AMBITIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR ASSESSING MILITARY PERFORMANCE IN CRISIS RESPONSE OPERATIONS

This paper addresses the issue of measuring armed forces’ performance in crisis response operations. By means of interviews (17 respondents) and a large scale survey (1,253 respondents) field and general officers of the Netherlands Armed Forces (NAF) have been questioned on perceived organisational success in crisis response operations. The Dutch officers assess the NAF's performance positively. A number of senior officers are hesitant about the usefulness of measuring the performance of crisis response operations. According to them the context in which the operations are being executed is too complex. Most interviewees, however, are convinced that measuring performance is useful and should be improved. These military leaders express a strong need for criteria to assess their performance on the job.     

Linking job insecurity to well-being and organizational attitudes in Belgian workers: the role of security expectations and fairness

The aim of this study was to investigate how perceptions of job insecurity and fairness associate with individual well-being (job satisfaction and general health) and organizational attitudes (organizational commitment and turnover intention), under the condition that the psychological contract as perceived by the employee includes a promise on job security, or not. More specifically, we suggest that (H1) job insecurity is negatively related to individual well-being and organizational commitment and positively related to turnover intentions when job security is expected as part of the psychological contract, (H2) that job insecurity is negatively related to fairness perceptions when job security is expected as part of the psychological contract, (H3) that fairness associates positively with individual well-being and organizational commitment and negatively with turnover intentions and (H4) that the association between job insecurity, individual well-being and organizational outcomes is mediated by fairness under the condition that job security is expected as part of the psychological contract. Thus, we propose a model of mediated moderation. Results based on a sample of Belgian employees (N = 559) supported our hypotheses for organizational outcomes. For individual well-being, the mediation framework was not conditional upon a perceived promise of job security as part of the psychological contract. We conclude that employees' perceptions of job insecurity and fairness are important factors in employees' well-being and their attitudes towards the organization. More importantly, these perceptions can in part be shaped by organizational agents such as managers and supervisors. Additionally, the active utilization of the psychological contract in management strategies seems to have favourable results for the fostering of pro-organizational attitudes among employees.     

On the determinants of data breaches: A cointegration analysis

Decisions in Economics and Finance - Cyber risks and particularly data breaches constitute one of the new frontiers of risk modeling for insurers across the world. We use the cointegration...     

Semi-analytical prices for lookback and barrier options under the Heston model

Decisions in Economics and Finance - Under the Heston stochastic volatility model, we derive semi-analytical formulas for the prices of path-dependent options with payoffs linked to the maximum or...     

Accelerators as start-up infrastructure for entrepreneurial clusters

ABSTRACT

Infrastructure is commonly conceptualized as a set of facilities that play a critical role in facilitating activities by individuals and organizations. Conventionally, infrastructure is tightly linked to publicly funded projects that facilitate access to key resources and enable diverse activities. Within entrepreneurial clusters research, infrastructure includes universities, research institutions and telecommunication technologies that facilitate entrepreneurial activities. These capital-intensive investments seek to facilitate start-ups emergence by aiding access to markets and development of ideas. Accelerators facilitate the same activities and have only recently been conceptualized as start-up infrastructure. This study builds upon this research stream by elaborating on how accelerators can play this meaningful role at the cluster level. Specifically, and by relying on the analysis of empirical evidence from three distinct studies, we uncover how accelerators provide tangible and intangible dimensions of start-up infrastructure to form a positively reinforcing cycle of entrepreneurial activities. Additionally, our findings allow us to push further the idea that start-up infrastructure development can be an endogenous process involving multiple actors within the cluster. Our empirical findings and the theoretical insights derived from them have meaningful implications for the aforementioned literature, as well as start-up practitioners and policymakers linked to the funding of entrepreneurial clusters.     

Optimal prepayment and default rules for mortgage-backed securities

We study the optimal stopping problems embedded in a typical mortgage. Despite a possible non-rational behaviour of the typical borrower of a mortgage, such problems are worth to be solved for the lender to hedge against the prepayment risk, and because many mortgage-backed securities pricing models incorporate this suboptimality via a so-called prepayment function which can depend, at time t, on whether the prepayment is optimal or not. We state the prepayment problem in the context of the optimal stopping theory and present an algorithm to solve the problem via weak convergence of computationally simple trees. Numerical results in the case of the Vasicek model and of the CIR model are also presented. The procedure is extended to the case when both the prepayment as well as the default are possible: in this case, we present a new method of building two-dimensional computationally simple trees, and we apply it to the optimal stopping problem.     

从区位商视角论证构建城镇群的意义——以珠三角、大珠三角和泛珠三角区域为例

随着全球化和区域经济一体化的迅速发展,通过构建城镇群等城市联盟增强区域整体实力已成为提升城市竞争力积极有效的手段。从二十世纪九十年代初期起,先后形成的珠三角、大珠三角和泛珠三角城镇群,通过城市间的资源互补和优势扩散,带动区域整体水平,取得了跨越式发展。本文通过对珠三角、大珠三角和泛珠三角地区不同层次下各城市及区域主要产业就业人口区位商的计算比较,揭示了珠三角区域在制造业方面,大珠三角区域在生产性服务业方面及泛珠三角区域在生活性服务业方面的竞争优势,体现了不同层次城镇群内各行业的竞争发展趋势,由此验证了建立不同层次城镇群的必要性和竞争优势,为区域合作的政策措施提供一定的理论依据。     

Using ad hoc measures for response styles: a cautionary note

This research note addresses the challenge of how to optimally measure acquiescence response style (ARS) and extreme response style (ERS). This is of crucial importance in assessing results from studies that have tried to identify antecedents of response styles (such as age, education level, national culture). Using survey data from the Netherlands, a comparison is made between the traditional method and a more recently proposed method of measuring ARS and ERS (i.e., the convergent validity across both methods is assessed). The traditional method is based on an ad hoc set of related items. The alternative method uses a set of randomly sampled items to optimize heterogeneity and representativeness of the items. It is found that the traditional method may lead to response style measures that are suboptimal for estimating levels of ARS and ERS as well as relations of ARS and ERS with other variables (like hypothesized antecedents). Recommendations on how to measure response styles are provided.