Service Delivery Networks and Employment Relations at German Airports: Jeopardizing Industrial Peace on the Ground?

In this article, we ask how organizational restructuring towards a network form of service delivery challenges an established form of employment relations in Germany, that is labour–management collaboration. Building on a theoretical discussion of the marketization hypothesis, we develop a structuration perspective on the relationship between network restructuring and labour–management collaboration, which highlights the political economy of inter-firm networks. Empirically, we focus on two major airport authorities in Germany. Our findings show how these authorities at the core of service delivery networks face a strategic trade-off between short-term labour cost reductions and more adversarial employment relations. Apart from coinciding with a deterioration in working conditions for service workers, the handling of this trade-off depends on managers’ and worker representatives’ commitment to collaboration across the network. While unions and works councils initially continued with social partnership-type practices, the more adversarial management practices for enacting the network restructuring cause a fragmentation on the workers’ side and increase the conflict potential. We conclude that the agency of management and worker representatives in the enactment of inter-firm networks oscillates between more partnership-like and more conflictive practices, which turn the network restructuring into a political process with divergent outcomes for employment relations.     

Combining Matching and Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Estimation: Theory and An Application to the Evaluation of Active Labour Market Policies

We show how instrumental variable and matching estimators can be combined in order to identify a broader array of treatment effects. Instrumental variable (IV) estimators are known to estimate effects only for the compliers, representing a subset of the entire population. By combining IV with matching, we can estimate the treatment effects for the always‐ and never‐takers as well. Since in many cases these groups are the (endogenous) outcome of some assignment process, such estimates also help in judging the implications of such a selection process. In our application to the effects of participation in active labour market programmes in Switzerland, we find large and lasting positive employment effects for the compliers, whereas the effects for the always‐ and never‐participants are small. In addition, the compliers have worse employment outcomes without treatment than those who participate in the programme with or without the intervention under investigation. This suggests that the earlier assignment policy of the caseworkers was inefficient in that the always‐participants were neither those unemployed who would experience the highest expected treatment effects nor those unemployed who had the largest need for assistance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Subjective Performance Evaluations and Reciprocity in Principal–Agent Relations

We conduct a laboratory experiment with agents working on, and principals benefiting from, a real effort task in which the agents' performance can only be evaluated subjectively. Principals give subjective performance feedback to agents, and agents have an opportunity to sanction principals. In contrast to existing models of reciprocity, we find that agents tend to sanction whenever the feedback of principals is below their subjective self‐evaluations even if agents' pay‐offs are independent of it. In turn, principals provide more positive feedback (relative to their actual performance assessment of the agent) if this does not affect their pay‐off.     

ECB Monetary Policy Surprises: Identification Through Cojumps in Interest Rates

This paper proposes a new econometric approach to disentangle two distinct response patterns of the yield curve to monetary policy announcements. Based on cojumps in intraday tick data of short‐ and long‐term interest rate futures, we develop a day‐wise test that detects the occurrence of a significant policy surprise and identifies the market perceived source of the surprise. The new test is applied to 133 policy announcements of the European Central Bank (ECB) in the period from 2001 to 2012. Our main findings indicate a good predictability of ECB policy decisions and remarkably stable perceptions about the ECB's policy preferences. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transaction taxes, greed and risk aversion in an agent-based financial market model

Recent agent-based financial market models came to the result that taxing financial transactions does not per se increase financial stability and that the response of volatility and misalignments to rising tax rates seem to be u-shaped. Moreover, greed and the risk appetite of traders are often blamed for financial instability and there is no evidence how greed and risk aversion affect the effectiveness of regulations in financial markets. We aim to add to this gap in the literature by analyzing how the effectiveness of transaction taxes depend on different behavioral patterns within an agent-based framework. Our simulations indicate that a tax rate of 0.1% demarcates the stabilizing tax regime from the destabilizing one. We figure out that transaction taxes are less effective, either when chartists trade more aggressively, fundamentalists trade less aggressively, agents switch more frequently between trading strategies or only have short memory in their fitness measures. Lower risk aversion of agents, however, makes higher tax rates more effective as indicated by a flatter volatility response curve. We conclude that additional regulations should concentrate on the traders’ responsibilities for their risk-exposure.     

Institutionelle Unabhängigkeit als Freiheit vom Recht?

Die politische Unabh?ngigkeit der Europ?ischen Zentralbank wurde in den entsprechenden Vertr?gen gesichert. Wie sieht es aber mit ihrer Rechtsbindung aus? Wer kann die EZB vor Gericht aufgrund von Pfl ichtverletzungen verklagen und ist dies grunds?tzlich überhaupt m?glich? Diesen Fragen geht der Autor hier nach. Er widmet den Beitrag Ernst-Joachim Mestm?cker zu seinem 85. Geburtstag am 25. September.     

Ist mehr Innovativität im Marketing besser? Achtung,nicht-lineare Effekte!

Wie innovativ sollten Unternehmen ihr Marketing gestalten? Ist mehr Innovativit?t immer sinnvoll? Antworten auf diese Fragen gibt dieser Beitrag. Ausgew?hlte Fallstudien und eine empirische Studie belegen, dass zus?tzliche Innovationsanstrengungen ab einem bestimmten Ma? negativ wirken k?nnen.