Die Diskussion über die Portabilität von risikogerechten Transferbeträgen in der Privaten Krankenversicherung

The capital funded health insurance system in Germany (the PKV) is afflicted with a lack of competition because insurants loose their ageing provisions if they switch their insurer. This leads to prohibitive switching costs even after few years of insurance. An intensified competition can only be achieved by transferring ageing provisions with the switch-over. But this raises complex economic and actuarial questions.The article starts with a motivation of the appropriateness of calculative ageing provisions. These quantities can be transferred. A further amount has to be transferred in order to avoid risk selection. Central requests for a mechanism to determine such risk adjustment amounts are derived. After that, options for an implementation are lined out.     

Wirbelsäulenerkrankungen —Praxisfälle aus der Versicherungsmedizin

Back problems are very widely spread among the population and incur a high cost for the public at large. Screening methods such as X-rays, CTs and so on frequently help to diagnose degenerative changes to the spine, which are then regarded as the cause of the pain. However, other causes (e. g. psychosomatic causes) are also frequently at the root of the back pain. The implications that back problems have for private occupational disability insurance are explained in this article.     

Corporate social responsibility: Doing well by doing good

Saving the rain forest from yet another palm oil plantation would certainly garner a company favorable attention from environmentalists, but how would its shareholders react? In this article, we show that by strategically practicing corporate social responsibility (CSR), a company can ‘do well by doing good’; in other words, it can make a profit and make the world a better place at the same time. CSR is regarded as voluntary corporate commitment to exceed the explicit and implicit obligations imposed on a company by society's expectations of conventional corporate behavior. Hence, CSR is a way of promoting social trends in order to enhance society's basic order, which we define as consisting of obligations that cover both the legal framework and social conventions. Due to globalization, companies are now less constrained by society's basic order than they have been in the past. Because different countries have different laws and standards, there are more ways to get away with less than ideal behavior in the quest for greater and greater profits. Nearly everyone agrees that this is not a good thing, but what can be done? Via this article, we offer an understanding of CSR that could be the answer. Herein, we contend that practicing CSR is not altruistic do-gooding, but rather a way for both companies and society to prosper. This is especially true when CSR is conceived of as a long-range plan of action.     

Audit committee characteristics and firm performance during the global financial crisis

We address the question ‘do governance enhancing audit committee (AC) characteristics mitigate the firm performance impact of significant‐adverse‐economic events such as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC)?’ Our analysis reveals that smaller audit committees with more experience and financial expertise are more likely to be associated with positive firm performance in the market. We also find that longer serving chairs of audit committees negatively impacts accounting performance. However, accounting performance is positively impacted where ACs include blockholder representation, the chair of the board, whose members have more external directorships and whose chair has more years of managerial experience. We contribute to the growing body of research on the impact of audit committee governance attributes on performance during times of financial distress.