of the model and including the comparative and contextual research both strengthened the policy conclusions and improved the probability of their adoption and implementation. A case of a Minnesota county that followed the model in an effort to reform water governance within the county illustrated adoption of the approach. The stakeholder analysis process was previously applied in Africa, China and Southeast Asia and the model should be applicable to a wide range of settings and problems.     

Conference Tourism: A Problem for the Environment,as well as for Research?

The increase in professional trips to conferences and seminars made by employees in the 'knowledge industries' presents an environmentally worrying trend in mobility in contemporary post-industrial society. A number of factors are involved. Globalisation and regional competition encourage host cities and institutions to put themselves on the conference map. For the individual traveller, conferences and seminars offer escape from daily routines and the chance to experience new, perhaps exotic, places. But trips to distant conferences can have serious environmental impacts, especially if made by airplane. Because of the aggressive impact of greenhouse gas emissions in the upper atmosphere, their threat to the global climate is more serious than similar trips made at surface level. In addition, the time spent on such trips competes with other tasks: conference participation takes scarce time resources available to university academics for research. In the age of electronic communication, it is questionable whether conferences are effective arenas for communicating and gathering knowledge.     

Tax Effects on the Real Exchange Rate

This study examines the impact of taxes on the real exchange rate through their marginal effects on economic activity. We hypothesize that an increase in the capital interest tax rate leads to real domestic currency depreciation while an increase in wage or consumption tax rates leads to a real domestic currency appreciation. These hypotheses are supported by an empirical study using panel data estimations of annual data from 10 OECD countries over 17 years.     

The dynamic role of small- and medium-sized multinationals in global production networks: Norwegian maritime firms in the Greater Shanghai Region in China

This article examines the role of small- and medium-sized multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the dynamic development of global production networks (GPNs) in the maritime industry. It studies the dynamism between subsidiaries of Norwegian maritime firms and regional actors and institutions in the Greater Shanghai Region of China from the perspectives of the subsidiaries. It argues that strategic coupling, recoupling and decoupling are partly the results of regional selection mechanisms. However, in the cases where the subsidiaries are embedded within the host region, the strategies and behaviour of MNEs are of decisive importance for the dynamic development of GPNs.     

Categorizing risks in seven large projects—Which risks do the projects focus on?

In a hierarchy of project objectives, strategic objectives will often be principally different from the operational ones. Operational objectives concern the project outputs/results, and strategic objectives concern the project goal and purpose. In this study, risks are categorized as risks to operational, long‐term, or short‐term strategic objectives, and, by studying a dataset of some 1,450 risk elements that make up the risk registers of seven large projects, we examine how operational and strategic risks are distributed in the projects. The study strongly indicates that risks to a project's strategic objectives rarely occur in the project's risk registers, though project success and failure stories indicate their importance.     

The Modeling Process for Stage Models

The purpose of this paper is to present and test a modeling procedure because researchers have struggled for decades to develop stages-of-growth models that are both theoretically founded and empirically validated. This article presents the concept and hypothesis of stages, the history of stage models, and a procedure that may serve as a useful tool in modeling stages of growth. Based on previous research and lessons learned from case study experience of the government sector in Norway, a procedure for the stages of growth modeling process is suggested and demonstrated. The procedure is used for developing a stage model for e-government interoperability. This article provides new insight into issues and challenges faced when engaging in stages of growth research. The paper proposes a new approach to stages of growth modeling. The utility of the suggested procedure is to improve theory building and empirical validation. The contribution to academia is the modeling process that can be applied in future developments of stages of growth. The contribution to practice lies in the stage hypothesis of organizational development over time.