Managing service employees: literature review,expert opinions,and research directions

This article reviews the service management and marketing literature on managing people with a particular emphasis on managerial relevance. This review explores the market and financial results of managing people effectively, emphasizing that it is probably harder to duplicate high-performing human assets than any other corporate resource. The challenges inherent in boundary-spanning frontline jobs are discussed, including role conflict and emotional labor. Next, recommended human resources (HR) strategies and practices related to recruitment, training, empowerment, service delivery teams, and employee motivation are reviewed. The literature review concludes with a section on service culture, climate, and leadership. Each section is complemented with further research suggestions that emerged from interviews with eight academic and practitioner experts. The last section outlines six themes for new research opportunities with high potential managerial relevance; they relate to (1) the financial impact of HR practices and strategies, (2) motivating service employees, (3) training, (4) emotional labor, (5) dealing with rude customers, and (6) the impact of technology on managing service employees.     

A number‐of‐modes reference rule for density estimation under multimodality

We consider kernel density estimation for univariate distributions. The question of interest is as follows: given that the data analyst has some background knowledge on the modality of the data (for instance, ‘data of this type are usually bimodal’), what is the adequate bandwidth to choose? We answer this question by extending Silverman's idea of ‘normal‐reference’ to that of ‘reference to a Gaussian mixture’. The concept is illustrated in the light of real data examples.     

Competition among banks and the pass-through of monetary policy

This paper introduces monopolistically competitive financial intermediaries into the New Keynesian DSGE setting. Modelling bank market power explicitly contributes to understanding two empirical facts: (i) The short-run transmission of changes in money market rates to bank retail rates is far from complete and heterogeneous. (ii) Stiffer competition among commercial banks implies that loan rates correlate more tightly with the policy rate. In my model, the degree of monopolistic competition in the banking sector has a sizeable impact on the pass-through of changes in the policy rate. In particular, a more competitive market for bank credit amplifies the efficiency of monetary policy.     

Modeling of CPDOs – Identifying optimal and implied leverage

When the subprime crisis started to emerge, collateralized products based on credit default swap (CDS) exposures combined with security features seemed to be a more rational alternative to classic asset backed securities. Constant Proportion Collateralized Debt Obligations (CPDOs) are a mixture of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and CPPIs with inverse mechanism. This new asset aims at meeting the investors’ demand for credit derivatives with security enhancements, but to our knowledge quantitative approaches for pricing other than simulation algorithms do not exist yet. CPDOs became famous notably by Standard & Poor’s rating model error which illustrated that closed-form analytical pricing is necessary in order to evaluate and understand complex derivatives. This article aims to shed a light on CPDOs’ specific structural enhancements and mechanisms. We quantify inherent risks and provide a dynamic closed-form pricing formula.