Bank capital regulation,loan contracts,and corporate investment

This paper studies the link between bank capital regulation, bank loan contracts and the allocation of corporate resources across firms’ different business lines. Credit risk is lower when firms write contracts that oblige them to invest mainly into projects with highly tangible assets. We argue that firms have an incentive to choose a contract with overly safe and thus inefficient investments when intermediation costs are increasing in banks’ capital-to-asset ratio. Imposing minimum capital adequacy for banks can eliminate this incentive by putting a lower bound on financing costs.     

HRM Systems for Knowledge Workers: Differences Among Top Managers,Middle Managers,and Professional Employees

This theoretical study contributes to the debate in the field of strategic HRM on whether HRM systems should differ across employee groups within the firm. It explores differences in the efficacy of two HRM systems—high‐involvement HR and internal labor market systems—across top management teams, middle managers, and professional employees. In addition, it examines factors that may prevent the adoption of effective HRM systems for these groups of knowledge workers. A model is proposed depicting how four job‐level moderators influence the HRM‐performance relationship and how these moderators apply to each of the three employee groups. Short‐term performance pressures and favoritism in staffing are proposed as factors that may hinder the adoption of effective HRM systems. Finally, HRM systems for different employee groups are classified based on their gains potential and barriers to implementation, yielding four categories of strategic HRM activity metaphorically labeled low‐hanging fruits, high‐hanging fruits, peanuts, and barren land. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Zunehmende Unsicherheit als Risiko für die Versicherung: Risikotransfer zwischen Unternehmen,Banken, Versicherungen und Märkten

The increase in natural and human catastrophes is well documented. For risk averse private customers this increase in risks implies an increase in the willingness to pay for insurance which in turn increases the business possibilities for insurers. However, this argumentation can not be transferred to firm insurance, as, following the work by Modigliani and Miller, companies are in general not to be regarded as being risk averse. In this article we discuss with the example of the demand for reinsurance why firms might want to shift risk to other firms. An empirical study for the German market for reinsurance is presented. The results are then used to discuss whether an increase in risk might lead to an increase in risk transfers between firms and insurers.     

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.     

Post-bürokratische Organisation — Utopie und Alltag

Post-bürokratische Organisationskonzepte forcieren den Abbau hierarchischer und disziplin?rer Schranken innerhalb von Organisationen, um den Informationsaustausch zu vereinfachen und die Flexibilit?t der Organisation zu erh?hen. Mithilfe von Intranets, die den unbeschr?nkten Zugriff auf alle elektronischen Informationen sowie einen direkten Kontakt zwischen Organisationsmitgliedern erlauben, sollen diese Werte im Handeln umgesetzt werden. Am Beispiel eines Start-up-Unternehmens, das sich den Prinzipien der post-bürokratischen Organisation unter Einsatz eines multiautoren-basierten Intranets verpflichtet hat, untersuchen wir, inwieweit die Versprechungen dieser alternativen Organisationsform mithilfe dieser Technologie realisiert werden konnten. Die Ergebnisse unserer Untersuchung zeigen, dass hierarchische und disziplin?re Schranken von den Organisationsmitgliedern bei der Wahl ihrer Kommunikationspartner im Intranet reproduziert wurden, ohne dass strukturierende Einflüsse des Intranets vorlagen.     

Rückversicherungen und Alternative Risikotransfers: Ein theoretischer Vergleich

This paper analyses the economic potential of alternative risk transfers (ART) in comparison with classic reinsurance. The particular question discussed is whether ARTs operate as complements or substitutes to reinsurance. We obtain that ARTs are equivalent to reinsurance with respect to their ability to allocate risks optimally. This might be induced by risk aversion of the primary insurer, costs of bankruptcy, solvability regulation, progressive taxes or agency costs. As a consequence, ARTs have to be considered as strong competitors of reinsurance in the standard business of risk transfers. However, ART are dominated by reinsurance with respect to the risk management services which the latter provides.     

On reproducible econometric research

Recent software developments are reviewed from the vantage point of reproducible econometric research. We argue that the emergence of new tools, particularly in the open‐source community, have greatly eased the burden of documenting and archiving both empirical and simulation work in econometrics. Some of these tools are highlighted in the discussion of two small replication exercises. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

More is not always better: The impact of relationship functions on customer-perceived relationship value

Customer–supplier relationships have been promoted as a source of value for customers and as a way for suppliers to differentiate. Customer-perceived relationship value (i.e., a customer's overall assessment of the benefits and sacrifices of a given relationship with a supplier) is driven by relationship functions (i.e., the co\ntributions a supplier makes to a customer's value-creation processes). Earlier research categorizes relationship functions into two groups: direct, operation-related functions and indirect, change-related functions. This research finds that indirect functions have less impact than direct functions. Given the widely discussed advantages of supplier involvement in customer innovation, and the importance of information, access to market actors and motivation, this study analyzes why change-related functions have less of an impact than operation-related functions. The empirical results reveal that change-related relationship functions have a non-linear, inverted u-shaped impact on relationship value, and that the degree of customer innovativeness moderates this impact. Thus, while an analysis of all relationship functions is necessary, suppliers wishing to optimize business relationships should pay particular attention to customer innovativeness. The non-linear impact of change-related relationship functions gives rise to several interesting avenues for further research.     

How to subcontract?

Firms compete for a contract and subcontract part of the work. If subcontracting takes place before the award of the contract, the revenue equivalence result breaks down, as subcontractors anticipate that their bids influence the probability of the firm winning the contract. Properties of the optimal subcontracting mechanism are discussed.