Solvency II,asset liability management,and the European bond market – theory and empirical evidence

It is already foreseeable that Solvency II will tie capital requirements to a very comprehensive risk definition including underwriting and market risks. The new regulatory framework will demand more sophisticated tools to detect interest rate risks on both sides of the balance sheet in an integrated approach. Efforts by life insurers to level these risks could lead to an increased demand for long term fixed income securities. At this point the question arises if this industry wide change in asset demand will have or already has had an impact on prices of long-term bonds and the yield curve in the Euro-Zone?     

Soziale Pflegeversicherung und Beihilfeverordnungen: Ein Leistungsvergleich

Zusammenfassung   Im Pflegefall werden Beamte und Angestellte von unterschiedlichen Versorgungseinrichtungen unterstützt. Wie sind die Regelungen für diese beiden Besch?ftigungsgruppen ausgestaltet? Wo liegen die Unterschiede? Schneiden Beamte bei einem Leistungsvergleich besser ab? Dr. Jasmin H?cker, 29, Tobias Hackmann, 27, Dipl.-Volkswirt, und Thorsten Henne, 25, sind Mitarbeiter am Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre und Finanzwissenschaft I an der Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg.     

Why ‘Good Governance’ Fails: Lessons from Regional Economic Development in Colombia

By critically reviewing different strands of literature on institutional change and development, this essay argues that, in order to fully understand subnational economic development, we need to move away from ‘good governance' explanations in which geography‐specific analyses of power structures and elite interests are largely absent. Using findings for Colombia and insights from economic geography and heterodox political economy theories, this essay gives theoretical and conceptual guidelines and approximations for future studies on regional economic development. The contribution provides a place‐based discussion of how the historically evolved distribution of power balances, context‐specific elite interests, and the interaction between place‐bound actors and place‐less dynamics affect subnational institutional arrangements shaping policies and development outcomes. The conclusions drawn are not limited to Colombia and will prove beneficial to researchers studying regional economic development in subnational contexts elsewhere in the world.     

Top managers in the digital age: Exploring the role and practices of top managers in firms' digital transformation

This study explores the role and facilitating actions of top managers in response to the digital transformation. Building on 27 in-depth interviews with top managers and close associates from large German firms, we find that top managers respond to the digital transformation by engaging in three key actions: understanding digitalization, setting the formal context for digitalization, and leading change. Moreover, findings emphasize that top management team support is essential in firms' digital transformation. Overall, this study contributes novel insights about the consequences of top managers for firms and establishes an initial foundation for investigating top managers in the digital age.     

Financial Development and Inequality in the Global Economy

We build a heterogeneous firms model with firm‐specific wages and credit frictions to study the role of financial development for inequality in the global economy. If there are many small (non‐exporting) firms, better access to external funds reduces wage and profit inequality as well as unemployment. In contrast, if there are many large (exporting) firms, financial development might have opposite effects – especially if trade costs are low. In summary, the implications of financial development for inequality depend on the size distribution of firms and on the costs of exporting. Trade liberalization, however, raises inequality unambiguously.     

The Client as a Source of Institutional Conformity for Commitments to Core Values in the Auditing Profession*

Based on an analysis of questionnaire data from a large sample of certified auditors, we examine how the main type of client being served influences auditor conformity to the core values of their profession. We contrast auditors of (primarily) listed companies with auditors of (primarily) single member companies, that is, limited liability companies with a single owner who typically is also the only employee of the company. We show that these two groups of auditors differ in the extent to which they hold certain values important (i.e., show compliance) and in the closeness with which these values are held within each group of auditors (i.e., show convergence). Our results also demonstrate that the type of client predominantly served by an auditor is relevant for explaining variation in professional values both within and between organizational contexts. In addition, we offer a new theoretical approach to classifying auditors and analyzing their commitment to core values of the profession. We analyze commitment to values via both compliance and convergence, two often overlooked aspects of conformity to value commitments in professions.     

The relative importance of human resource management practices for innovation

Human resource management (HRM) practices are generally expected to stimulate a firm's innovation performance. However, which of these practices really pay off? Based on a unique dataset that includes detailed information for both a firm's innovation activities and a broad set of HRM practices, we find that primarily new workplace organization practices seem to enhance a firm's innovation activities. Flexible practices of working time management and incentive payment schemes show only small effects on both innovation propensity and innovation success. Further training does only affect innovation success, but not innovation propensity. Overall, we find a stronger linkage between HRM practices and innovation propensity than with innovation success. Further, we find that innovation propensity increases, first, with the number of combinations of HRM practices adopted by a firm but not with the number of combinations of HRM practices from different groups of HRM practices adopted by a firm.     

Planned or Emergent Strategy Making? Exploring the Formation of Corporate Sustainability Strategies

In strategy research, there is a consensus that strategy making resides on a continuum from planned to emergent where most strategies are made in a mixed way. Different contingency factors have been suggested to explain the factors that influence strategy making. Sustainability research seems to overlook most of this development and assumes instead that sustainability strategies are made in a purely planned way. We contribute to a better understanding of the role of different strategy making modes for sustainability in three ways. First, we point to the bias towards planned strategy formation in sustainability research. Second, we propose a new contingency factor to help explain sustainability strategy making based on the nature of the problem addressed. Third, we discuss strategy making for different types of sustainability problems. We argue that planned strategy making is expected for salient and non‐wicked problems while emergent strategy making is likely for non‐salient and wicked problems. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Asymptotically efficient recursive estimation for incomplete data models using the observed information

For a recursive maximum-likelihood estimator with step lengths decaying as 1/n, an adaptive matrix needs to be incorporated to obtain asymptotic efficiency. Ideally, this matrix should be chosen as the inverse Fisher information matrix, which is usually very difficult to compute for incomplete data models. In this paper we give conditions under which the observed information can be incorporated into the recursive procedure to yield an efficient estimator, and we also investigate the finite sample properties of these estimators by simulation.