Branding: The Past, Present, and Future: A Study of the Evolution and Future of Branding

Branding, as any other concept, has evolved over time: from the days when sheep of one herd started to be branded to distinguish them from another herd to the current era when everything, from water and flowers to clothes and food, is branded. Throughout these times, there have been numerous theories to describe and understand the underlying nuances. This paper finds the relationships in previous literature and reveals how these theories see branding from various perspectives and how they can be integrated to form a coherent view. It is also discussed how branding and society affect each other. Based on the knowledge of how branding theories have been developed as dependent variables of each other and the society, we are able to form a better understanding of the past, the present, and the future of branding.

Do Households Have Rational Expectations on Future Consumption? Evidence from the Finnish Consumer Survey

Ever since its initial introduction some fifty years ago, the rational expectations paradigm has dominated the way economic theory handles uncertainty. The main assertion made by John F. Muth (1961), seen by many as the father of the paradigm, is that expectations of rational economic agents should essentially be equal to the predictions of relevant economic theory, since rational agents should use information available to them in an optimal way. This assumption often has important consequences on the results and interpretations of the models where it is applied. Although the rational expectations assumption can be applied to virtually any economic theory, the focus in this thesis is on macroeconomic theories of consumption, especially the Rational Expectations–Permanent Income Hypothesis proposed by Robert E. Hall in 1978. The much-debated theory suggests that, assuming that agents have rational expectations on their future income, consumption decisions should follow a random walk, and the best forecast of future consumption level is the current consumption level. Then, changes in consumption are unforecastable. This thesis constructs an empirical test for the Rational Expectations–Permanent Income Hypothesis using Finnish Consumer Survey data as well as various Finnish macroeconomic data. The data sample covers the years 1995–2010. Consumer survey data may be interpreted to directly represent household expectations, which makes it an interesting tool for this particular test. The variable to be predicted is the growth of total household consumption expenditure. The main empirical result is that the Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), a balance figure computed from the most important consumer survey responses, does have statistically significant predictive power over the change in total consumption expenditure. The history of consumption expenditure growth itself, however, fails to predict its own future values. This indicates that the CCI contains some information that the history of consumption decisions does not, and that the consumption decisions are not optimal in the theoretical context. However, when conditioned on various macroeconomic variables, the CCI loses its predictive ability. This finding suggests that the index is merely a (partial) summary of macroeconomic information, and does not contain any significant private information on consumption intentions of households not directly deductible from the objective economic variables. In conclusion, the Rational Expectations–Permanent Income Hypothesis is strongly rejected by the empirical results in this thesis. This result is in accordance with most earlier studies conducted on the topic.

Future challenges of forest policy analysis.

XVIII IUFRO World Congress, Ljubljana 1986.