New Developments in the Theory of Adverse Selection in Competitive Insurance

We provide an overview of the paths taken to understand existence and efficiency of equilibrium in competitive insurance markets with adverse selection since the seminal work by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976). A stream of recent work reconsiders the strategic foundations of competitive equilibrium by carefully modelling the market game.     

Distribution and determinants of lifetime unemployment

The empirical literature on unemployment almost exclusively focuses on the duration of distinct unemployment spells. In contrast, we use a unique administrative micro data set for the time span 1975-2004 to investigate individual lifetime unemployment — defined as the cumulative length of all unemployment spells over a 25-year period. This new perspective enables us to answer questions regarding the long-term distribution and determinants of unemployment for birth cohorts 1950-1954. We show that lifetime unemployment is highly concentrated on a small part of the population. With censored quantile regressions we investigate the long-lasting influence of bad luck early in the professional career: Controlling for individual and firm characteristics we find that choosing at a young age what turns out to be an unfavorable occupation significantly increases the predicted amount of lifetime unemployment.     

Cicatrices de juventud. Efectos del desempleo temprano en el desempleo posterior

Para discernir si el desempleo temprano genera desempleo posterior, los autores toman datos administrativos de 700 000 individuos emparejados con su empleador y los siguen durante veinticuatro años. Tomando como instrumento del desempleo temprano las perturbaciones de la demanda de trabajo a escala empresarial, encuentran un efecto de cicatriz significativo y persistente: en la media, cada día de desempleo durante los primeros ocho años de vida activa incrementa el desempleo en plena edad de trabajar en medio día. Con regresiones cuantílicas observan que el efecto aumenta cuanto más se prolongue el desempleo temprano.     

Nachhaltigkeitsziele in der Wirtschaftspolitik — volkswirtschaftliche Überlegungen

Wirtschaftsdienst - Through the canon of the UN SDGs or the European Green Deal, sustainability goals are finding their way into legislation. From an economic point of view, these targets often aim...     

Market Orientation of Riding Schools: A Comparison of For Profit and Nonprofit Organizations Using Structural Equation Modeling

For profit and nonprofit service providers compete in different areas of economy. Market orientation is a widely acknowledged concept that influences the performance of both for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations. Nevertheless, the different underlying attitudes and motivations of voluntary or professional managers may influence the market orientation of an organization. An empirical study was conducted for investigating the influence of different attitudes toward market orientation. Groups of non- and for-profit managers are compared using the example of German riding schools. Overall, 244 volunteer and professional managers answered the survey. A structural path model was evaluated using the software SmartPLS 3. Results show that attitudes and motivations exert influence differently in the non- and the for-profit contexts. The economic situation was found to have an influence solely on the satisfaction reported by professional managers but not on the satisfaction reported by volunteers. Implications for future research on nonprofit market orientation can be drawn from the findings.     

Cross-National Sensory Segments in the Organic Market Based on Stated Preferences for the Five Basic Tastes

Taste is one of the most important motivations for purchasing food. Studies regarding sensory preferences for specific product categories prove that consumers differ in their liking of sensory attributes. However, little is known about general consumers’ taste preferences that are not related to a certain product. Therefore, this study analyzes if patterns of general taste preferences exist, and how they can be characterized. To this end, 1,796 organic consumers from six different European countries, interviewed as part of an EU-funded research project between October 2010 and February 2011, were segmented based on their stated preferences for the five basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Seven consumer segments were identified. They differed in their size as well as in their distributions of gender, age, and organic consumption frequency. All seven taste patterns can be found in each of the six study countries. As an approach toward stronger marketing-oriented sensory research, this study shows that a consumer segmentation based on general taste preferences as a fundament for sensory marketing is meaningful and promising.     

Functions of industrial supplier relationships and their impact on relationship quality

Although recent scholarly work on business relationships often discusses relationship quality as a major issue, especially with regard to the phenomenon of vendor stratification, there is still little empirical research on this important construct. In this paper, the authors provide a thorough conceptualization of relationship quality and its possible antecedents, i.e., the direct and indirect functions of the relationship for the customer. Drawing on an empirical base of 230 buyer questionnaires, the authors show that the extent to which a supplier fulfills direct and indirect functions in a relationship has a direct positive impact on the relationship quality perceived by the customer. This impact is especially strong when the customer can easily replace the supplier or, in other words, when the supplier faces competition. The findings are discussed and the authors provide managerial implications for decision-makers from both buyer and supplier organizations.     

Validating multiple structural change models–a case study

In a recent article, Bai and Perron ( 2003 , Journal of Applied Econometrics) present a comprehensive discussion of computational aspects of multiple structural change models along with several empirical examples. Here, we report on the results of a replication study using the R statistical software package. We are able to verify most of their findings; however, some confidence intervals associated with breakpoints cannot be reproduced. These confidence intervals require computation of the quantiles of a nonstandard distribution, the distribution of the argmax functional of a certain stochastic process. Interestingly, the difficulties appear to be due to numerical problems in GAUSS, the software package used by Bai and Perron. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.