The liquidity of bank assets and banking stability

This paper shows that an increased liquidity of bank assets, paradoxically, increases banking instability and the externalities associated with banking failures. This is because even though higher asset liquidity directly benefits stability by encouraging banks to reduce the risks on their balance sheets and by facilitating the liquidation of assets in a crisis, it also makes crises less costly for banks. As a result, banks have an incentive to take on an amount of new risk that more than offsets the positive direct impact on stability.     

Do Lower Caseloads Improve the Performance of Public Employment Services? New Evidence from German Employment Offices

The caseworker‐to‐clients ratio is an important, but understudied, policy parameter that affects both the quality and cost of public employment services that help job seekers find employment. We exploit a large‐scale pilot by Germany's employment agency, which hired 490 additional caseworkers in 14 of its 779 offices. We find that lowering caseloads caused a decrease in the rate and duration of local unemployment as well as a higher re‐employment rate. Disentangling the mechanisms that contributed to this improvement, we find that offices with lowered caseloads increased monitoring and imposed more sanctions but also intensified search efforts and registered additional vacancies.     

Do core-selecting Combinatorial Clock Auctions always lead to high efficiency? An experimental analysis of spectrum auction designs

For many years the Simultaneous Multi-Round Auction (SMRA) has been the primary auction design for spectrum sales worldwide. Recently, the core-selecting Combinatorial Clock Auction (CCA) has been used as an alternative to the SMRA in a number of countries promising strong incentives for truthful bidding and high efficiency as a result. We analyze the efficiency and auctioneer revenue of the CCA in comparison to SMRA and examine bidding behavior in both formats. The experiments are based on two value models, which resemble single- and multiband spectrum sales in the field. Such applications often allow for thousands of possible bundles. Bidders in the CCA submitted bids for only a fraction of all bundles with a positive valuation. Bundles were selected based on synergies and payoff after the primary bid rounds. As a consequence, we found efficiency of the CCA to be significantly lower than that of SMRA in the multi-band value model and auctioneer revenue of the CCA to be lower in both value models. In addition, we characterize several properties of the auction format, which result from the two-stage design and the payment and activity rules.     

New Technologies for Customer Rating: Integration of Knowledge-Based Systems and Human Judgement

Avoiding incorrect credit decisions and minimizing the required effort are crucial factors for the economic success of a bank. A basic task of credit granting is a correct valuation of a customer's annual account. CUBUS was designed to give general valuation and a first global impression of a company quickly. It also draws the user's attention to the most critical items of the balance sheet. In addition, detailed analysis and valuations of each annual account item is provided. CUBUS goals which have been achieved include increasing decision quality, improving the know-how level of the staff, improving communication among different departments and finally defining and establishing generally accepted guidelines and norms. The system allows very flexible human-computer cooperation. It works as a competent assistant which provides the following functions: autonomous valuations, reactive assistance, active consulting, interactive problem solving, tutoring and supervising. When SBC's (Swiss Bank Corporation) general management decided that all commercial customers had to be rated, an application had to be developed to make CUBUS judgements available to all credit specialists within the existing mainframe database environment. The integration of mainframe databases and transactions, knowledge-based systems running on workstations, and the judgement of human users raised the challenging question of what general principles have to be applied when such diverse components have to be combined in the most efficient way.     

A reexamination and extension of international strategy–structure theory

Using a sample of 95 German firms, the study finds general support for the traditional fits of international strategy–structure theory. Employing an information‐processing perspective, the study conceptually and empirically extends existing theory (1) to address strategy–structure fit for various types of matrix structure, and (2) by adding two new elements of international strategy to the existing international strategy–structure model: the level of international transfers and level of foreign R&D. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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