Customer Touchpoints im stationären Einzelhandel — Potenzial von Pervasive Computing

Je mehr individuelle Leistungen die Kunden verlangen, desto mehr Informationen ben?tigen die Anbieter. W?hrend die H?ndler im Distanzgesch?ft über personalisierte Daten ihrer Kunden und vor allem im Online-Shop über Bewegungsdaten verfügen, hat der station?re Einzelhandel noch erhebliche Datenlücken. Diese Lücken kann man mit einer Pervasive-Computing-Umgebung schlie?en. Neue Customer Touchpoints liefern Informationen darüber, wer bei ihm einkauft und wie der Einkauf durchgeführt wird.     

Business experience and start-up size: Buying more lottery tickets next time around?

This paper explores the determinants of start-up size by focusing on a cohort of 6,247 businesses that started trading in 2004, using a unique dataset on customer records at Barclays Bank. Quantile regressions show that prior business experience is significantly related with start-up size, as are a number of other variables such as age, education and bank account activity. Quantile treatment effects (QTE) estimates show similar results, with the effect of business experience on (log) start-up size being roughly constant across the quantiles. Prior personal business experience leads to an increase in expected start-up size of about 50 %. Instrumental variable QTE estimates are even higher, although there are concerns about the validity of the instrument.     

Do Information Rents in Loan Spreads Persist over the Business Cycles?

In this paper, we seek empirical evidence for information rents in loan spreads by analyzing a sample of UK syndicated loan contracts for the period from 1996 to 2005. We use various measures for borrower opaqueness and control for bank, borrower and loan characteristics and we find that undercapitalized banks charge approximately 34 bps higher loan spreads for loans to opaque borrowers. We further analyze whether this effect persists throughout the business cycle and find that this effect prevails only during recessions. However, we do not find evidence that banks exploit their information monopolies during expansion phases.     

The globalization of Chinese enterprises

The question of how and why Chinese firms globalize is one of the most pressing issues for businesses today. China's globalization process is nothing less than remarkable. The twenty‐first century will feature a developing country as the leader of the global economy by 2020, when, by most estimates, China's purchasing power parity (PPP) gross domestic product (GDP) surpasses America's. With China's new role on the world's stage, global economic and political institutions are likely to change. China's foray into Latin America, for example, has changed the traditional role that America has played in its “backyard.” While the Chinese government was given much credit for China's globalization, Chinese private‐ and family‐owned businesses have also propelled China outward. Our research stream and annual China Goes Global conference at Harvard has attempted to frame the questions associated with China's globalization. This special issue is another important step in this direction. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Symbiotic production: The case of telecommunication pricing

In this paper we analyze a generalization of vertical monopolies in which monopoly suppliers trade essential inputs with one another. The most obvious applications of the model, which we call symbiotic production, are to postal and telecommunications services. We show how producers can use per-unit tariffs to achieve cooperative outcomes without colluding directly over consumer prices. We then show the firms have an incentive to collude in the setting of tariffs but that suchcollusion will lower consumer prices. This assumes that the suppliers are otherwise unfettered. In contrast, if the constituent monopolies are regulated, we show that collusion enables the firms to completely undo the restraints of regulation. The model has important policy implications for the international telecommunications market.     

Resources,population, environment: An oversupply of false bad news

False bad news about population growth, natural resources, and the environment is published widely in the face of contradictory evidence. For example, the world supply of arable land has actually been increasing, the scarcity of natural resources including food and energy has been decreasing, and basic measures of U.S. environmental quality show positive trends. The aggregate data show no long-run negative effect of population growth upon the standard of living. Models that embody forces omitted in the past, especially the influence of population size upon productivity increase, suggest a long-run positive effect of additional people.     

Optimal taxation,the compensation principle and the measurement of changes in economic welfare

This paper explores the implications of optimal taxation for the measurement of changes in economic welfare. It shows that the measure implied by the compensation principle — the sum of the relevant compensating variations — is only accurate in the presence of optimal lump-sum taxation: an unsurprising conclusion, but a gloomy one given that such taxation is generally infeasible. However, all is not lost. The paper uses the linear income tax case to show that it is possible to derive weights that can be attached to the relevant compensating variations to provide accurate measures of changes in welfare in the presence of second-best taxation: weights that can be calculated from observable data.     

Temporary overpessimism: Job loss expectations following a large negative employment shock

Job loss expectations were widespread amongst workers in East Germany following reunification with West Germany. Though experiencing a large negative employment shock, East German workers were nevertheless overpessimistic immediately after reunification with respect to their job loss risk. Over time, job loss expectations fell and converged to West German levels, which was driven by a stabilizing economic environment and by an adaptation of the interpretation of economic signals with workers learning to distinguish individual risk from firm-level risk. In fact, conditional on actual job loss risk, East German workers quickly caught up to West Germans regarding the share of correctly predicted job losses.     

Ownership and Control of German Corporations

In a study of the ownership of German corporations, we finda strong relation between board turnover and corporate performance,little association of concentrations of ownership with managerialdisciplining, and only limited evidence that pyramid structurescan be used for control purposes. The static relationship ofownership to control in Germany is therefore similar to theUnited Kingdom and the United States. However, there are markeddifferences in dynamic relations involving transfers of ownership.There is an active market in share blocks giving rise to changesin control, but the gains are limited and accrue solely to theholders of large blocks, not to minority investors. We provideevidence of low overall benefits to control changes and theexploitation of private benefits of control.