Surveillance-based injury epidemiology in schools in Germany

The two objectives of this article are: a) to describe the German School Injury Surveillance System and b) to determine major trends and patterns of different school-associated injury indicators. The database covers all children and adolescents from nursery school through university during their time at school and day care, including their way to and from school. Presently, this results in 17.5 million insured young persons, or 21.2% of the German general population. The surveillance system includes two main informational sources: school accident and medical accident reports.In 2003 over 1.5 million school-related injuries received medical attention in Germany. This is an incidence rate of about 86 injuries per 1000 students. Between 1975 and 2003, the mortality rate declined from 23.4 to 7.7 per million. This is a drop of 67% in about 30 years.     

Public Versus Private Real Estate Equities: A More Refined, Long-Term Comparison

In this article we compare public and private real estate equities. In so doing, we control for three of the main differences between these investment alternatives: property-type mix, leverage and appraisal smoothing. With these two restated indices, we then run tests to determine in a statistical sense whether the restated means and volatilities of the two series were different from one another. The clear answer is that they were not. The results of the statistical tests combined with the fact that the average difference between the two (restated) return series has substantially narrowed (to approximately 60 basis points) in the more recent (1993–2001) period jointly suggest a seamless real estate market in which public- and private-market vehicles display a long-run synchronicity. This has important implications for portfolio management. First, public- and private-market vehicles ought to be viewed as offering investors a risk/return continuum of real estate investment opportunities. Second, while the "platform" did not matter in terms of observed return characteristics, the platform may matter with regard to liquidity, governance, transparency, control, executive compensation and so forth; an apparent clientele effect hints at these issues being valued differently by large and small investors.     

Am Tage schaue ich nicht fern!

Although the share of older people in our society increases, the media sciences rarely examine this group of media users. Existing studies often limit themselves to chronological age and neglect a more theoretical approach. This study includes theoretical references from gerontological research, which describes aging as a multidimensional process, and links them to user-oriented perspectives of mass communication research. Referring to qualitative data from interviews with elderly people, the study achieves to identify prospects, appraisals and resources, which influence media use of people in the process of aging.     

Legitimacy‐as‐Feeling: How Affect Leads to Vertical Legitimacy Spillovers in Transnational Governance

Transnational governance schemes (TGSs) are interorganizational networks of public and/or private actors that jointly regulate global public policy issues, such as the prevention of human rights violations and the protection of ecosystems. Considering that TGSs mainly address issues of public concern, the general public represents a major source of legitimacy in transnational governance. We theorize how members of the general public, whom we conceptualize as intuiters, apply heuristics to bestow legitimacy on TGSs. Given the difficulty of assessing TGSs, we argue that intuiters draw on affect‐based responses towards a TGS's better‐known network affiliates, such as participating business firms, to judge the legitimacy of the TGS as a whole. This substitution produces a ‘vertical’ legitimacy spillover. More specifically, we examine the heuristic process of judgment underlying vertical spillovers in TGSs and derive implications for the legitimacy construct and the analysis of spillover phenomena.     

Default models based on scale mixtures of Marshall-Olkin copulas: properties and applications

We present a unification of the Archimedean and the Lévy-frailty copula model for portfolio default models. The new default model exhibits a copula known as scale mixture of Marshall-Olkin copulas and an investigation of the dependence structure reveals that desirable properties of both original models are combined. This allows for a wider range of dependence patterns, while the analytical tractability is retained. Furthermore, simultaneous defaults and default clustering are incorporated. In addition, a hierarchical extension is presented which allows for a heterogeneous dependence structure. Finally, the model is applied to the pricing of CDO contracts. For this purpose, an efficient Laplace transform inversion approach is developed. Supporting a separation of marginal default probabilities and dependence structure, the model can be calibrated to CDS contracts in a first step. In a second step, the calibration of several parametric families to CDO contracts demonstrates a good fitting quality, which further emphasizes the suitability of the approach.     

Covid-19 and smart beta

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management - We investigate the role of sectors on the performance of smart beta products during the COVID-19 crisis. Cross-sectional differences in excess returns...     

A New Retrospective on Mergers

This paper is based on my keynote address given at the 2006 International Industrial Organization Conference in Boston, April 8, 2006. I survey long-run trends in mergers, review the debate over the economic success of mergers generally, and examine the changing treatment that business schools have accorded mergers over the past five decades. A final section is a time series analysis of links at the U.S. macroeconomic level between changes in merger activity and labor productivity growth.     

Corporate Legitimacy as Deliberation: A Communicative Framework

Modern society is challenged by a loss of efficiency in national governance systems values, and lifestyles. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse builds upon a conception of organizational legitimacy that does not appropriately reflect these changes. The problems arise from the a-political role of the corporation in the concepts of cognitive and pragmatic legitimacy, which are based on compliance to national law and on relatively homogeneous and stable societal expectations on the one hand and widely accepted rhetoric assuming that all members of society benefit from capitalist production on the other. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to moral legitimacy, from an output and power oriented approach to an input related and discursive concept of legitimacy. This shift creates a new basis of legitimacy and involves organizations in processes of active justification vis-à-vis society rather than simply responding to the demands of powerful groups. We consider this a step towards the politicization of the corporation and attempt to re-embed the debate on corporate legitimacy into its broader context of political theory, while reflecting the recent turn from a liberal to a deliberative concept of democracy.Prof. Dr. Guido Palazzo is Assistant Professor for Business Ethics at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). He graduated in Business Administration at the University of Bamberg (Germany) and earned his PhD in Political Philosophy (1999) from the University of Marburg (Germany). His research interests are in Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Branding, Democratic Theory and Organizational Ethics.Prof. Dr. Andreas Georg Scherer is director of the Institute for Organization and Administrative Science (IOU) and holds the Chair for Foundations of Business Administration and Theories of the Firm at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). He has published six books. His work has appeared in Academy of Management Review, Advances in Strategic Management, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, M@n@gement, Management International Review, Organization, organization Studies, and in numerous volumes and German journals. Dr. Scherer is member of the editorial boards of Business Ethics Quarterly, Organization, and Organization Studies.     

The lag structure of returns to research and development

These facets of worker displacement are investigated – definition, detection and consequence. A definition of displacement is sought that permits the identification of those who are truly at risk of adverse consequences because of this event. The detection goal is to indentify data elements in available administrative data sources that can be used for this purpose. A consolidated database is used that represents three states in the US and seven industry sectors, which includes seven years of quarterly employer/industry affliation and earnings pairings. Estimated earnings losses are shown to be sensitive to the definition of displacement that is adopted. Available data elements do not support the reliable prediction of adverse consequences associated with displacement relative to earnings discontinuities that accompany other causal definitations of unemployment.