Japan’s Lost decade: Does money have a role?

We study the contribution of the stock of money to the macroeconomic outcomes of the 1990s in Japan using a small-scale structural model. Likelihood-based estimates of the parameters are provided and time stabilities of the structural relationships analyzed. Real balances are statistically important for output and inflation fluctuations and their role has changed over time. Models which give money no role give a distorted representation of the sources of cyclical fluctuations. The severe stagnation and the long deflation are driven by different causes.     

Towards a Comprehensive Framework for Environmental Management Accounting — Links Between Business Actors and Environmental Management Accounting Tools

This article develops a comprehensive framework for environmental management accounting (EMA) linking business actors and EMA tools. The proposed framework provides structure for managers to understand and assess the variety of environmental management accounting tools that have been developed to date, with the intention of encouraging their adoption. The framework systematically integrates two major components of environmental management accounting — monetary environmental management accounting (MEMA) and physical environmental management accounting (PEMA). It highlights the past/future and short/long-term time dimensions of the different tools, and the regularity of information generation, before concluding with a brief discussion about choice of the most important EMA tools.     

Asset management in an inflationary environment—Are commodities a useful hedge?

The 2008 German investment act now allows insurers to buy commodities. Taking the perspective of a German investor and using techniques of cointegration analysis this paper aims to investigate whether commodity investments can be a useful hedge against inflation. A financial asset can only be considered to be a hedge against inflation if its price is cointegrated with the general price level. The results of the study seem to imply that commodity investments may be considered as a hedge against inflation for German insurers, but only to a limited extend.     

Confronting Information Asymmetries: Evidence from Real Estate Markets

There are relatively few direct tests of the economic effectsof asymmetric information because of the difficulty in identifyingexogenous information measures. We propose a novel exogenousmeasure of information based on the quality of property taxassessments in different regions and apply this to the U.S.commercial real estate market. We find strong evidence thatinformation considerations are significant. Market participantsresolve information asymmetries by purchasing nearby properties,trading properties with long income histories, and avoidingtransactions with informed professional brokers. The evidencethat the choice of financing is used to address informationconcerns is mixed and weak.     

Do dropouts suffer from dropping out? Estimation and prediction of outcome gains in generalized selection models

In this paper we describe methods for predicting distributions of outcome gains in the framework of a latent variable selection model. We describe such procedures for Student‐t selection models and a finite mixture of Gaussian selection models. Importantly, our algorithms for fitting these models are simple to implement in practice, and also permit learning to take place about the non‐identified cross‐regime correlation parameter. Using data from High School and Beyond, we apply our methods to determine the impact of dropping out of high school on a math test score taken at the senior year of high school. Our results show that selection bias is an important feature of this data, that our beliefs about this non‐identified correlation are updated from the data, and that generalized models of selectivity offer an improvement over the ‘textbook’ Gaussian model. Further, our results indicate that on average dropping out of high school has a large negative impact on senior‐year test scores. However, for those individuals who actually drop out of high school, the act of dropping out of high school does not have a significantly negative impact on test scores. This suggests that policies aimed at keeping students in school may not be as beneficial as first thought, since those individuals who must be induced to stay in school are not the ones who benefit significantly (in terms of test scores) from staying in school. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mit weniger Angst zur Herz-OP

Pr?operatives Pflegemanagement - Mit der Card AG pflegt das Herzzentrum Münster eine sehr intensive Form zus?tzlicher Vorbereitung auf eine anstehende Herzoperation bei Kindern. Ziel des bundesweit einzigartigen Projekts: Anschauliche Informationen im Vorfeld der OP sollen Eltern und Kindern ?ngste nehmen und so den Genesungsprozess positiv beeinflussen.     

A temporal perspective on the relationship between top management team internationalization and firms' innovativeness

This study examines whether top management team (TMT) internationalization is positively related to firm innovativeness. Besides focusing on the accumulation of top managers' international knowledge and capabilities, we explore the influence of moderators reflecting temporal concerns at three levels: CEO age, TMT tenure, and firm age. Combining upper echelons theory with innovation literature and using a sample of large stock-listed German firms, we demonstrate that TMT internationalization can increase firm innovativeness. This relationship is context-dependent on the age of the CEO. Overall, this paper sheds light on the antecedents of firm innovativeness and the consequences of increasingly international TMTs.