Does Gibrat's law hold for retailing? Evidence from Sweden

Gibrat's Law predicts that firm growth is a purely random effect and therefore should be independent of firm size. The purpose of this paper is to test Gibrat's law within the retail industry, using a novel data-set comprising all surviving Swedish limited liability companies active at some point between 1998 and 2004. Very few studies have previously investigated whether Gibrat's Law seems to hold for retailing, and they are based on highly aggregated data. Our results indicate that Gibrat's Law can be rejected for a large majority of five-digit retail industries in Sweden, since small retail firms tend to grow faster than large ones.     

Rechtlich-normative Rahmenbedingungen der Regierungskommunikation – ein Thema für die Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft

Governmental public relations, the tax-funded political communication by administrative bodies in Germany, can very well be described as an area of constant conflict. Actors are legally obliged to communicate their policies and decisions to the electorate; on the other hand there is the constant peril of infringements of democratic rights of oppositional actors through communicative measures. Major juridical debates have arisen. Communication studies have approached the subject of legal restrictions of governmental public relations rather cautiously so far. With the issue becoming more and more salient—especially due to the accelerating process of digitisation—the question of whether this is still satisfactory gains importance. This paper is to stimulate a debate. It highlights connections and delimitations between the different perspectives and points out the possible contributions of communication studies to the establishment of valid normative and legal frameworks and the emerging fields of research for the discipline itself.     

How responsive is body weight to transitory income changes? Evidence from rural Tanzania

We use time-series of rainfall to estimate the response of body weight to transitory changes in household income in rural Tanzania. We find that the response of body weight to income changes is positive on average, but that the impact is highest for female children, and lower for adults. For female children, a ten-percent increase in household income implies an increase in body weight by about 0.4 kg. In contrast, the body weight of adolescents and young adults is virtually invariant to income changes.     

The concept of psychological capital: a comprehensive review

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive view on the concept of psychological capital (PsyCap) and develop an agenda for future research. PsyCap describes an individual’s psychological capacity that can be measured, developed, and managed for performance improvement. The higher-order construct comprises the psychological resources self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience, and has been linked with a range of desirable work attitudes, behaviors, and other outcomes. By analyzing and structuring the existing literature on PsyCap, we identified several research gaps that require further analysis. In particular, we encourage researchers to expand the research on the effects of PsyCap to other workplace-related domains, especially the field of strategic decision-making, we call for researchers to further study the relationship between emotions and PsyCap, and we suggest to analyze the effects of PsyCap in the context of strategic human resources management. Also, future studies should establish transparency on the interaction between organizational change processes and PsyCap as well as the relative importance of the four components of PsyCap. We close by discussing the implications of our findings for corporate practice, such as employee selection and development.     

Surprise volume and heteroskedasticity in equity market returns

Heteroskedasticity in returns may be explainable by trading volume. We use different volume variables, including surprise volume—i.e. unexpected above-average trading activity—which is derived from uncorrelated volume innovations. Assuming weakly exogenous volume, we extend the Lamoureux and Lastrapes () model by an asymmetric GARCH in-mean specification following Golsten et al. (). Model estimation for the US as well as six large equity markets shows that surprise volume provides superior model fit and helps to explain volatility persistence as well as excess kurtosis. Surprise volume reveals a significant positive market risk premium, asymmetry and a surprise volume effect in conditional variance. The findings suggest that e.g. a surprise volume shock (breakdown)—i.e. large (small) contemporaneous and small (large) lagged surprise volume—relates to increased (decreased) conditional market variance and return.