European Union and the developing nations' external debt : EU-15's debt policy, 1960–2008

This Master's Thesis defines the debt policy of the current European Union Member States towards the developing nations. Since no official policy for debt exists in the EU, it is defined to include debt practices (loans and debt relief in development cooperation) and debt within the EU development policy framework. This study (1) describes how the issue of external debt appears in the development policy framework, (2) compares EU Member States' given loans and debt relief to grants for the developing nations (1960s to the 2000s), and (3) measures the current orientation in ODA of each EU Member State between grant aid and loan aid using the Grant-Loan Index (GLI). Theoretical aspects include reasons for selecting between loans (Bouchet 1987) and grants (Odedokun 2004, O'Brien and Williams 2007), policy context of the EU (Van Reisen 2007) and the meaning of external debt in the set-up between the North and the South. In terms of history, the events and impact of the colonial period (where loans have originated) are overviewed and compared in light of today's policies. Development assistance statistics are derived from the OECD DAC statistics portal and EU development policy framework documents from the EU portal. Methodologically, the structure of this study is from policy analysis (Barrien 1999, Hill 2008, Berndtson 2008), but it has been modified to fit the needs of studying a non-official policy. EU Member States are divided into three groups by Carbone (2007a), the Big-3, Northern and Southern donors, based on common development assistance characteristics. The Grant-Loan Index is used to compare Carbone's model, which measures quality of aid, to the GLI measuring the structure of aid. Results indicate that EU- 15 countries (active in debt practices) differ in terms of timing, stability and equality of debt practices in the long-term (1960s to the 2000s). In terms of current practices, (2000-2008), it is noted that there lies a disparity between the actual practices and the way in which external debt is represented in the development policy framework, although debt practices form a relevant portion of total ODA practices for many EU-15 Member States, the issue itself plays a minor role in development policy documents. Carbone’s group division applies well to the Grant – Loan Index’s results, indicating that countries with similar development policy behaviour have similarities in debt policy behaviour, with one exception: Greece. On the basis of this study, it is concluded that EU development policy framework content in terms of external debt and debt practices are not congruent. The understanding of this disparity between the policy outline and differences in long-term practices is relevant in both, reaching the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, and in the actual process of developing development aid.

The effects of stall surfaces and milk yield on the lying behavior of dairy cow

The importance of lying behavior to dairy cows and the feasible definition of lying has attracted many studies on the subject. Cattle show both behavioral and physiological stress responses when subjected to thwarting of their lying behavior. If cows are unable to lie down they later compensate for lost lying time when possible. Environmental factors such as housing and bedding systems have been noted to affect the time spent lying, but there is usually large variation in lying time between individuals. Internal factors such as the reproductive stage, age and health of cows affect their lying time and can cause variation. However, the effect of higher milk production on behavior has not previously been illuminated. The objective of this study was to provide data applicable for the improvement of resting conditions of cows. The preference of stall surface material, differences in normal behavior per unit time and various health measures were observed. The aim was to evaluate lying behavior and cow comfort on different stall bedding materials. In addition, the effect of milk yield on behavior was examined in a tie stall experiment. The preferences for surface materials were investigated in 5 experiments using 3 surface materials with bedding manipulations. According to the results, the cows preferred abundant straw bedding and soft rubber mats. However, they showed an aversion to sand bedding. Some individuals even refused to use stalls with sand when no organic bedding material was present. However, this study was unable to determine the reason for the avoidance, as neither the sand particle size nor thermal properties appeared critical. However, previous exposure to particular surface materials increased the preference for them. The amount of straw bedding was found to be an important factor affecting the preferences for stalls, and the lying time in stalls increased when the flooring softness was improved by applying straw or by installing elastic mats. Despite sand being the least preferred flooring material in preference tests, the health of legs improved during exposure to sand-floored stalls. Moreover cows using sand were cleaner than those that used straw stalls. Thus, sand bedding entailed some health benefits despite the contradictory results of preference tests, which more strongly reflected the perceptions of individual animals. Milk yield was observed to affect behavior by reducing the lying time, possibly due to factors other than longer duration of eating. High yielding cows seemed to intensify their lying bouts, as they were observed to lie with the neck muscles relaxed sooner after lying down than lower yielding cows. In conclusion, cows were found to prefer softer stall surface materials and organic bedding material. In addition, the lying time was reduced by a high milk yield, although the lying time seemed to be important for resting. Cows might differ in the needs for their lying environment. The management of dairy cows should eliminate any unnecessary prevention of lying, as even in tie-stalls high yielding cows seem to be affected by time constraints. Adding fresh bedding material to stalls increases the comfort of any stall flooring material.

Modern Societal Impulses and their Nordic Manifestations : On Emancipation and Constraint in Societal Development

The 1980s and the early 1990s have proved to be an important turning point in the history of the Nordic welfare states. After this breaking point, the Nordic social order has been built upon a new foundation. This study shows that the new order is mainly built upon new hierarchies and control mechanisms that have been developed consistently through economic and labour market policy measures. During the post-war period Nordic welfare states to an increasing extent created equality of opportunity and scope for agency among people. Public social services were available for all and the tax-benefit system maintained a level income distribution. During this golden era of Nordic welfare state, the scope for agency was, however, limited by social structures. Public institutions and law tended to categorize people according to their life circumstances ascribing them a predefined role. In the 1980s and 1990s this collectivist social order began to mature and it became subject to political renegotiation. Signs of a new social order in the Nordic countries have included the liberation of the financial markets, the privatizing of public functions and redefining the role of the public sector. It is now possible to reassess the ideological foundations of this new order. As a contrast to widely used political rhetoric, the foundation of the new order has not been the ideas of individual freedom or choice. Instead, the most important aim appears to have been to control and direct people to act in accordance with the rules of the market. The various levels of government and the social security system have been redirected to serve this goal. Instead of being a mechanism for redistributing income, the Nordic social security system has been geared towards creating new hierarchies on the Nordic labour markets. During the past decades, conditions for receiving income support and unemployment benefit have been tightened in all Nordic countries. As a consequence, people have been forced to accept deteriorating terms and conditions on the labour market. Country-specific variations exist, however: in sum Sweden has been most conservative, Denmark most innovative and Finland most radical in reforming labour market policy. The new hierarchies on the labour market have co-incided with slow or non-existent growth of real wages and with a strong growth of the share of capital income. Slow growth of real wages has kept inflation low and thus secured the value of capital. Societal development has thus progressed from equality of opportunity during the age of the welfare states towards a hierarchical social order where the majority of people face increasing constraints and where a fortunate minority enjoys prosperity and security.

Developing Peer-To-Peer Web Applications

As the virtual world grows more complex, finding a standard way for storing data becomes increasingly important. Ideally, each data item would be brought into the computer system only once. References for data items need to be cryptographically verifiable, so the data can maintain its identity while being passed around. This way there will be only one copy of the users family photo album, while the user can use multiple tools to show or manipulate the album. Copies of users data could be stored on some of his family members computer, some of his computers, but also at some online services which he uses. When all actors operate over one replicated copy of the data, the system automatically avoids a single point of failure. Thus the data will not disappear with one computer breaking, or one service provider going out of business. One shared copy also makes it possible to delete a piece of data from all systems at once, on users request. In our research we tried to find a model that would make data manageable to users, and make it possible to have the same data stored at various locations. We studied three systems, Persona, Freenet, and GNUnet, that suggest different models for protecting user data. The main application areas of the systems studied include securing online social networks, providing anonymous web, and preventing censorship in file-sharing. Each of the systems studied store user data on machines belonging to third parties. The systems differ in measures they take to protect their users from data loss, forged information, censorship, and being monitored. All of the systems use cryptography to secure names used for the content, and to protect the data from outsiders. Based on the gained knowledge, we built a prototype platform called Peerscape, which stores user data in a synchronized, protected database. Data items themselves are protected with cryptography against forgery, but not encrypted as the focus has been disseminating the data directly among family and friends instead of letting third parties store the information. We turned the synchronizing database into peer-to-peer web by revealing its contents through an integrated http server. The REST-like http API supports development of applications in javascript. To evaluate the platform s suitability for application development we wrote some simple applications, including a public chat room, bittorrent site, and a flower growing game. During our early tests we came to the conclusion that using the platform for simple applications works well. As web standards develop further, writing applications for the platform should become easier. Any system this complex will have its problems, and we are not expecting our platform to replace the existing web, but are fairly impressed with the results and consider our work important from the perspective of managing user data.

A Safe Vaccine (DV-STM-07) against Salmonella Infection Prevents Abortion and Confers Protective Immunity to the Pregnant and New Born Mice

Pregnancy is a transient immuno-compromised condition which has evolved to avoid the immune rejection of the fetus by the maternal immune system. The altered immune response of the pregnant female leads to increased susceptibility to invading pathogens, resulting in abortion and congenital defects of the fetus and a subnormal response to vaccination. Active vaccination during pregnancy may lead to abortion induced by heightened cell mediated immune response. In this study, we have administered the highly attenuated vaccine strain delta pmrG-HM-D (DV-STM-07) in female mice before the onset of pregnancy and followed the immune reaction against challenge with virulent S. Typhimurium in pregnant mice. Here we demonstrate that DV-STM-07 vaccine gives protection against Salmonella in pregnant mice and also prevents Salmonella induced abortion. This protection is conferred by directing the immune response towards Th2 activation and Th1 suppression. The low Th1 response prevents abortion. The use of live attenuated vaccine just before pregnancy carries the risk of transmission to the fetus. We have shown that this vaccine is safe as the vaccine strain is quickly eliminated from the mother and is not transmitted to the fetus. This vaccine also confers immunity to the new born mice of vaccinated mothers. Since there is no evidence of the vaccine candidate reaching the new born mice, we hypothesize that it may be due to trans-colostral transfer of protective anti-Salmonella antibodies. These results suggest that our vaccine DV-STM-07 can be very useful in preventing abortion in the pregnant individuals and confer immunity to the new born. Since there are no such vaccine candidates which can be given to the new born and to the pregnant women, this vaccine holds a very bright future to combat Salmonella induced pregnancy loss.

Organisational Responses to Workplace Harassment: An Exploratory Study

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to explore what kind of measures personnel managers have taken to intervene in workplace harassment and to explore how organisational characteristics and the characteristics of the personnel manager affect the choice of response strategies. Design/methodology/approach – The study was exploratory and used a survey design. A web-based questionnaire was sent to the personnel managers of all Finnish municipalities and data on organisational responses and organisational characteristics were collected. Findings – The study showed that the organisations surveyed relied heavily on reconciliatory measures for responding to workplace harassment and that punitive measures were seldom used. Findings indicated that personnel manager gender, size of municipality, use of “sophisticated” human resource management practices and having provided information and training to increase awareness about harassment all influence the organisational responses chosen. Research limitations/implications – Only the effects of organisational and personnel manager characteristics on organisational responses were analysed. Future studies need to include perpetrator characteristics and harassment severity. Practical implications – The study informs both practitioners and policy makers about the measures that have been taken and that can be taken in order to stop harassment. It also questions the effectiveness of written anti-harassment policies for influencing organisational responses to harassment and draws attention to the role of gendered perceptions of harassment for choice of response strategy. Originality/value – This paper fills a gap in harassment research by reporting on the use of different response strategies and by providing initial insights into factors affecting choice of responses.

Bullying and organisational politics in competitive and rapidly changing work environments

This paper argues that workplace bullying can in some cases be a form of organisational politics, that is, a deliberate, competitive strategy from the perspective of the individual perpetrator. A cross-sectional study conducted among business professionals revealed that there was a correlation between a politicised and competitive climate and bullying. This finding implies that globalisation, increased pressures for efficiency, and restructuring, which limits the number of management positions and thereby contributes to increased internal competition, may lead to more bullying. The findings have important implications for management, since the possible political aspects of bullying must be taken into account in order to be able to undertake successful prevention and intervention measures.

Corporate Governance in European Banks: Essays on Bank Ownership

Banks are important as they have a central role in the financial system, where funds are channelled either through financial intermediaries, such as banks, or through financial markets, hence promoting growth in any economy. Recently, we have been reminded of the drawbacks of the central role of banks. The current financial crisis, which started out as a sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US, has become a global financial crisis with substantial impact on the real economy in many countries. Some of the roots to the current financial crisis can be sought in the changing role of banks and in bank corporate governance. Moreover, the substantial revitalising measures taken have been justified by the central role of banks. Not only are banks important, they are also very special. The fact that banks are regulated in conjunction with greater opacity, make bank corporate governance different from corporate governance in non-bank companies. Surprisingly little is, however, known about bank corporate governance, in particularly, in a European setting. Hence, the objective of this doctoral thesis is to provide new insights in this research area by examining banks from 37 different European countries. Each of the three essays included in the doctoral thesis examines a particular aspect of bank corporate governance. In the first essay the interaction between the regulatory environment a bank operates in and its ownership structure is explored. Indicators of the severity of the moral hazard problem induced by the deposit insurance system and implicit too-big-to-fail government guarantee, particular features of deposit insurance systems as well as legal protection of shareholders, legal origin of a country and level of integration to the European community are used in the analysis. The empirical findings confirm previous findings on the link between legal protection of shareholders and ownership structure. Moreover, they show that differences in deposit insurance system features can explain some of the differences in ownership structure across European banks. In the second essay the impact of management and board ownership on the profitability of banks with different strategy is examined. The empirical findings suggest that the efficiency of these two particular corporate governance mechanisms varies with the characteristics of the agency problem faced by the bank. More specifically, management ownership is important in opaque non-traditional banks, whereas board ownership is important in traditional banks, where deposit insurance reduces the monitoring incentives of outsiders. The higher profitability does, however, go together with higher risk. In the third essay the profitability and risk of commercial, savings and cooperative banks are compared. The empirical findings suggest that distinct operational and ownership characteristics rather than only the mere fact that a bank is a commercial, savings or cooperative bank explain the profitability and risk differences. The main insight from the three essays is that a number of different aspects should be addressed simultaneously in order to give the complexity of bank corporate governance justice.

Conditional Moments in Asset Pricing

A better understanding of stock price changes is important in guiding many economic activities. Since prices often do not change without good reasons, searching for related explanatory variables has involved many enthusiasts. This book seeks answers from prices per se by relating price changes to their conditional moments. This is based on the belief that prices are the products of a complex psychological and economic process and their conditional moments derive ultimately from these psychological and economic shocks. Utilizing information about conditional moments hence makes it an attractive alternative to using other selective financial variables in explaining price changes. The first paper examines the relation between the conditional mean and the conditional variance using information about moments in three types of conditional distributions; it finds that the significance of the estimated mean and variance ratio can be affected by the assumed distributions and the time variations in skewness. The second paper decomposes the conditional industry volatility into a concurrent market component and an industry specific component; it finds that market volatility is on average responsible for a rather small share of total industry volatility — 6 to 9 percent in UK and 2 to 3 percent in Germany. The third paper looks at the heteroskedasticity in stock returns through an ARCH process supplemented with a set of conditioning information variables; it finds that the heteroskedasticity in stock returns allows for several forms of heteroskedasticity that include deterministic changes in variances due to seasonal factors, random adjustments in variances due to market and macro factors, and ARCH processes with past information. The fourth paper examines the role of higher moments — especially skewness and kurtosis — in determining the expected returns; it finds that total skewness and total kurtosis are more relevant non-beta risk measures and that they are costly to be diversified due either to the possible eliminations of their desirable parts or to the unsustainability of diversification strategies based on them.

When sharing becomes a liability: An intellectual capital approach to describing the dichotomy of knowledge protection versus sharing in intra- and interorganizational relationships

The tension created when companies are collaborating with competitors – sometimes termed co-opetition - has been subject of research within the network approach. As companies are collaborating with competitors, they need to simultaneously share and protect knowledge. The opportunistic behavior and learning intent of the partner may be underestimated, and collaboration may involve significant risks of loss of competitive edge. Contrastingly, the central tenet within the Intellectual Capital approach is that knowledge grows as it flows. The person sharing does not lose the knowledge and therefore knowledge has doubled from a company’s point of view. Value is created through the interplay of knowledge flows between and within three forms of intellectual capital: human, structural and relational capital. These are the points of departure for the research conducted in this thesis. The thesis investigates the tension between collaboration and competition through an Intellectual Capital lens, by identifying the actions taken to share and protect knowledge in interorganizational collaborative relationships. More specifically, it explores the tension in knowledge flows aimed at protecting and sharing knowledge, and their effect on the value creation of a company. It is assumed, that as two companies work closely together, the collaborative relationship becomes intertwined between the two partners and the intellectual capital flows of both companies are affected. The research finds that companies commonly protect knowledge also in close and long-term collaborative relationships. The knowledge flows identified are both collaborative and protective, with the result that they sometimes are counteracting and neutralize each other. The thesis contributes to the intellectual capital approach by expanding the understanding of knowledge protection in interorganizational relationships in three ways. First, departing from the research on co-opetition it shifts the focus from the internal view of the company as a repository of intellectual capital onto the collaborative relationships between competing companies. Second, instead of the traditional collaborative and sharing point of departure, it takes a competitive and protective perspective. Third, it identifies the intellectual capital flows as assets or liabilities depending on their effect on the value creation of the company. The actions taken to protect knowledge in an interorganizational relationship may decrease the value created in the company, which would make them liabilities.

Leader - Follower Relations In An Intercultural Chinese Context - Personal, Interpersonal and Behavioural Influences and Impact on Work Contribution

The successful interaction between leaders and their followers is central to the overall functioning of a company. The increasingly multinational nature of modern business and the resulting multicultural and increasingly heterogeneous workforce imposes specific challenges to the development of high-quality work relationships. The Western multinational companies that have started operations in China are facing these challenges. This study examines the quality of leader-follower relationships between Western expatriate leaders and their Chinese followers as well as between Chinese leaders and their Chinese followers in Western-owned subsidiaries in China. The focus is on the influence of personal, interpersonal and behavioural factors (personality, values, cultural knowledge, perceived and actual similarity, interactional justice, and follower performance) and the work-related implications of these relationships (job attitudes and organisational citizenship behaviour). One interesting finding of this study is that Chinese followers have higher perceptions of their Western than their Chinese leaders. The results also indicate that Chinese and Western leaders’ perceptions of their followers are not influenced favourably by the same follower characteristics. In a similar vein, Chinese followers value different traits in Western versus Chinese leaders. These results, as well as the numerous more specific findings of the study, have practical implications for international human resource management and areas such as selection, placement and training. Due to the different effect of personal and interpersonal factors across groups, it is difficult to achieve the “perfect match” between leader and follower characteristics that simultaneously contribute to high-quality relationships for Chinese and Western leaders as well as for followers. However, the results indicate that the ability of organisations to enhance the quality of leader-follower relations by selecting and matching people with suitable characteristics may provide an effective means for organisations to increase positive job attitudes and hence influence work-related outcomes.

Hedging Options with Different Time Units in the Pricing Models

This study examined the effects of the Greeks of the options and the trading results of delta hedging strategies, with three different time units or option-pricing models. These time units were calendar time, trading time and continuous time using discrete approximation (CTDA) time. The CTDA time model is a pricing model, that among others accounts for intraday and weekend, patterns in volatility. For the CTDA time model some additional theta measures, which were believed to be usable in trading, were developed. The study appears to verify that there were differences in the Greeks with different time units. It also revealed that these differences influence the delta hedging of options or portfolios. Although it is difficult to say anything about which is the most usable of the different time models, as this much depends on the traders view of the passing of time, different market conditions and different portfolios, the CTDA time model can be viewed as an attractive alternative.

Real Estate Investment and Uncertainty: Econometric Modelling using Finnish Data

The purpose of this paper is to test for the effect of uncertainty in a model of real estate investment in Finland during the hihhly cyclical period of 1975 to 1998. We use two alternative measures of uncertainty. The first measure is the volatility of stock market returns and the second measure is the heterogeneity in the answers of the quarterly business survey of the Confederation of Finnish Industry and Employers. The econometric analysis is based on the autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) model and the paper applies a 'general-to-specific' modelling approach. We find that the measure of heterogeneity is significant in the model, but the volatility of stock market returns is not. The empirical results give some evidence of an uncertainty-induced threshold slowing down real estate investment in Finland.

An Empirical Study of the Mixture of Time and Movements in Prices

This paper investigates the persistent pattern in the Helsinki Exchanges. The persistent pattern is analyzed using a time and a price approach. It is hypothesized that arrival times are related to movements in prices. Thus, the arrival times are defined as durations and formulated as an Autoregressive Conditional Duration (ACD) model as in Engle and Russell (1998). The prices are defined as price changes and formulated as a GARCH process including duration measures. The research question follows from market microstructure predictions about price intensities defined as time between price changes. The microstructure theory states that long transaction durations might be associated with both no news and bad news. Accordingly, short durations would be related to high volatility and long durations to low volatility. As a result, the spread will tend to be larger under intensive moments. The main findings of this study are 1) arrival times are positively autocorrelated and 2) long durations are associated with low volatility in the market.

The Effect of Obesity on Wages and Employment: The Difference Between Having a High BMI and Being Fat

In this paper, we re-examine the relationship between overweight and labour market success, using indicators of individual body composition along with BMI (Body Mass Index). We use the dataset from Finland in which weight, height, fat mass and waist circumference are not self-reported, but obtained as part of the overall health examination. We find that waist circumference, but not weight or fat mass, has a negative effect on wages for women, whereas all measures of obesity have negative effects on women’s employment probabilities. For men, the only obesity measure that is significant for men’s employment probabilities is fat mass. One interpretation of our findings is that the negative wage effects of overweight on wages run through the discrimination channel, but that the negative effects of overweight on employment have more to do with ill health. All in all, measures of body composition provide a more refined picture about the effects of obesity on wages and employment.