Sanfte Berührung

Das Konzept respectare^? - Bei der Begleitung von Sterbenden fühlen sich Pflegende und Angeh?rige oft hilflos, weil Worte den Schwerkranken nicht mehr erreichen. Respektvolle Berührungen k?nnen ein Weg sein, Kontakt aufzunehmen und N?he herzustellen. Simone Franz stellt ein besonderes Konzept vor.     

What drives spreads in the euro area government bond market?

Spreads between euro area government bond yields are related to short-term interest rates, which are in turn related to market liquidity, to cyclical conditions, and to investors' incentives to take risk. In theory, lower interest rates are associated with lower degrees of risk aversion and smaller government bond spreads. Empirically, the Eurosystem's short-term interest rates are positively related to those spreads, which our econometric model finds to include significant and policy-relevant default risk and liquidity risk components.
— Simone Manganelli and Guido Wolswijk     

Nature of innovation and technology management in system companies

Competition in the industries that develop complex products (such as aircraft engines and radar) depends on the integration of organizational systems as well as the pace of technological change.
Companies in these industries can be regarded as 'system companies'. A framework and taxonomy are developed to indicate the characteristics and types of companies and to understand how organizational learning and integration take place. This makes it easier for companies to anticipate strategic change and some implications of this kind are described.     

Intergenerational externalities,sustainability and welfare—The ambiguous effect of optimal policies on resource depletion

This paper studies an endogenous growth model with exhaustible resources, overlapping generations and human capital externalities. In the competitive equilibrium, selfish behavior and inefficient skills accumulation may prevent sustained growth. Implementing the utilitarian optimum likely induces sustainability via increased knowledge formation, but resource depletion may be faster or slower than under laissez-faire depending on the social discount rate. Heavy (modest) social discounting delays (anticipates) the achievement of net welfare gains for newborn agents and successors. The reason is that human capital accumulation magnifies the positive growth effects of policies that lower the rate of resource destruction, preserving the welfare of newborn agents. Resource-depleting policies, instead, hamper growth and reduce lifetime welfare of early-in-time generations—the first loser being the currently young.     

Companies' participation in EMAS: The influence of the public regulator

When adopted in 1993, the European Union's Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) was viewed as emblematic of a new policy approach involving more flexible and market‐based environmental instruments. A few years after coming into force, EMAS does not appear to be a tremendous success in terms of industrial participation. Apart from in Germany and Austria, participation is insignificant and comparatively very far behind that in ISO 14001, the environmental management standard of the International Organization for Standardization. The paper seeks to explain this modest result. It focuses on the influence of the European and national regulators on industrial participation. Using a comparative analysis of the implementation of EMAS in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, it argues that the most powerful participation leverage has been the granting of regulatory relief for registered companies. This leads one to be pessimistic as to the future of EMAS. The possibility and scope for a lighter regulatory touch are primarily nationally specific since they are related to the national regulatory traditions. Consequently, the systematic and comprehensive use of this leverage is unlikely to generalize. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment.     

Local discourse and global competition: production experiences in family workshops of the Brianza

One of the most important consequences of post‐Fordist global restructuring has been the ‘deterritorialization’ of capital and its increasing geographic expansion. Another and quite different view emphasizes the fact that capitalist activity can be organized by means of localized or territorially based systems of specialized production. In this article my purpose is to show how these two disciplinary discourses are actually not mutually exclusive. Developed local economies are not immune from concerns of deterritorialization, nor should their economic achievement gloss over the glitches that are emerging at the local level due to stiffer global competition. These two aspects become immediately apparent as I illustrate the local discourse that emerges among workshop owners within an industrial district of the Brianza in the Italian region of Lombardy. After a discussion about the origin and the characteristics of this regional economy, I illustrate by way of ethnographic examples how innovation and competitiveness within and outside this industrial district mask forms of exploitation and contradictions amidst family‐run workshops. In discursive terms, exploitation is articulated in various ways, but two in particular seem to be most recurrent in the narrative of small entrepreneurs of this region. One is the ideology of ‘hard work’ and the other, more recently heard of, is the ideology of ‘high quality product’. In the brief concluding section I will stress the point that these two discourses emerging from exploitative social relations of production are to be viewed as responses to the concerns regarding the possible deterritorialization of some factories and the increasing competition with crossboundary markets.     

Interaction behaviors in business relationships and heuristics: Issues for management and research agenda

Various empirical studies have evidenced that interaction is a critical process in the development of buyer–seller relationships in business-to-business markets. Research examining the different aspects of interaction processes and the consequences of interaction in business relationships for the development of the businesses involved has tended to black-box the interaction process. Limited attention has been given to how interaction behaviors of individuals arise and the interplay between cognition and behaviors in interaction. At the same time, recent research offers some insights into the use and role of heuristics in contexts analogous to those individual actors face when they interact in business relationships. In this paper we review current research on interaction processes in business relationships as well as on heuristics in the management context and argue that focusing on heuristics used in interaction in business relationships offers valuable insights on how interaction behaviors emerge. In particular, we discuss the notion of heuristics as an “adaptive toolbox,” and how it relates to adaptations in business relationships. We also discuss implications for management and outline a future research agenda.     

The runaway taxpayer

In order to analyze the determinants of tax evasion, the existing literature on individual tax compliance typically takes a ‘prior-to-audit’ point of view. This paper focuses on a ‘post-audit, post-detection’—so far unexplored—framework, by investigating what happens after tax evasion has been discovered and noncompliant taxpayers are asked to pay their debts. We first develop a two-period dynamic model of individual choice, considering an individual that has been already audited and detected as tax evader, who knows that Tax Authorities are looking for her to cash the due amount. We derive the optimal decision of running away in order to avoid paying the bill, and show that the experience of a prior tax notice reduces the probability to behave as a scofflaw. We then exploit information on ‘post-audit, post-detection’ tax compliance provided by an Italian collection agency for the period 2004–2007 to empirically assess the relationship between prior tax notices and unlawful behavior. The evidence from alternative logit model specifications supports our theoretical prediction: successful tax notices are negatively correlated with the probability of running away.