Do European recommendations impact on sustainability policies by Italian local governments?

Taking the role of a facilitator, the EU has published recommendations to steer sustainability policies in local governments. The authors analysed strategic plans published by Italian local governments and found that the EU’s recommendations had zero effect. The way forward is for local governments to be required to produce sustainability policies.     

Der Weg zum passenden Pflege-Studiengang

Im Gesundheitsbereich gibt es viele Schnittstellen, sind unterschiedlichste Branchen aktiv. Daraus ergeben sich komplexe T?tigkeitsbereiche und eine steigende Nachfrage nach akademisch gut ausgebildeten Pflegefachkr?ften. HEILBERUFE zeigt Wege auf, das passende Studium im F?cherdschungel zu finden.     

Who times the foreign exchange market? Corporate speculation and CEO characteristics

This paper shows that managers' personal beliefs and individual characteristics explain a large share of the substantial time-variation of derivative use beyond firm, industry, and market fundamentals. We construct a panel data set of foreign currency derivative holdings and currency exposures for U.S. non-financial firms. We use a novel approach to build a firm-specific foreign exchange return. We find that managers adjust derivatives notional amounts in response to past foreign exchange returns, as if they were forming views on future currency prices. We then construct an empirical measure of speculative behavior for each firm to investigate the profile of the speculator. Firms where the CEO holds an MBA degree, is younger, and has less previous working experience speculate more. These results are consistent with overconfident managers taking more risk.     

Creating value in business relationships: The role of sales

Understanding the creation of value in business relationships has been a long-standing goal of researchers and managers alike. By adopting a relational perspective, recent research on business relationships has made much progress in understanding value-creating processes. As the sales function is thought to be a pivotal part of the value-creating processes in business relationships, the evolving view on creating relationship value clearly has implications for our understanding of the role of sales in these processes. In contrast to its importance, the question of how the sales function contributes to creating value in business relationships has been largely neglected in extant literature. The objective of our paper is to answer this question by systematically linking the relational value creating process to the sales function's content. Interpreting value creation as interaction process, we identify four features of value-creating processes in business relationships suggested in recent research (i.e., jointness, balanced initiative, interacted value, and socio-cognitive construction) and, based on these, outline a framework that is used to define a set of tasks that are key to creating value in business relationships and hence become critical for sales in its hitherto neglected role as co-creator of relationship value. We illustrate the various tasks of this new role of sales with data from 43 interviews with sales managers and salespeople. Along with related normative recommendations in extant literature, the interviews provide support for the validity and relevance of our framework for understanding the role of sales in creating relationship value. This framework puts forward a much-needed first effort towards a theory of sales' role in creating relationship value and offers several opportunities for future research.     

The CEO Performance Effect: Statistical Issues and a Complex Fit Perspective

How CEOs affect strategy and performance is important to strategic management research. We show that sophisticated statistical analysis alone is problematic for establishing the magnitude and causes of CEO impact on performance. We discuss three problem areas that substantially distort the measurement and sources of a CEO performance effect: (1) the nature of performance time series, (2) confounding and (3) the discovery of many interactions associated with the CEO performance effect. We show that the aggregate of empirical research implies complex interdependency as the driver of the CEO performance effect. This suggests a ‘fit’ model requiring new research approaches. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

GMWB for life an analysis of lifelong withdrawal guarantees

In this paper, we analyze the latest guarantee feature in the variable annuities market: guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefits for life (GMWB for life) which are also called guaranteed lifelong withdrawal benefits (GLWB). This option gives the client the right to deduct a certain amount annually from the policy??s account value until death??even if a unit-linked account value drops to zero. We show how such products can be analyzed within a general framework presented in Bauer et al. (ASTIN Bull. 38(2):621?C651, 2008). We price the embedded guarantee for different product designs and parameters under both, deterministic and optimal client behavior.     

Estimating non-simultaneous changes in the mean of vectors

A sequence of independent vectors with correlated components is considered. It is supposed that there is one change point in the mean of each component and changes need not occur simultaneously. The asymptotic distribution of the change point estimators is studied. If the true change points are well separated, the explicit asymptotic distribution of the change point estimators is presented. In the case the true change points coincide, it is shown that the limit distribution of properly standardized change points estimates exists. It depends not only on the underlying time series dependence structure, but also on the ratio of the sizes of the changes. The asymptotic distribution function is not known, but due to the invariance principle it can be obtained by simulations.     

Simulador de vuelo ejecutivo como medio de aprendizaje en la planeación de recursos de nuevas empresas bajo el enfoque del marcador balanceado

A deficient strategic planning in new companies has produced that entrepreneurs initial decisions haven’t been the appropriate and, in the long term, consequences will be reflected in the failure of many new companies. The objective of this article is to propose an executive flight simulator that will help to identify and evaluate different strategies for the development of resources of a new manufacturing company, based on the four perspectives of the balanced scorecard that will help the user to become sensitive in the impact that this will have in the performance measures. The simulator is designed under the System Dynamics view for educational purposes in MBAs, entrepreneurship or executive development programs.     

The emergent role of value representation in managing business relationships

This paper explores value processes, their effects, and their management in business relationships. Over time, scholars progressively moved their interest from the value of the objects exchanged to the value of business relationships. However, how value is related to interactive processes that characterize business relationships still remained unclear. With this scope, the paper brings to the fore recent studies on the role of actors' perceptions of value and the interactive features of the business context. The empirical research involves 77 interviews carried out over two years with actors internal and external to the Mikron Tool's business network, a Swiss leader in manufacturing high-precision tools. The study shows that four key value processes – value creation, value communication, value measurement, and value appropriation – determine specific consequences that must be managed to achieve effective business relationships. Moreover, empirical evidences highlight the relevance of value representation in affecting the four value processes. The study contributes to an improved understanding of value management in interactive and interdependent business contexts. Also, it draws attention to the need for a better integration between the traditional economic view of value and recent insights from the fields of organizational psychology and sociology.