Vienna University of Economics and Business
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Eating healthy or wasting less? Reducing resource footprints of food consumption
Get PDFTo feed future populations on ever-scarcer natural resources, policy initiatives aim to decrease resource footprints of food consumption. While adopting healthier diets has shown great potential to reduce footprints, current political initiatives primarily address strategies to reduce food waste, with the target of halving food waste at retail and consumption levels by 2030. Using Germany as a case study, we compare the resource-saving potential of this political target with three scenarios of nutritionally viable, plant-based dietary patterns and investigate interactions and trade-offs. By using the food and agriculture biomass input-output model, we capture biomass, cropland, and blue water footprints of global supply chains. The results show that dietary changes are particularly effective in reducing biomass and cropland footprints, showing a decrease of up to 61% and 48% respectively, whereas halving food waste decreases biomass and cropland footprints by 11% and 15% respectively. For blue water savings, halving food waste is more effective: water use decreases by 14% compared to an increase of 6% for dietary change with the highest water consumption.Subsequently, a combination of the scenarios shows the highest total reduction potential. However, our findings reveal that despite reduced footprints, a dietary shift can lead to an increased amount of food waste due to the rising consumption of products associated with higher food waste shares. Therefore, policy strategies addressing both targets might be contradicting. We conclude that international and national policies can be most effective in achieving higher resource efficiency by exploiting the reduction potentials of all available strategies while simultaneously considering strategy interactions
Going Beyond GDP with a Parsimonious Indicator: Inequality-Adjusted Healthy Lifetime Income
Get PDFPer capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does notcapture many dimensions that imply a “good life”, such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of being easy to interpret and to calculate with manageable data requirements. Against this backdrop, there is a need for a measure of well-being that preserves the advantages of per capita GDP, but also includes health and equality. We propose a new parsimonious indicator to fill this gap, and calculate it for 149 countries. This new indicator could beparticularly useful in complementing standard well-being indicators during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is because (i) COVID-19 predominantly affects older adults beyond their prime working ages whose mortality and morbidity do not strongly affect GDP, and (ii) COVID-19 is known to have large effects on inequality in many countries
ScriptTagLibs for Java EE
No full textTaglib library for Java based Web servers adhering to the Java EE specifications (EE stands for "enterprise edition").
Newer versions, if available, cf. <https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsf4oorexx/files/Sandbox/rgf/taglibs/ga/
The Impact of Expectations on Macroeconomic Instability
No full textThis dissertation investigates the impact of expectations on macroeconomic instability. In empirical macroeconomics, expectations are useful for the identification of structural effects. This is exemplified in different settings. First, for the identification of various monetary policy shocks from central banks. Second, for the identification of news coming from the credit market. The last setting builds upon the observation that market participants do make systematic errors in beliefs. Surprises in beliefs are used to identify a financial shock. Modeling approaches have to be adapted in order to identify structural shocks in the economy with the help of expectations and in a next step examine their influence on macroeconomic instability.
The first chapter investigates the international effects of Euro area rate forward guidance and compares them to spillovers from a conventional monetary policy shock. The forward guidance shock is identified via a combination of zero and sign restrictions that make use of the relationship between expectations and observed data. To address potential time variation, the proposed methodology uses a fully flexible approach that allows to handle both drifts in residual variances and the structural coefficients. The results show that both shocks lead to considerable international effects on output growth, inflation, and equity returns. Moreover, the investigation finds that effects are stronger during the period of the global financial crisis, which is particularly true for the forward guidance shock. This implies that monetary policy is generally not hindered in affecting the real economy by the zero lower bound. Additionally, shocks to expectations can have real domestic effects with international consequences.
The second chapter investigates the role of credit market sentiments and investor beliefs on credit cycle dynamics and their propagation to business cycle fluctuations. US data from 1968 to 2014 is used to show that credit market sentiments are indeed able to detect asymmetries in a small-scale macroeconomic model. By exploiting recent developments in behavioral finance on expectation formation in financial markets, an unexpected credit market news shock is identified which exhibits different impacts in an optimistic and pessimistic credit market environment. While an unexpected movement in the optimistic regime leads to a rather low to muted impact on output and credit, a significant and persistent negative impact on these variables is found in the pessimistic regime. Therefore, this chapter departs from the current literature on the role of financial frictions for explaining business cycle behavior in macroeconomics and argues in line with recent theoretical contributions on the relevance of expectation formation mechanisms as a source of macroeconomic instability.
The third chapter studies how non-rational risk shocks affect the macroeconomy. Exploiting survey data on expectations of financial executives, a non-rational risk shock is identified through belief dis- tortions. Surprises in beliefs in credit spreads measure belief distortions, and are used as a proxy for exogenous variation in the risk premium. Belief distortions elicit overreaction of credit spreads, even- tually leading to exaggerated beliefs on financial markets. Results indicate that the constructed shocks have statistically and economically meaningful effects. A positive non-rational risk shock moves credit spreads remarkably up while real activity and the stock market decline.Security: validuse
The role of unpaid domestic work in explaining the gender gap in the (monetary) value of leisure
No full textThe value of travel time savings (VTTS) representing the willingness to pay to reduce
travel time, consists of two components: the value of liberating time [equal to the value
of leisure (VoL)] and the value of time assigned to travel (VTAT), representing the travel
conditions of a trip. Their relative values indicate which dimension to emphasize when
investing in transport: speed or comfort. In this paper, we formulate and estimate a framework aimed at the improvement in the estimation of the VoL. By introducing a novel treatment of time assigned to domestic work, we consider that unpaid labor should be assigned
a wage rate as a measure of the expenses avoided when assigning time to those chores.
We use state-of-the-art data on time use and expenses as well as online data on gig workers collected in Austria, and apply the time-use and expenditure model of Jara-Diaz et al.
(Transp Res Part B 42(10): 46–957, 2008). The wage rates for paid and unpaid work were
combined to reformulate the budget constraint, which afected women more than men due
to the higher involvement of the former in domestic activities. Compared against the original estimation, the VoL changed from €10/h for men and €6/h for women to €9/h for both
genders, which in turn yields a larger average VTAT, which becomes positive for public
transport. As a conclusion, the novel treatment of domestic labor contributes to closing
the gap in the VoL between genders and highlights the power of unveiling the components
behind the VTTS. The empirical fndings imply that investments in travel time reductions
rather than in comfort should be prioritized, given the very good conditions of public transport in Austria
New directions for RIS studies and policies in the face of grand societal challenges
Get PDFThe regional innovation system (RIS) approach has become a widely used framework for examining the dynamics of innovation across space and for crafting policies to promote the innovation capacity of regions. The dominant focus has been on technological and business innovation enhancing competitiveness and economic growth. In light of persistent environmental and social challenges such as climate change, aging, and growing inequalities, this understanding appears to be too narrow. We argue that the RIS approach requires a critical reassessment for informing the next generation of regional innovation policies. We explore how RIS scholarship and policies could benefit from an alternative understanding of the innovation process. Inspired by recent work on mission-oriented and transformative innovation policies, we develop the notion of a ‘challenge-oriented RIS (CoRIS). In contrast to conventional understandings of a RIS, this approach embraces a more critical view of innovation, captures the directionality of change, opens up to new innovation actors at different territorial scales, and pays more attention to the application side and upscaling of innovation within the region and beyond. Acknowledging that regions vary in their capacity for transformative change and challenge-oriented innovation, the article outlines new directions for place-based innovation policies
Employing Portable JavaFX GUIs with Scripting Languages
Get PDFWhen creating standalone applications with scripting languages it may become a challenge to devise powerful graphical user interfaces (GUI) for them that can be deployed and run on all the major operating system platforms, notably Windows, MacOS and Linux. This article introduces a platform independent solution for scripting languages that makes it feasible to quickly implement GUIs, ranging from simple to the most complex needs, by exploiting JavaFX (OpenJFX) and taking advantage of the Java (OpenJDK) scripting framework (javax.script). This way it becomes possible to create standalone, portable GUI applications with scripting languages that support the Java scripting framework
Introduction to the Mini-track on Global, International, and Cross-Cultural Issues in the Digital Economy
Get PDFFrom “Decent work and economic growth” to “Sustainable work and economic degrowth”: a new framework for SDG 8
Get PDFThe sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) have successfully raised awareness and built momentum for taking collective action, while also remaining uncritical of the central causes of the environmental crises – economic growth, inequality, and overconsumption in the Global North. We analyse SDG 8 “Decent Work and Economic Growth” from the perspective of strong sustainability – as phenomena, institutions and ideologies – and find that it does not fit the criteria of strong sustainability. Based on this observation, we propose a novel framework for SDG8 in line with strong sustainability and the latest scientific research, “Sustainable Work and Economic Degrowth”, including a first proposal for new sub-goals, targets and indicators. This encompasses an integrated systems approach to achieving the SDGs’ overalls goals – a sustainable future for present and future generations. The key novel contributions of the paper include new indicators to measure societies’ dependence on economic growth, to ensure the provisioning of welfare independent of economic growth
Headquarters Resource Allocation within Multinational Corporations: Antecedents, Consequences, and Related Methodological Issues
Get PDFThe allocation of HQ resources to entrepreneurial initiatives in subsidiaries is crucial to their realization. However, such allocation does not always follow rational decision making, and corporations potentially forego important opportunities while financing unpromising ones. I investigate biases of senior headquarters managers in the allocation of financial resources to subsidiary initiatives, as well as consequences of organizational and human resource allocation on the operational management practices of MNC subsidiaries. My doctoral research further entails important methodological findings regarding survey methods used in my dissertation and their implications for practitioners and academics relying on the insights published in the top IB journals