Kriegsberichterstattung in deutschen Qualitätszeitungen

As the gulf wars and the wars in former Yugoslavia occured in the 1990s, researchers and journalists alike began to discuss anew the conditions, role, and effects of war coverage. Despite the comparatively large number of empirical studies on war coverage, longitudinal analyses of the development and change of the media’s performance in constructing an image of war are lacking to date. The study introduced here pursues this subject with a broadly conceived content analysis. Starting with the fact that the media do not only merely take up issues, but process them in a specific way, we looked for coverage patterns into which frames of interpretation were worked during the journalists‘ production of the media image of events — a process referred to as framing. It was the aim of the study to investigate more closely the framing of German war coverage. It appeared that media reconstruction of war changed over time. German war coverage retains, however, a strong focus on the military and combat action. It is rather these subjects than, for instance, the causes or consequences of war that are most intensely covered.     

Layoffs and Their Ethical Implications under Scientific Management, Quality Management and Open-Book Management

Two major management philosophies of the 20th Century, scientific management and quality management, are often contrasted. Scientific management is seen as a system that focuses on task efficiencies whereas quality management is described as a collaborative, people-centered process approach to continuous improvement. This paper examines the ethical implications of these diverse approaches, particularly in the way information is used to decide which employees to lay off in times of economic difficulty. The paper uses case examples of quality management as teaching tools to place the conduct of managers within utilitarian, deontological and justice approaches to ethical decision making. Finally, it suggests that a third system, open-book management, may help deal with this ethical dilemma, though not without risk.     

Varying risk premia in international bond markets

Cochrane and Piazzesi [Cochrane, J.H., Piazzesi, M., 2005. Bond risk premia. American Economic Review 95, 138–160] use forward rates to forecast future bond returns. We extend their approach by applying their model to international bond markets. Our results indicate that the unrestricted Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005) model has a reasonable forecasting power for future bond returns. The restricted model, however, does not perform as well on an international level. Furthermore, we cannot confirm the systematic tent shape of the estimated parameters found by Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005). The forecasting models are used to implement various trading strategies. These strategies exhibit high information ratios when implemented in individual countries or on an international level and outperform alternative approaches. We introduce an alternative specification to forecast future bond returns and achieve superior risk-adjusted returns in our trading strategy. Bayesian model averaging is used to enhance the performance of the proposed trading strategy.     

Standard Oil as a Technological Innovator

A century ago, in 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its path-breaking decision in the monopolization case against the Standard Oil Companies. Standard pleaded inter alia that its near-monopoly position was the result of superior innovation, citing in particular the Frasch-Burton process for refining the high-sulfur oil found around Lima, Ohio. This paper examines the role of Hermann Frasch in inventing and developing the desulfurization process, showing that Standard failed to recognize his inventive genius when he was its employee and purchased his rights and services only after he had applied it in his own Canadian company.     

Unter der Tarnkappe

The article deals with the question of whether the economic interests of media companies have an effect on the quality of their media coverage. Such an effect would violate professional journalistic standards. As a case study, we analyze media coverage on the abortive acquisition of the ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG by the Axel Springer Verlag, comparing Springer-owned and competitor-owned newspapers. The professional journalistic standards of relevance, neutrality, balance and transparency are applied to measure the quality of the media coverage. Results show systematic differences in the presentation and evaluation of the acquisition between the two media groups, in line with their economic interests. Springer newspapers apply a two-level strategy: On the one hand, they publish fewer and more neutral articles than the competitors’ newspapers — they obviously do not want to draw attention to the topic. On the other hand, they try to influence public discussion covertly by using »opportune witnesses« and «volatile issues«. The media coverage of both newspaper groups — Springer and competitors — can be explained by their economic interests. This assertion is supported by both theoretical assumptions and empirical findings.