Too Many Cooks? Committees in Monetary Policy

How many people should decide monetary policy? In this article, we take an empirical perspective on this issue and analyze the relationship between the number of monetary policy decision makers and monetary policy outcomes. Using a new data set that characterizes central bank monetary policy committees (MPCs) in more than 30 countries from 1960 through 2006, we find a U‐shaped relationship between MPC size and inflation; our results suggest that the lowest level of inflation is reached at MPCs with an intermediate size of about five to nine members. Similar results are obtained for inflation variability. Other MPC characteristics also matter for monetary policy outcomes, though to a smaller degree. For instance, the membership composition of the MPC as well as the frequency of MPC membership turnover appears to affect economic variables.     

全面维修管理

摘要对全面维修管理所包含态度、战略、组织机构、设施、人力资源管理、计算机化的维修管理系统、持续改进以及丈档九个部分,做了详尽的论述     

Tests of ex ante versus ex post theories of collateral using private and public information

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant empirical literature has been unable to isolate each of these effects. This paper attempts to do so using a credit registry that is unique in that it allows the researcher to have access to some private information about borrower risk that is unobserved by the lender. The data also include public information about borrower risk, loan contract terms, and ex post performance for both secured and unsecured loans. The results suggest that the ex post theories of collateral are empirically dominant, although the ex ante theories are also valid for customers with short borrower–lender relations that are relatively unknown to the lender.     

Defining the “global” in global leadership

While scholars have begun to develop the conceptual foundations of global leadership, few attempts have been made to unify the plethora of existing definitions. We argue that the lack of a precise, rigorous and commonly accepted definition of global leadership limits the field's conceptual and empirical progress. Building on recommended practice for construct definitions, we first review and critique existing definitions of global leadership. Second, we specifically focus on explicating the global construct encompassed by the global leadership phenomenon and propose three dimensions along which this sub-construct can be analyzed: complexity, flow, and presence. Finally, we offer a revised construct definition and conclude with implications for research and practice.     

Reconsidering Media Discourses on Food Crisis from a Quantitative Perspective

In 2007–2008, when food prices started to increase dramatically, purchasing power parity of consumers, especially the urban poor, started to decrease automatically. High food prices were argued to cause poverty, hunger, and food riots among urban populations. Henceforward, “food crisis” became a new storyline in the current debate. In contrast, in the pre-2007 period, when rural farmers had been facing negative welfare effects of low food prices for many years, there were no crisis talks. This article analyzes different media coverage of urban consumers and rural producers under changes in relative incomes for the 2000–2013 period and propounds media bias on the food crisis debate by using content analysis and the OLS regression model.     

How Productive Is Workplace Health and Safety?

In this paper, we investigate the causal impact of workplace health and safety practices on firm performance, using Danish longitudinal matched employer–employee data merged with unique cross‐sectional representative firm survey data on work environment conditions. We estimate standard production functions, augmented with workplace environment indicators, addressing both time‐invariant and time‐varying potentially relevant unobservables in the production process. We find positive and large productivity effects of improved physical dimensions of the health and safety environment, specifically, “internal climate” and “monotonous repetitive work”.     

Managing the Quality of Marketing Data: Cost/benefit Tradeoffs and Optimal Configuration

A large majority of work in database marketing deals with what to do with data when it is available. This paper focuses on an aspect of data that has not been visited frequently in the database/interactive marketing literature—managing the quality of data resources from a profit point of view. While costly to achieve and sustain, high data quality is essential for effective database marketing. The notion that “more is better” very often prevails in data quality management decisions, essentially with very little consideration, if any, of cost. This paper suggests that data quality management decisions should be driven by considerations of cost–benefit tradeoffs and profit maximization. It specifically addresses data quality decisions which are highly relevant in the database marketing area: the subset of data records managed, reflecting time-span coverage, and the targeted quality levels in this subset. Decisions of these types are routinely made based on satisfying technical and functional requirements. In this study, we propose a model that quantifies the benefits and the costs associated with these decisions, and permits optimizing them from a profit maximization standpoint. The paper describes the model development, discusses its implications for data quality management decisions, and highlights its potential contributions with illustrative examples.     

Nanomaterials and the Precautionary Principle in the EU

This article focuses on the risks of nanomaterials and nanotechnologies, and the challenges they pose to European consumer law. These risks are exemplary for the sociological phenomenon of modern risk society, living under the condition of uncertainty with regard to the likelihood and the extent of possible negative effects. Generally, in law important functions in risk societies are fulfilled by the precautionary principle. It serves both, as a justification for state measures vis-à-vis other legal interests, especially economic human rights, and as a request for state action in response to possible risks. This paper will argue that the precautionary principle applies at least to health protection as a core part of consumer protection and basically EU law is well equipped to deal with uncertainties. This is established in case law and practice. However, although there is pressure to apply the precautionary principle to nanomaterials and nanotechnologies, the European Commission has adopted a rather modest approach. That has been criticized especially by the European Parliament. For dealing with the gap in basic research and methodology, this article suggests a burden sharing in financing taking into account both, the precautionary principle and the principle of proportionality.     

Ein simulationsbasierter Renditevergleich von fondsgebundenen Altersvorsorgeprodukten

The demographic change and its consequences forces citizens of Germany to realign towards private insurance products. This decision should be based on structured analyses. Most recent studies were inconclusive regarding this decision.As investments are commonly compared using average developments of the underlying, the possibility to switch the underlying during the duration of the investment, they are not represented accordingly and therefore bias the results of the calculation. We perform a thorough simulation analysis to compare two competing investments for retirement provisions while respecting additional costs and tax implications of switching.Without any switching the evaluation of other studies is generally verified (pure investment beats insurance product). But as soon as switching is implemented the tax advantage of insurance products is overcompensating the cost advantage of a pure investment solution. Further research should aim in this direction.