Money and Inflation in the Euro Area: A Case for Monetary Indicators?

This paper studies the relationship between inflation, output, money and interest rates in the euro area, using data spanning 1980 2000. The P* model is shown to have considerable empirical support. Thus, the price gap' or, equivalently, the real money gap' (the gap between current real balances and long-run equilibrium real balances), has substantial predictive power for future inflation. The real money gap contains more information about future inflation than the output gap and the Eurosystem's money-growth indicator (the gap between current M3 growth and a reference value). The results suggest that the Eurosystem's money-growth indicator is an inferior indicator of future inflation.

Firefighter fatalities in Sweden, 1937 - 2016

The purpose of this work was to present collective data on firefighter fatalities in Sweden between 1937 and 2016. Data presented is directly related to operations only. Fatalities due to long-term exposure of gases, particles, and physical/psychological stress or similar were not included in the study. Also, accidents involving ambulances as well as fatalities in direct relation to physical training were excluded. The data was collected from a large collection of newspaper articles, periodicals, magazines and reports. Over the period a total of 56 fatalities occurred, of which 19 fatalities were due to traumas, 15 fatalities were related to burns, 6 were related to road accidents or involved vehicles, 4 fatalities occurred during training, 4 due to cardiovascular problems, 7 due to asphyxiation and 1 fatality was due to drowning. 26 fatalities occurred inside structures and 30 outside.Conclusions from the data included that fatalities related to road accidents or accidents involving fire apparatus seems to be the highest cause in more recent cases and that fatalities related to structural firefighting seems to be the highest cause before introducing requirements on bringing a hose into structures (requirements introduced in 1986). Overall, traumas seems to be the cause to most fatalities in the Swedish fire service. Due to the small size of the dataset in conjunction with a long period in time, conclusions have been drawn with great caution

Law and Digital Society

In this article we argue the need for more socio-legal scrutiny in a digitally mediated and data-driven development. We focus and briefly outline socio-legally relevant aspects of the “sharing” economy, that poses a number of conceptual issues on how we understand and regulate innovative platform based ventures. This also arguably underscores a number of issues relating to the role of consumer and user data and the implications of this “datafication”, not least in terms of questions of accountability and balancing of both powers and privacy in a data-driven world that often is described as a “black box” (cf. Pasquale, 2015) in the sense that much of the automated processes – such as the workings of algorithms and third party trade of consumer data – is withheld from insight and transparency

Intellectual Property Law Compliance in Europe: Illegal File Sharing and the Role of Social Norms

The current study empirically demonstrates the widely discussed gap between copyright law and social norms. Theoretically founded in the sociology of law, the study uses a well-defined concept of norms to quantitatively measure changes in the strength of social norms before and after the implementation of legislation. The ‘IPRED law’ was implemented in Sweden on 1 April 2009, as a result of the EU IPR Enforcement Directive 2004/48/EC. It aims at enforcing copyright, as well as other IP rights, when they are violated, especially online. A survey was conducted three months before the IPRED law came into force, and it was repeated six months later. The approximately one thousand respondents between fifteen and twenty-five years-of-age showed, among other things, that although actual file-sharing behaviour had to some extent decreased in frequency, social norms remained unaffected by the law

Digital Consumption and Over-Indebtedness Among Young Adults in Sweden

This LUii report presents empirical results from studies on consumption and over-indebtedness in Swedish young adults in a digital context. The studies have been conducted through in-depth interviews with municipal financial counsellors as well as a quantitative survey with approximately 1,100 respondents in a sample representative of Swedes from 18 to 25 years old. The report includes an extensive literature review on over-indebtedness and consumption in a digital context. The purpose of the project has been to form a better understanding of in what ways the digitization of our everyday lives – including consumption, credit handling and overall communication – influences economic vulnerability among young adults. The research report is written by researchers linked to Lund University Internet Institute (LUii) and has been funded by the Swedish Enforcement Authority. The research has also been conducted in connection with a wider interdisciplinary research theme on ”The Credit Society”, at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies at Lund University. The research group is led by Stefan Larsson, Associate Professor in Technology and Social Change, and involves Lupita Svensson, PhD in Social Work, and Hanna Carlsson, PhD in Information Science. The work with the literature review received invaluable help from Fredrik Åström, bibliometrician and Associate Professor at Lund University. The empirical research was conducted during 2015 and early 2016

Anticipated Alternative Instrument-Rate Paths in Policy Simulations

This paper specifies a new convenient algorithm to construct policy projections conditional on alternative anticipated policy-rate paths in linearized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, such as Ramses, the Riksbank's main DSGE model. Such projections with anticipated policy-rate paths correspond to situations where the central bank transparently announces that it, conditional on current information, plans to implement a particular policy-rate path and where this announced plan for the policy rate is believed and then anticipated by the private sector. The main idea of the algorithm is to include among the predetermined variables (the "state" of the economy) the vector of nonzero means of future shocks to a given policy rule that is required to satisfy the given anticipated policy-rate path.