A performance analysis of participating life insurance contracts

Traditional life insurance products, in particular participating life insurance contracts, are often criticized. Their performance is often said to be poor compared to other investment alternatives. Interestingly, this perception appears to persist although very little research has been conducted into the performance of participating life insurance contracts. But are participating life insurance contracts actually bad for policyholders? We conduct a performance analysis based on contracts offered in the German market, in order to provide evidence to support decision making by policyholders.     

Asset Write‐downs: Evidence from 2001–2008

Accounting for asset write‐downs has received substantial media attention throughout the Global Financial Crisis and has been the subject of academic debate and numerous accounting regulations during the past three decades. This study provides evidence of the magnitude and frequency of quarterly asset write‐down activities for a sample of US firms between 2001 and 2008 and examines whether reported asset write‐downs mirror market and economic indicators during the sample period.     

Efficiency in Banking: Empirical Evidence from the Czech Republic

The paper examines the cost efficiency of the Czech-banking system in the 1990s by applying the distribution free approach model. Reported results indicate that foreign banks were on average more efficient than the other banks, although their efficiency was comparable with the ‘good’ small banks’ efficiency in early years of their operation. Based on the estimated results it is argued that early privatisation of state-owned commercial banks and more liberal policy towards foreign banks in the early stage of transition would have enhanced the efficiency in the banking system. Anita Taci - The views and opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of the EBRD.     

Austrian exporters: unique or alike? New insights and missing puzzle pieces

In this paper we provide detailed evidence on the performance of exporters compared to non-exporters in Austrian manufacturing industries based on firm-level data. The centrepiece of the study is the issue of the export premium, i.e. the size and productivity advantages of exporting firms compared to their purely domestic peers. We present evidence for the existence of sales, labour productivity and wage premia. These results are largely in line with the results found for other European countries. Furthermore we document the existence of large differences in these premia across industries and provide explanations for this finding. Our results are robust with regards to including additional firm control variables such as employment and R&D-related variables though the magnitudes of the export premia become much smaller. We also propose a new interpretation of the export premium estimation with firm fixed effects which we interpret as a result on export switchers. Finally, we employ a probit model to document the importance of sunk export costs for the decision to export.     

Governance and resource interaction in networks. The role of venture capital in a biotech start-up

This paper examines venture capital (VC) governance in innovation processes. The VC literature often presents the relationship between a VC firm and a start-up as dyadic and analyzes it with agency theory. In contrast, this paper deploys the resource interaction framework presented in Håkansson and Waluszewski (2002) to governance and innovation in networks. The paper reports an in-depth case study of Pyrosequencing, a Swedish biotech firm financed with VC. The results from this study reveal how the relationship between a VC and a start-up company is embedded in a wider network and how the governance of the VC spreads in the surrounding network and influences a start-up's possibilities to develop organizational and technical resource interfaces to critical counterparts such as suppliers and customers.