Firm integration strategies and imperfect labour markets

This paper introduces labour market imperfections into a three‐country model to study the determinants of firm integration strategies in an open economy. Accounting simultaneously for the decision upon in‐house production versus international outsourcing and the decision upon exporting versus horizontal foreign investment, the analysis points to a crucial role of labour market frictions for the interaction of vertical and horizontal aspects of firm integration strategies in a general equilibrium environment. Beyond that, the analysis sheds light on the consequences of integrating developing countries into the global market, thereby pointing to hitherto unexplored effects arising from adjustments of firm integration strategies. In a welfare analysis, we show that the existence of gains from trade crucially depends on whether firm integration strategies are endogenous or not.     

Kindermarketing aus neurologischer Sicht: Empfehlungen für ethisch korrekte Gestaltungen des Marketing-Mix

Children are subject to fundamental developmental processes concerning perception, information processing and product understanding. Since children are targeted by the consumer goods industry with different marketing techniques, the critical question arises, whether these techniques support children’s decision making or foster erroneous purchases with crucial later health consequences. In this article we review interdisciplinary findings on children’s development and yield implications for the marketing mix. We use Piaget’s psychological framework, enriched with recent neuroeconomic findings for analyzing consequences of marketing campaigns and techniques that are frequently used. Furthermore we derive several conclusions for ethical marketing techniques to children and rise empirical questions that issue critical marketing techniques more precisely.     

Credit risk securitization and bank soundness in Europe

Using a unique sample of 749 cash and synthetic securitization transactions issued by 60 stock-listed bank holdings in the EU-13 plus Switzerland over the period from 1997 to 2007 this paper provides empirical evidence that credit risk securitization has a negative impact on the issuing banks’ financial soundness. Baseline findings hold even when controlling for likely reverse causality by employing instrumental variable techniques and substituting the accounting-based z-score ratio by market-based indicators of bank risk. Moreover, investigating the relationship between credit risk securitization and single z-score components in order to evaluate significant transmission channels proposed by relevant theoretical literature, we find a negative impact of securitization on bank profitability and capital environment as well as a positive relationship between securitization and the issuing bank's return volatility. Against the background of our empirical results we underline that the decision by the Basel Committee to enhance the new Basel III framework in the field of securitization is a step in the right direction.     

Institutional Factors Influencing the Size and Structure of Tourism: Comparing Dalarna (Sweden) and Maine (USA)

This paper explains why neither Maine, USA's comparatively laissez faire economic and land use institutions, nor Dalarna, Sweden's more heavily regulated economy, seems well designed to make tourism a powerful economic development engine. The paper focuses on three clusters of institutions that have a major influence on tourism's scale, economic structure, and long-term sustainability. Labour laws and labour market institutions are important determinants of tourism employment, job quality, product mix, production methods, and regional competitiveness. Land ownership and property rights influence both the incentives facing landowners, tourists, and tourism businesses and stresses on ecosystem carrying capacity. Commodity taxes affect the absolute and relative prices of various tourist services and, via feedback effects on demand, influence tourism's aggregate scale, activity mix and transportation/location patterns. The paper employs institutional contrasts between Dalarna and Maine to frame hypotheses that will guide a larger comparative study of sustainable tourism in forest regions. Perhaps most controversially, we hypothesise that Sweden's venerable right of common access (allemansrätten), as currently implemented, impedes sustainable tourism development. An appendix sketches the current state of tourism in the two regions.     

Beyond the Bounded Instrumentality in Current Corporate Sustainability Research: Toward an Inclusive Notion of Profitability

We argue that the majority of the current approaches in research on corporate sustainability are inconsistent with the notion of sustainable development. By defining the notion of instrumentality in the context of corporate sustainability through three conceptual principles we show that current approaches are rooted in a bounded notion of instrumentality which establishes a systematic a priori predominance of economic organizational outcomes over environmental and social aspects. We propose an inclusive notion of profitability that reflects the return on all forms of environmental, social, and economic capital used by a firm. This inclusive notion of corporate profitability helps to redefine corporate profitability as if sustainability matters in that it overcomes the bounded instrumentality that impairs current research on corporate sustainability. We apply this notion to different car manufacturers and develop conceptual implications for future research on corporate sustainability.     

IT Competence in Internet Founder Teams

In the Net Economy, numerous start-ups relying on Internet-based business models have been founded in the recent years. In these ventures IT experts are confronted with different requirements to those of traditional software development. It can thus be assumed that founders in the Net Economy prefer IT experts with a different competence profile. Based on an elaborate competence model for IT experts in Internet-based ventures, founder preferences are empirically analyzed and related to the novelty of the venture’s product. An adaptive conjoint analysis is applied to obtain utility values for single components of competence. Using cluster analysis, four different competence profiles are identified which correspond to prototypical IT experts bearing different core functions. Data analysis suggests that founders with more innovative products differ from founders with less innovative products in their perception of the optimal IT expert’s competence profile. The results have implications both for career decisions of IT experts and for founders of Internet start-ups who are looking for co-founding IT experts. This study is one of the first to explicitly focus on IT competence in Internet-based ventures. It therefore extends existing research on IT competence to a new and dynamic industry.     

Why is research on management accounting change not explicitly evolutionary? Taking the next step in the conceptualisation of management accounting change

In this article we discuss the evolutionary foundation of the OIE-guided management accounting change research building on the framework of [Scapens R.W. 1994. Never mind the gap: towards an institutional perspective on management accounting practice. Management Accounting Research, 5, 301–321.] and [Burns, J. and Scapens, R.W., 2000. Conceptualizing management accounting change: an institutional framework. Management Accounting Research, 11, 3–25.]. We argue that research on management accounting change should be based on evolutionary theory, but that the full potential of evolutionary theory has not yet been described or used in management accounting research. The conceptualisation and understanding of management accounting change can be improved and expanded if the evolutionary approach is developed beyond the general belief that it describes only small and gradual, often slow, changes. In this article we show that an evolutionary perspective on management accounting change implies that management accounting’s development is explained as the interaction between the evolutionary sub processes of retention (inheritance), variation and selection. Thus, both continuity and change are seen as evolutionary outcomes. These processes follow the cumulative causality that Charles Darwin proposed and Thorstein Veblen applied to the social sciences. Such a comprehensive theory, here labelled Universal Darwinism, must, however, be given substance with supporting details.