Testing the risk as feeling and risk as analysis perspective for insurance: the antecedents of purchasing unit-linked life insurance products

Risk and uncertainty are critical to human decision-making. Yet our understanding of the underlying traits that present the foundation of decision-making remains limited. The work develops a causal model of the antecedents of consumers’ purchase behavior in the context of unit-linked life insurance products. Our experimental approach (n?=?929) builds on the risk as analysis and risk as feeling perspective, which entails huge theoretical and practical contributions. Risk avoidance and uncertainty avoidance are identified to strongly influence the product perceptions. We complement our findings by investigating the conditions that favor the influence of both traits by investigating moderating effects.     

Policy instruments and self-reported impacts of the adoption of energy saving technologies in the DACH region

Empirica - Using a large sample of enterprises from a survey that was simultaneously conducted in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, we study the self-reported impacts of the adoption of...     

The Worth of Values – A Literature Review on the Relation Between Corporate Social and Financial Performance

One of the older questions in the debate about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is whether it is worthwhile for organizations to pay attention to societal demands. This debate was emotionally, normatively, and ideologically loaded. Up to the present, this question has been an important trigger for empirical research in CSR. However, the answer to the question has apparently not been found yet, at least that is what many researchers state. This apparent ambivalence in CSR consequences invites a literature study that can clarify the debate and allow for the drawing of conclusions. The results of the literature study performed here reveal that there is indeed clear empirical evidence for a positive correlation between corporate social and financial performance. Voices that state the opposite refer to out-dated material. Since the beginnings of the CSR debate, societies have changed. We can therefore clearly state that, for the present Western society, “Good Ethics is Good Business.”     

Falling in love with brands: a dynamic analysis of the trajectories of brand love

This article presents a study designed to investigate and map the trajectories of brand love. Consumers described experiences related to the initiation and evolution of their relationships with their most loved brand. Participants were asked to graphically trace the course of their feelings toward their currently most loved brand and to recall the events that influenced those feelings. The paths toward brand love followed five distinct trajectories, labeled as “slow development,” “liking becomes love,” “love all the way,” “bumpy road,” and “turnabout.” The formative experiences shaping these trajectories often include individual, personal, and private experiences that are largely outside any marketer’s control.     

Learning about beta: Time-varying factor loadings, expected returns, and the conditional CAPM

We amend the conditional CAPM to allow for unobservable long-run changes in risk factor loadings. In this environment, investors rationally “learn” the long-run level of factor loadings from the observation of realized returns. As a consequence of this assumption, we model conditional betas using the Kalman filter. Because of its focus on low-frequency variation in betas, our approach circumvents recent criticisms of the conditional CAPM. When tested on portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market, our learning-augmented conditional CAPM passes the specification tests.     

Did closures do any good? Labour productivity,mine dynamics,and rationalization in interwar Ruhr coal mining

Throughout the late 1920s, German coal mining saw an exceptional surge in labour productivity, led by the performance of the Ruhr coal mines. It is commonly accepted in the relevant literature that the economy‐wide ‘rationalization boom’ explains that pattern. This study tests the related hypothesis that ‘negative rationalization’, in the form of a massive wave of mine closures over the period 1924–9, played a significant role in stimulating aggregate labour productivity in the Ruhr coal district. Using an original dataset for the totality of Ruhr coal mines, the causes of productivity change over the broader period 1913–38 are identified, using the decomposition method of Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan. Results suggest that labour productivity was driven largely by improvements at individual mines, attributable to the intensified mechanization of underground operations. In sharp contrast, turnover effects were marginal, overall, compared to the effects stemming from the producer dynamics among surviving mines. Thus, the practical productivity implications of mine closures during the rationalization boom are negligible and overrated in the literature. These findings indicate the necessity of testing the relative importance of ‘negative rationalization’ in the form of plant closures in other branches of the Weimar economy.     

Multi-Criteria Analysis of Grid Expansion Concepts on the Low Voltage Level

In recent years, the power generation and consumption in Germany have undergone fundamental changes. New political regulations and the renewable energy law have resulted in a sharp increase in the installed generation capacities of photovoltaics connected to a low voltage grid. Distribution system operators are faced with the challenge of preventing grid component overload as well as a violation of voltage range. Due to increasing requirements of grid expansion in future years, distribution system operators must evaluate new expansion concepts compared to conventional ones. One interesting approach is the installation of Voltage Regulated Distribution Transformers (VRDT) regulating the voltage level of distribution grids. In this paper, the local network of one of the largest German distribution system operators is analysed in the context of future requirements for grid expansion using the conventional and VRDT expansion. Grid structures have grown over the last decades and therefore vary widely in their grid topologies. A classification of the entire grid in a few classes results in high inaccuracies. Therefore, the creation of synthetic grid structures is developed for the calculation of the required network extension. In addition, both grid expansion concepts are evaluated not only for financial aspects, but against environmental, economic, technological, and social dimensions using a multi-criteria decision making approach. The study shows a high market potential for VRDTs in low voltage grids with an increasing enforcement level of photovoltaics.     

Alternative Benchmarks for Evaluating Mutual Fund Performance

While real estate investment trusts (REITs) have experienced very high growth rates over the past 15 years, the growth in mutual funds that invest in REITs has been even more dramatic. REIT mutual fund returns are typically presented relative to the return on a simple value-weighted REIT index. We ask whether including additional factors when benchmarking funds' returns can improve the explanatory power of the models and offer more precise estimates of alpha. We investigate three sets of REIT-based benchmarks, plus an index of returns derived from non-REIT real estate firms, namely homebuilders and real estate operating companies. The REIT-based factors are a set of characteristic factors, a set of property-type factors and a set of statistical factors. Using traditional single-index benchmarks, we find that about 6% of the REIT funds exhibit significant positive performance using traditional significance levels, which is more than twice what random chance would predict. However, with the multiple-index benchmarks that we prefer, this falls considerably to only 0.7%. In addition, we find that these sets of factors and the non-REIT indices better explain the month-to-month returns of the REIT mutual funds. This suggests that investors or researchers evaluating REIT mutual fund performance may benefit from a multiple-benchmark approach.