"When doing good is just the start to being good": a possible tool to improve the organizational effectiveness of non-profit health care organizations

Health care is an area where many non-profit organizations do good work, relieving governments and for-profit providers of workload. They contribute often specific knowledge and competence or provide better access to patients through their cultural and ethnic affiliations. Non-profit organizations, NPOs, are often dependent on one or more significant donors, sometimes governments, sometimes for-profit health providers and mostly private/corporate donors with an interest in specific medical areas, such as Alzheimers, or in unique communities, such as the Laotian neighborhoods in Southern California. In the media, high profile scandals involving financial irresponsibility have caused shock waves around the world. Concerns among some donors over the lack of a transparent performance measurement of non-profit entities have increased with the greater call for transparency and good governance in the corporate world. Not all the scandals have been in the commercial sector; some Not for Profit Organizations (NPOs) have been identified as having less than credible governance structures (Thomson, 2003). The watchdog organization SustainAbility reported that accountability and transparency are issues on which several NPOs are found wanting (Anon., 2003) and the New York Times reports that until recently NPOs were thought to be exempt from traditional oversight; their do-good nature and the commitment of their participants were thought to be sufficient to produce positive results (Christensen, 2004).     

Legitimationsdefizite und Kompetenzen der EIOPA im Lichte der Meroni-Rechtsprechung

The establishment of the European (Financial) Supervisory Authorities (ESA) represents a new peak in the process of agencification of the administration of the European Union. The European legislator has granted the newly founded European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) numerous far-reaching powers in relation to national supervisory authorities and market participants. In this regard the question arises if the European Union was duly empowered by primary law to found this supervisory authority. It has, hitherto, also remained unclear if the extent of the powers entrusted to EIOPA is in conformity with other founding principles of European primary law and the case law of the ECJ.     

Non-parametric estimation of operational risk losses adjusted for under-reporting

Not all claims are reported when a database for financial operational risk is created. The probability of reporting increases with the size of the operational risk loss, and converges towards one for big losses. Losses in operational risk have different causes, and usually follow a wide variety of distributional shapes. Therefore, a method for modelling operational risk based on one or two parametric models is deemed to fail. In this paper, we introduce a semi-parametric method for modelling operational risk that is capable of taking under-reporting into account and being guided by prior knowledge of the distributional shape.     

Culture‐Led Discrepancies and Negotiating Conflicts in Strategic Outsourcing Alliances

Outsourcing and alliance collaboration have become prominent features of the global economy. Empirical studies demonstrate that outsourcing alliances are often not as successful as their initiators expect them to be. National cultural differences are frequently viewed as a crucial factor when such alliances fail. While empirical studies are abundant, theoretical frameworks that explicate the role of national cultural differences in shaping the dynamics of outsourcing alliances are rare. This article builds on Kumar and Nti's (1998) discrepancy model to specify how culture affects the dynamics of outsourcing alliances. We suggest that national cultural differences give rise to process and outcome discrepancies in outsourcing alliances. Notably, outsourcing alliances evolve through three stages–formation, operation and outcome–with discrepancies arising in each of these stages (Das & Teng, 2002). We develop a framework to link discrepancy management to these different stages, and to the notions of task‐oriented and relationship‐oriented cultures. Our study has a number of implications for future research and managerial practice. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

When do stable roommate matchings exist? A review

We compare different preference restrictions that ensure the existence of a stable roommate matching. Some of these restrictions are generalized to allow for indifferences as well as incomplete preference lists, in the sense that an agent may prefer remaining single to matching with some agents. We also introduce a new type of cycles and in greater detail investigate the domain of preferences that have no such cycles. In particular, we show how the absence of these cycles relates to the “symmetric utilities hypothesis” by Rodrigues-Neto (J Econ Theory 135:545–550, 2007) when applied to roommate problems with weak preferences.     

A unifying framework for the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims

In a recent paper, Thomson and Yeh [Thomson, W., Yeh, C.-H., 2008. Operators for the adjudication of conflicting claims. Journal of Economic Theory 143, 177–198] introduced the concept of operators on the space of rules for the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims. They focused on three operators in order to uncover the structure of such a space. In this paper, we generalize their analysis upon presenting and studying a general family of operators inspired by three apparently unrelated approaches to the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims. We study the structural properties of this family and show, in particular, that most of Thomson and Yeh’s results are specific cases of our study.     

Book reviews

Recent regulatory initiatives stress that an independent oversight board, rather than the management board, should assume the role of auditors' client. In an experiment, we test whether the type of client affects auditors' independence. Unique features of the German institutional setting enable us to realistically vary the type of auditors' client as our treatment variable: we portray the client either as the management preferring aggressive accounting or the oversight board preferring conservative accounting. We measure auditors' perceived client retention incentives and accountability pressure in a post-experiment questionnaire to capture potential threats to independence. We find that the type of auditors' client affects auditors' behaviour contingent on the degree of the perceived threats to independence. Our findings imply that both client retention incentives and accountability pressure represent distinctive threats to auditors' independence and that the effectiveness of an oversight board in enhancing auditors' independence depends on the underlying threat.     

Financial liberalization and the relationship-specificity of exports

We investigate the causal impact of equity market liberalizations on sectoral export performance across 91 countries (1980–1997). The increased availability of external finance has boosted trade of industries that intensively use relationship-specific inputs, and lowered exports of industries using standardized inputs.     

Intrasectoral structural change and aggregate productivity development: robust stochastic nonparametric frontier function estimates

This paper investigates the sources of total factor productivity growth in the German manufacturing sector during 1981–1998. Decompositions of aggregate productivity growth are used to identify the effects of structural change and entry–exit on aggregate productivity growth. We find a substantial rise in productivity growth after the German reunification. The bulk of this rise can be attributed to structural change and entry–exit. Two methodological refinements are implemented. The first refinement is the application of robust stochastic nonparametric approaches to frontier function analysis, and the second is the calculation of bootstrap confidence intervals for the components of the productivity decompositions.     

Makroprudenzielle Politik

The aim of macroprudential policy is to oversee financial stability and to safeguard the stability of the financial system. Systemic risk arises if distressed financial institutions put the stability of the entire financial system at risk, thus impairing its functioning and the provisioning of services to the real economy, with negative implications for economic growth. Macroprudential policy aims at increasing the overall resilience of the financial system by monitoring the allocation of risk in the financial system and by preventing the build-up of excessive risks. In the aftermath of the crisis, new institutions were established and macroprudential instruments were created. Responsibility for macroprudential policy is located mostly at the national level. Due to its international dimension it is embedded into a network of international institutions