The multi-faceted role of experience dealing with policy risk: The impact of intensity and diversity of experiences

Firms learn from their previous experience, transfom routines into knowledge and thus develop capabilities. This holds for the market- and the non-market environment likewise. Experience is therefore useful to deal with policy risk arising from potential discretional and opportunistic behavior of political authorities, such as governments. We argue that firms can not only learn from the intensity of experience dealing with policy risk, but also from the exposure to a more diverse range of policy risk across different political environments. Testing a sample of 164 Spanish multinational firms, we find that the positive impact of diversity of experiences on the scope of internationalization is more important than the intensity of experience. Moreover, we also find a moderating impact between both types of experience. Overall, our findings emphasize the multi-faceted nature of experience and the need to disentangle the impact and interrelationships of its different components.     

Trends in Service Sourcing Practices

This paper identifies 12 current trends in sourcing practices in general and explores whether these trends are relevant for service sourcing in particular. Based on interviews with sourcing managers, it is, for example, concluded that service sourcing is becoming more systematic, formalized, and globalized with greater demands for trained staff, high-tech tools and focus on CSR. The authors have contributed equally to the article and appear in alphabetical order. The authors would like to express their gratitude to the respondents who made the study possible.     

How resilient is the German banking system to macroeconomic shocks?

Macroeconomic stress testing studies often rely on rather short sample periods due to the limited availability of banking data. They may fail to appropriately account for the cyclicality in the interaction between the banking system and macroeconomic developments. In this paper, we use a newly constructed data set on German banks’ income and loss statements over the past 39 years to model the interaction between the banking sector and the macroeconomy. Our VAR analysis indicates that the level of stress in the banking sector is strongly affected by monetary policy shocks. The results rationalize the active behavior of central banks observed during periods of financial market crises.     

Von pragmatischen Post-Docs und progressiven PraktikernAbout Pragmatic Post-docs and Progressive Practitioners

Scientific journals are a key factor for the integration of a research discipline. For their integrative capacity it is mainly important how members of a discipline use these journals as readers and authors and how they assess them. To gain more insight into this topic, all members of the German Society for Journalism and Communication Science (DGPuK) were asked to take part in an online survey during the summer of 2015. Object of this survey were the three journals Publizistik, Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft and Studies in Communication | Media. Participants were asked about the utilization of those journals, their fulfillment of general expectations towards journals in German communication science as well as about publication behavior and expectations towards the publication process. Using a cluster analysis, participants were split in five different groups, discriminant in terms of expectations, assessments and forms of utilization. Results show that the analyzed journals still do not use their full potential to create long-term commitment, especially among younger academics.     

Within‐firm wage inequality and firm‐level exports

This paper analyzes changes in within‐firm inequality of hourly wages arising from export shocks to exporting firms in Denmark. We provide causal evidence that export demand shocks increase within‐firm inequality. Decomposing overall inequality into within and between components for occupational and educational groups, the results show that exports lead to a significant increase in within‐group wage inequality but do not affect the between‐group component. We develop a partial equilibrium model, featuring heterogeneous workers, which rationalizes these observations and shows how export demand shocks induce a complementarity effect, leading to increases in wage inequality within firms.     

Determinants of indebtedness among young adults: Impacts of lender guidelines,explicit information and financial (over)confidence

For most people, borrowing money is a necessary aspect of life in the 21st century. Wisely handled, loans give consumers access to consumption too expensive for most individuals to purchase with cash, such as homes and cars. However, history shows that taking on too much debt can be detrimental for the individual consumer as well as society as a whole. In this paper, we investigate determinants of over‐indebtedness among young adults. We perform three studies in a setting focused on buying and borrowing money for a home. We show that, compared with an overall mortgage amount, explicit information about monthly payments reduces the tendency to take on too much debt (Study 1), that the amount borrowed depends on standards regarding the loan amount communicated through guidelines from the lender (Study 2), and that borrowers who are overconfident about their financial abilities tend to borrow more than less confident individuals (Study 3). These determinants and their policy implications are discussed.     

Behavioral Effects of Withholding Taxes on Labor Supply*

In most advanced economies, income tax collection uses third‐party withholding for wage income. Because withholding taxes do not necessarily reflect true effective taxes, these may give false signals of net‐of‐tax pay. We test labor supply responses to such misconceptions using laboratory experiments. Withholding taxes (and the resulting tax refunds) should be behaviorally neutral, but our results show that tax adjustments lead to effort adjustments, which suggests that withholding blurs tax incentives. While there is no statistically significant response in the overall sample, the participants in the subgroup who self‐assess to be motivated by monetary incentives (about half of the total sample) reduce their effort in response to withholding taxes and increase their effort after receiving tax refunds.     

The Department of Justice as a gatekeeper in whistleblower-initiated corporate fraud enforcement: Drivers and consequences

We examine drivers and consequences of U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight of whistleblower cases of corporate fraud against the government. We find that the DOJ is more likely to intervene in and conduct longer investigations of cases that have a higher chance of victory and yield greater monetary proceeds, indicating that DOJ enforcement is influenced by its performance measures. DOJ intervention also affects the firm- and aggregate-level fraud environment. Firms subject to DOJ intervention improve their employee relations, internal controls, and board independence, and experience lower future whistleblowing risk. Whistleblowers avoid courts and agencies with low DOJ intervention rates. In contrast, we do not find that cases pursued by whistleblowers alone affect firms' or whistleblowers' behavior, suggesting that public enforcement through DOJ intervention has a greater deterrent effect on fraud than private enforcement by whistleblowers acting alone.