Human capital investments in asymmetric corporate tournaments

We consider a tournament between two workers of different abilities who choose both human capital investment and effort. The employer can influence the workers’ behavior by determining the sequence of human capital investments, i.e. the training design. The workers can either invest simultaneously or sequentially with the favorite being the first mover or sequentially with the underdog as first mover. The results show that the outcome of the tournament crucially depends on the employer’s choice of training design and on the ability difference between the workers. If the two workers clearly differ in their abilities the employer will prefer simultaneous human capital accumulation. However, if the abilities of the two workers are rather similar the employer optimally chooses sequential human capital accumulation with the underdog being the first mover.     

Statistical study of foreign exchange rates, empirical evidence of a price change scaling law, and intraday analysis

In this paper we present a statistical analysis of four foreign exchange spot rates against the U.S. Dollar with several million intra-day prices over 3 years. The analysis also includes gold prices and samples of daily foreign exchange prices over 15 years. The mean absolute changes of logarithmic prices are found to follow a scaling law against the time interval on which they are measured. This empirical law holds although the distributions of the price changes strongly differ for different interval sizes.Systematic variations of the volatility are found even during business hours by an intra-day analysis of price changes. Seasonal heteroskedasticity is observed with a period of one day as well as one week as the result of an analogous intra-week analysis; taking this into account is necessary for any future study of intra-day price change distributions and their generating process. The same type of analysis is also made for the bid-ask spreads.     

The Baltics: Continuing Boom or Bursting Bubble?

Since the late 1990s, the economies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have experienced unprecedented economic growth, which has attracted a large number of foreign investors. American companies were among the first to seek business opportunities and have invested over $1 billion in the three countries as of 2008. However, the boom—partly financed on a loose credit policy—has recently created a fragile economic situation due to soaring wages, double-digit inflation, and high current account deficits. The resulting economic deceleration in the first half of 2008 has led analysts to comment that the “Baltic Bubble” is about to burst, potentially leading to a long-term recession. Other experts, nevertheless, maintain that the three countries are only experiencing a natural consolidation, which does not seriously endanger business opportunities in the long run. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the current condition of the Baltic economies and the environment for businesses there in order to determine if the three countries will still be attractive destinations for foreign direct investment (FDI) in the future.     

Regulierung, Effizienz und das Anreizdilemma bei Investitionen in intelligente Netze

In this paper, we survey from a theoretical point of view to what extend cost-based and incentive-based regulatory regimes stimulate investments. For the purpose of this analysis, we furthermore differentiate by different efficiency measures, i.e. allocative efficiency, productive efficiency and dynamic efficiency and analyse to what extend each efficiency measure is stimulated by the regulatory regime. Eventually, we analyse to what extend regulatory incentives for network innovation in a smart grid context exist and to what extend different forms of regulation stimulate dynamic efficiency.     

A Typology of International New Ventures: Empirical Evidence from High‐Technology Industries

We examine determinants of different types of International New Ventures (INVs), namely Export Start‐up, Geographically Focused Start‐up, Multinational Trader, and Global Start‐up. Whereas this typology of INVs has been widely accepted in the literature, empirical testing of the determinants of INV types is largely missing. Our arguments build on the International New Venture Theory (INVT). Hypotheses generated from our framework are tested on 195 German high‐tech enterprises. Results show that growth orientation, prior international experience, knowledge intensity, product differentiation, and learning orientation distinguish significantly between the different INV types.