Delay in contests

Why is there delay in contests? In this paper, we follow and extend the line of reasoning of Carl von Clausewitz to explain delay. For a given contest technology, delay may occur if there is an asymmetry between defense and attack, if the expected change in relative strengths is moderate, and if the additional cost of investment in future strength is low.     

The Strategic Social Map of a Nongovernmental Organization

Currently, the traditional states-nation, as far as their social commitments are concerned, are giving way to the nongovernmental organizations (NGO). These organizations have a mission, strategy, and goals different from those organizations looking simply for profits. Nevertheless, NGOs are concerned about using management and information systems at least as good as those used by private companies. Organizations try to develop a social strategy taking their social responsibility as starting point. In this paper, the authors describe how to fix the organization mission, its strategy and goals, and also how to make its action map. A strategy proposal will be described, as well as the way on how to put it into practice. The main goals of this paper is to describe the mission, strategy, and goals of the organization; design its strategic social map; fix the limits of the organization's action; apply the theoretical model to a NGO; and design an information model in order to manage the strategic development. The authors would like to express their gratitude to M. Dolors Celma Benaiges, lecturer at the Escola Universitària del Maresme, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, for her assistance reviewing and translating the paper.     

How Do Debit Cards Affect Cash Demand? Survey Data Evidence

This paper analyzes how EFT-POS payments and ATM withdrawals affect cash demand. In particular, survey data about Austrian individuals are employed to estimate a purse cash demand equation, which takes account of sample selection effects. The results reveal that purse cash demand is significantly and sizably affected by debit card usage and that there are significant differences in cash demand for individuals with different debit card usage frequencies. In addition, the effect of EFT-POS payments on cash use at the point-of-sale is discussed on the basis of data from a consumer transaction survey.     

Social security and retirement incentives in Austria

This paper provides an overview of the interaction between social security and retirement behavior in Austria in the decades up to the on-going reform process. The key question is, how much of the retirement behavior can be attributed to incentive effects of the pension system. We describe the labor market and retirement behavior of the elderly in Austria, survey the key features of the public pension system and finally present the results of a series of simulations aimed at assessing the retirement incentives generated by the pension system. We compute levels and accrual rates of social security wealth and implicit tax rates on continued work according to the method portrayed in Gruber and Wise [Gruber J, Wise D (1999) Social security and retirement around the world. University of Chicago Press, Chicago London]. To some extent, the sharp drop in labor force participation among the elderly must be attributed to major disincentives of the Austrian pension system; the system turns out to provide significant incentives to retire early. Past reforms have reduced the disincentives. Our results, however, show the need to further reform the public pension scheme and to reorient it stronger towards the principle of actuarial fairness.     

Testing for random effects in panel models with spatially correlated disturbances

In the empirical analysis of panel data the Breusch–Pagan (BP) statistic has become a standard tool to infer on unobserved heterogeneity over the cross-section. Put differently, the test statistic is central to discriminate between the pooled regression and the random effects model. Conditional versions of the test statistic have been provided to immunize inference on unobserved heterogeneity against random time effects or patterns of spatial error correlation. Panel data models with spatially correlated error terms are typically set out under the presumption of some known adjacency matrix parameterizing the correlation structure up to a scaling factor. This paper delivers a bootstrap scheme to generate critical values for the BP statistic allowing robust inference under misspecification of the adjacency matrix. Moreover, asymptotic results are derived for the case of a finite cross-section and infinite time dimension. Finite sample simulations show that misspecification of spatial covariance features could lead to large size distortions, while the robust bootstrap procedure retains asymptotic validity.     

A web-based system architecture for ontology-based data integration in the domain of IT benchmarking

In the domain of IT benchmarking (ITBM), a variety of data and information are collected. Although these data serve as the basis for business analyses, no unified semantic representation of such data yet exists. Consequently, data analysis across different distributed data sets and different benchmarks is almost impossible. This paper presents a system architecture and prototypical implementation for an integrated data management of distributed databases based on a domain-specific ontology. To preserve the semantic meaning of the data, the ITBM ontology is linked to data sources and functions as the central concept for database access. Thus, additional databases can be integrated by linking them to this domain-specific ontology and are directly available for further business analyses. Moreover, the web-based system supports the process of mapping ontology concepts to external databases by introducing a semi-automatic mapping recommender and by visualizing possible mapping candidates. The system also provides a natural language interface to easily query linked databases. The expected result of this ontology-based approach of knowledge representation and data access is an increase in knowledge and data sharing in this domain, which will enhance existing business analysis methods.     

Systemically important banks: an analysis for the European banking system

In this paper we perform an empirical analysis to identify systemically important banks by a few individual bank characteristics that are easy to observe in practice. This analysis builds on a new method to construct measures of systemic relevance of individual institutions that are consistent with a risk analysis at the level of the banking system, taking correlations in bank asset returns into account. We derive asset return correlations for a sample of European publicly traded banks from market data and construct two risk measures: incremental value at risk and conditional expected shortfall. Incremental value at risk quantifies the individual contributions of banks to the system’s Value-at-Risk. Conditional expected shortfall measures the increase in the expected system wide deposit insurance liability that would follow from the default of an institution. The analysis of hypothetical defaults of institutions is performed consistently with the observed distribution of asset returns by using the conditional distribution. Both measures are then analyzed in a panel regression where individual characteristics are used to explain incremental value at risk and conditional expected shortfall.     

Die Bundesbestimmtheit der Länderausgaben

Die L?nder beklagen bei Verhandlungen über die Finanzausstattung eine starke Belastung durch die Bundesbestimmtheit vieler ihrer Ausgaben. Wie hoch sind die durch bundesgesetzliche Bestimmungen verursachten Ausgaben wirklich? Wie lassen sich diese berechnen? Welche Konsequenzen ergeben sich durch die errechneten „Ausgabenverursachungsquoten“ für die Politik? Prof. Dr. Helmut Seitz, 51, ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Volkswirtschaftslehre, insbesondere Empirische Finanzwissenschaft und Finanzpolitik, an der Technischen Universit?t Dresden. Herrn Dirk Freigang, TU Dresden, danke ich für zahlreiche konstruktive Anregungen.     

Einzelbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung