Strategic Leadership Communication for Crisis Network Coordination

In large-scale societal crises, organizations involved in saving lives and protecting the public need to collaborate and coordinate their crisis communication to minimize damage and increase resilience. This study analyzed strategic leadership communication fostering such coordination in a network consisting of 24 members representing a variety of authorities, organizations and units established during a large forest fire in Sweden. As the crisis unfolded over a two-week period, 10 network meetings were observed and audio recorded. Discourse analysis was employed to analyze network leaders’ and members’ communication during the meetings. Findings illustrate that leadership communication strategies that fostered networked coordination of organizations’ crisis communication differ in significant ways from leadership communication in noncrisis and team contexts. Salient leadership communication strategies of directing/structuring and encouraging/facilitating were employed during crisis network meetings and functioned to coordinate involved organizations’ crisis communication efforts during time pressure. The study contributes with new knowledge of strategic leadership communication for crisis network coordination, which is important to crisis management and can be used in crisis preparation to enhance resilience.     

The Quality of Insurance Intermediary Services—Empirical Evidence for Germany

Competing insurance intermediaries provide heterogeneous services that are difficult for incompletely informed consumers to assess. Transaction cost economics, search theory, and principal‐agent theory provide arguments on product quality differences between exclusive agents and independent intermediaries. This article uses a sample of 927 insurance intermediaries in Germany. By performing OLS estimations, we test the impact of the different distribution channels and other factors on intermediaries’ service quality. Depending on the proxies used for service quality, we find mixed evidence for the product quality hypothesis. Service quality depends to a large extent on the information‐gathering and processing activities of the individual intermediaries, independent of the respective distribution channel.     

Sensibler Umgang verhindert Retraumatisierung

Traumatische Erfahrungen begleiten Betroffene ein Leben lang - Wird bei einer Krankenhauseinweisung oder beim Umzug in ein Pflegeheim die Posttraumatische Belastungsst?rung nicht erkannt, kann es leicht zu Traumareaktivierungen kommen, die auch juristisch bedeutsame Entscheidungen nach sich ziehen k?nnen.     

The influence of pension funds on corporate governance

Although pension funds have gained importance in the last two decades, their role has not been described in detail by economic models. This article focuses on the scope of these institutional investors when they are not satisfied with a management team of a company in which the pension fund holds a block of shares. Stock holdings by pension funds are largely dispersed. Therefore, any intervention by pension funds in corporate governance requires the formation of a coalition of pension funds. The realization of a coordinated intervention, in turn, is subject to the problems related to the provision of public goods, such as free riding. We find that the stock dispersion and the combined share of pension funds, coordination costs and the attractiveness of the exit option are relevant factors for determining the probability of the success of interventions.     

Outsourcing of Unionized Firms and the Impact of Labor Market Policy Reforms

This paper shows that outsourcing of parts of the workforce in unionized firms leads to wage moderation both in the case of strategic and flexible outsourcing. As long as the share of the outsourced workforce is not too large, this wage‐moderation effect on domestic employment outweighs the direct substitution effect so that domestic employment increases in unionized firms as outsourcing costs fall. With respect to the impact of labor tax reform changes in the wage tax rate, the tax exemption and the unemployment benefit payments affect domestic wage setting in the same way as in the absence of outsourcing. Furthermore, increasing the degree of tax progression by keeping the relative tax burden per worker constant continues to be good for employment. However, except for low outsourcing activities, the impact of these policy measures will become smaller as outsourcing costs fall.     

Do time limits in the sickness insurance system increase return to work?

This article analyzes the effect of stricter enforcement of the eligibility criteria in the Swedish sickness insurance (SI) system. In 2008, time-restricted assessments of the individual’s working capacity on the 91st and 181st sick day was introduced. Taking advantage of the quasi-experimental feature of the intervention, I find a large and significant increased exit rate around the 181-day assessment. The impact is the result of longer spells outside SI-benefits, indicating that the stricter rules create disincentives to report sick.     

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.