Industrieversicherung in der Türkei im Vergleich zu Deutschland

In conjunction with the rapidly advancing industrialization of Turkey, the segment of industrial insurance has also steadily gained in importance. People seeking cover for industrial risks situated in Turkey, however, face several rather significant constrictions. Whilst some of those may be circumvented at least partially, the Turkish situation raises the question of the need for legislative reform (possibly inspired by German law) in this area. Such would foster the development of more innovative and adequate insurance products by the Turkish insurance market.     

Tax avoidance versus tax evasion: on some determinants of the shadow economy

In this paper we investigate how the possibility of (legal) tax avoidance affects the extent of (illegal) tax evasion and hence the shadow economy. We formulate a theoretical microeconomic model of household behavior in which households can participate in the official and in the shadow economy. Using comparative statics, we show that the complexity of the tax system affects participation in the shadow economy negatively, i.e. a more complex tax system with more possibilities of legal tax avoidance implies, ceteris paribus, a smaller labor supply in the shadow economy. In addition, we show that a reduction in the maximum admissible number of working hours in the official economy increases the labor supply in the shadow economy.     

The value of extended delegation in dynamic agency

One of the main advantages of delegation is that specific department level information is used. Its main disadvantage is probably that central management looses direct control over certain actions. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted trade-off. We show that delegation might be favorable even if specific knowledge is completely absent. We consider a firm that lives for two periods. Due to its organizational structure part of the tasks and decision rights is inevitably delegated to a subordinate (agent). The agent performs the tasks assigned to him, tantamount to personal effort, in each of the two periods. Besides this effort the decision to implement a particular project has to be made at the beginning of period two. With regard to the project choice, central management can decide to delegate it to the agent (decentralization). Alternatively it can make it personally (centralization). If the project choice is decentralized it remains unobservable for central management. Along with second period effort it must be motivated via an incentive contract written on period output.We analyze two different contracting regimes: long-term commitment and long-term renegotiation-proof contracts. With full commitment we find that centralization is indeed favorable as compared to delegation if no informational advantage exists. This confirms conventional wisdom. However, the result does not necessarily hold with renegotiation-proof contracts. Renegotiation-proofness may force central management to set too low second-period incentives. Delegation counteracts this effect as it allows central management to implicitly commit to a higher second-period incentive rate. This arises as both, personal effort and the project choice, rather than effort alone need to be motivated. A necessary condition for too low second-period incentives, and thus for delegation to be favorable, is a negative intertemporal correlation of output.     

The real effects of delisting: Evidence from a regression discontinuity design

We study how the delisting of a firm’s stock, and the accompanying drop in liquidity, causally affects a firm’s real economic decisions. Although delisting is endogenous, we identify a causal effect by using regression discontinuity design (RDD). This technique suits the delisting problem because the probability of delisting rises discontinuously when observable variables pass known thresholds. We find that delisting results in a modest decline in investment and cash saving and an important and robust decline in employment.     

Europäische Streitbeilegungsmechanismen bei Meinungsverschiedenheiten zwischen nationalen Versicherungsaufsichtsbehörden

In the course of the reconstruction of the European financial supervisory framework all level 3-committees (namely CEIOPS for the insurance sector) were re-established as fully-fledged authorities of the European Union. These authorities are granted authority to take decisions with immediate effect towards national supervisors. The European Financial Supervisory Authorities, however, form but the upper level of the European micro-prudential supervisory system. The day-to-day supervision of the financial markets will remain to be vested in the national supervisory authorities. By retaining a system, in which the financial supervision takes place primarily at the national level, one also remains to be faced with problems, where insurance undertakings or insurance groups act under the jurisdiction of several national supervisors. Disagreements between these supervisors will, thus, remain to be commonplace. In order to dissolve such disputes, the European legislator has provided for a formalised dispute resolution procedure in granting EIOPA a power to settle disagreements.     

The Differential Value Relevance of S&P's Core Earnings Versus GAAP Earnings: The Role of Stock Option Expense

In 2002, Standard & Poor's (S&P) introduced Core Earnings as a proprietary, uniform earnings metric, with the goal of improving financial reporting. The distinguishing feature of Core Earnings is its consistent treatment of seven adjustments to GAAP earnings for which there is no consensus adjustment by managers and analysts. We use stock price and return data to assess whether investors perceive Core Earnings to be more value relevant than GAAP earnings. The implementation of FASB 123R changed the calculation of GAAP and Core Earnings. This change allows us to assess the role of stock option expense in the valuation of earnings numbers by partitioning the sample into pre‐ and post‐FASB 123R periods and creating consistent measures of GAAP and Core Earnings. Our price results indicate that Core Earnings is more value relevant than GAAP earnings in the pre‐period after controlling for stock option expense, and in the post‐FASB 123R periods. The price results provide empirical evidence consistent with S&P's expectation that a uniformly calculated earnings measure is a more consistent and useful indicator of current performance and future earnings.     

CEO Bonus Compensation and Bank Default Risk: Evidence from the U.S. and Europe

We investigate the link between the incentive mechanisms embedded in CEO cash bonuses and the riskiness of banks. For a sample of U.S. and European banks, we employ the Merton distance to default model to show that increases in CEO cash bonuses lower the default risk of a bank. However, we find no evidence of cash bonuses exerting a risk‐reducing effect when banks are financially distressed or when banks operate under weak bank regulatory regimes. Our results link bonus compensation in banking to financial stability and caution that attempts to regulate bonus pay need to tailor CEO incentives to the riskiness of banks and to regulatory regimes.     

Poaching and Firm‐Sponsored Training

A series of seminal papers argues that poaching hampers company‐sponsored general training. Empirically, however, the existence and extent of poaching remain open questions. We provide a novel empirical strategy to identify poaching. We find that only few apprenticeship training firms in Germany are ‘poaching victims’ or ‘poaching raiders’. Victims are more likely to be in a temporary downturn and raiders are more likely to be growing. Victims hardly change their training strategy after poaching and poaching seems be a transitory event. This is an important result for countries that intend to introduce apprenticeship‐type training and need to convince firms to participate in training.     

Ein simulationsbasierter Renditevergleich von fondsgebundenen Altersvorsorgeprodukten

The demographic change and its consequences forces citizens of Germany to realign towards private insurance products. This decision should be based on structured analyses. Most recent studies were inconclusive regarding this decision.As investments are commonly compared using average developments of the underlying, the possibility to switch the underlying during the duration of the investment, they are not represented accordingly and therefore bias the results of the calculation. We perform a thorough simulation analysis to compare two competing investments for retirement provisions while respecting additional costs and tax implications of switching.Without any switching the evaluation of other studies is generally verified (pure investment beats insurance product). But as soon as switching is implemented the tax advantage of insurance products is overcompensating the cost advantage of a pure investment solution. Further research should aim in this direction.     

Evaluating the risk of patent infringement by means of semantic patent analysis: the case of DNA chips

In this paper, we are going to present a method for detecting the risks of patent infringement by evaluating similarities between patent documents on the basis of semantic patent analysis. This approach enables the user to visualize similarities in the contents on a semantic patent map by means of multi‐dimensional scaling. The effectiveness of the semantic patent map has already been demonstrated by Dressler (2006) with regard to patents of seal technology, in which documents are commonly kept short and the extracted contents are concise. This paper will open out to the field of biotechnology, where patents can easily comprise several hundreds of pages. The method presented here conveys an interdisciplinary approach and combines computer‐aided natural language processing with domain‐specific expertise of biochemical processes. This is illustrated by an authentic case of infringement involving two manufacturers of DNA chips. Our experiment will show how the infringement case is visualized on a patent map based on semantic patent analysis. This experiment can be compared with the search for a needle in a haystack, the two competitive patents representing significantly conflicting ‘needles.’ From an approximate number of 4,000 patents in the current US Class 435/6, a set of patents was selected that included the ‘needles’ mentioned. This paper will point out how such mutual interference can be detected by way of semantic patent analysis, and what advice may be given to R&D managers who are faced with the risk of patent infringement.