The article is intended as a contribution to the ongoing conceptual development of corporate sustainability. At the business level sustainability is often equated with eco-efficiency. However, such a reduction misses several important criteria that firms have to satisfy if they want to become truly sustainable.

This article discusses how the concept of sustainable development has evolved over the past three decades and particularly how it can be applied to the business level. It then goes on to describe the three types of capital relevant within the concept of corporate sustainability: economic, natural and social capital.

From this basis we shall then develop the six criteria managers aiming for corporate sustainability will have to satisfy: eco-efficiency, socio-efficiency, eco-effectiveness, socio-effectiveness, sufficiency and ecological equity. The article ends with a brief outlook towards future research. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment

Beyond the business case for corporate sustainability

Historically, the fields of exchange-rate economics and microstructure finance have progressed independently of each other. Recent interaction, however, has given rise to a microstructure approach to exchange rates. This book focuses on the economics of financial information and how microstructure tools help to clarify the types of information most relevant to exchange rates. The microstructure approach views exchange rates from the perspective of the trading room, the place where exchange rates are actually determined. Emphasizing information economics over institutional issues, the approach departs from three unrealistic assumptions common to previous approaches: that all information relevant to exchange rates is publicly available, that all market participants are alike in their goals or in how they view information, and that how trading is organized is inconsequential for exchange rates. The book shows how exchange-rate behavior previously thought to be particularly puzzling can be explained using the microstructure approach. It contains a combination of theoretical and empirical work.

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The Microstructure Approach to Exchange Rates

This paper finds that, concurrent with the rapid growing index investment in commodities markets since early 2000s, futures prices of different commodities in the US became increasingly correlated with each other and this trend was significantly more pronounced for commodities in the two popular GSCI and DJ-UBS commodity indices. This finding reflects a financialization process of commodities markets and helps explain the synchronized price boom and bust of a broad set of seemingly unrelated commodities in the US in 2006-2008. In contrast, such commodity price comovements were absent in China, which refutes growing commodity demands from emerging economies as the driver.

Index Investment and Financialization of Commodities

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a survey on female labor supply. The chapter surveys theoretical and empirical work on the labor supply of women, with special reference to women in Western economies, primarily the United States, in modern times. The behavior of female labor supply has important implications for many other phenomena, including marriage, fertility, divorce, the distribution of family earnings and male-female wage differentials. The labor supply of women is also of interest, because of the technical questions it poses. For example, because many women do not work, corner solutions are at least potentially a very important issue in both the theoretical and empirical analysis of female labor supply, even though in other contexts (for example, studies of consumer demand) corner solutions are often ignored. The chapter presents some “stylized facts” about female labor supply, and then discusses a number of theoretical models of special interest for understanding female labor supply. After considering empirical studies of the labor supply of women, the chapter concludes with some suggestions for future research. The chapter discusses major trends and cyclical patterns in time-series data, and then examines cross-sectional phenomena.

Chapter 2 Female labor supply: A survey

We construct an equally-weighted index of commodity futures monthly returns over the period between July of 1959 and December of 2004 in order to study simple properties of commodity futures as an asset class. Fully-collateralized commodity futures have historically offered the same return and Sharpe ratio as equities. While the risk premium on commodity futures is essentially the same as equities, commodity futures returns are negatively correlated with equity returns and bond returns. The negative correlation between commodity futures and the other asset classes is due, in significant part, to different behavior over the business cycle. In addition, commodity futures are positively correlated with inflation, unexpected inflation, and changes in expected inflation.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID677512_code223089.pdf?abstractid=560042&rulid=60281&mirid=3

Facts and Fantasies About Commodity Futures

﻿LEAVING aside the courageous efforts of people around Monthly Review and Science and Society there has, by and large, been hardly any Marxist tradition among American intellectuals. However, during the last few years the situation has considerably changed and there is now a growing interest in Marxism, particularly among the younger social scientists of America. The book under review falls within this trend.

Value and Capital

This paper is concerned with socialism purely as a theoretical category, leaving aside the historical movements and acts that have occurred in its name. "Early Bolshevism" refers to Bolshevism before Stalin's consolidation of power. Marx's notion of post-capitalist society - "communism", "socialism", "society of free and associated producers" - envisaged a society that has left behind all the vehicles of exploitation and oppression of the old society, such as state, commodity production, money, wage labour, to name the principal ones. This is contrasted with the notion of socialism as it appears in the writings of the early Bolsheviks - Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky. It turns out that the socialism emerging from the works of these avowed "Marxists" is the exact opposite of the socialism one finds in Marx's extant texts.

Paresh Chattopadhyay

Papers

Value and Capital

Worlds Apart: Socialism in Marx and in Early Bolshevism