Health Promotion and Flexibility: Extending and Obscuring Power in Organizations

This paper explores the intersection between pursuits of improving organizational flexibility and pursuits of improving employees' health. It is argued that health promotion programmes have the potential of operating as mechanisms of power, which assist organizations in making up self-governing employees who flexibly adapt their lifestyles to the criteria of health and professional success. The paper shows how the fact that health promotion programmes are handled by 'independent' and legitimate health experts, and are provided to employees in the name of their health and well-being, obscures the forces of power in them, making them seem merely as informed ways of helping employees help themselves towards healthier and more successful lives. The paper concludes that health promotion programmes help to establish a new work ethic that challenges the boundary between work and private life. Furthermore, they make a healthy lifestyle part of the competencies that employees are responsible for developing and nurturing.     

Rethinking twins and environments: possible social sources for assumed genetic influences in twin research

A central sociological problem is the extent to which genetics and the environment influence human behavior. Studies of twins are a core method in attempts to disentangle and to determine the comparative strength of genetic and environmental influences on psychosocial outcomes. A critical assumption of twin studies is that both monozygotic "identical" twins and dizygotic "fraternal" twins share common social environments. Therefore, any greater similarity of monozygotic than dizygotic twins is attributed to genetic influences. This paper tests the equal environment assumption by examining the extent to which greater concordance of adolescent monozygotic compared to dizygotic twins results from social, as well as genetic, influences. Bivariate comparisons indicate that monozygotic twins show greater similarity than dizygotic twins in socially-based characteristics including physical attractiveness, time spent in each other's company, the overlap in friendship networks, and friends' use of alcohol. Multivariate analyses indicate that measures of the social environment sometimes reduce or eliminate apparent genetic effects. In comparison with genetic indicators, social variables are usually stronger predictors of depression and alcohol use and abuse. These findings suggest that past twin studies could overstate the strength of genetic influences because some similarities in behavior among monozygotic compared to dizygotic twins stem from social influences.     

Flexible Copula Density Estimation with Penalized Hierarchical B‐splines

The paper introduces a new method for flexible spline fitting for copula density estimation. Spline coefficients are penalized to achieve a smooth fit. To weaken the curse of dimensionality, instead of a full tensor spline basis, a reduced tensor product based on so called sparse grids (Notes Numer. Fluid Mech. Multidiscip. Des., 31, 1991, 241‐251) is used. To achieve uniform margins of the copula density, linear constraints are placed on the spline coefficients, and quadratic programming is used to fit the model. Simulations and practical examples accompany the presentation.     

On perfect simulation for some mixtures of distributions

This paper studies the implementation of the coupling from the past (CFTP) method of Propp and Wilson (1996) in the set-up of two and three component mixtures with known components and unknown weights. We show that monotonicity structures can be exhibited in both cases, but that CFTP can still be costly for three component mixtures. We conclude with a simulation experiment exhibiting an almost perfect sampling scheme where we only consider a subset of the exhaustive set of starting values.     

Die Einstellung zur Einführung des „Doppelpasses“

In this study the attitude towards the new nationality law in Germany is explained by a value/expectancy theory of attitude. 215 standardized face-to-face-interviews were performed with a quota sample. The results of this survey show that the value and expectancy theory of attitude is extremely successful in explaining the attitude towards the new nationality law. Models explaining the predictor variable of the attitude theory and a feedback-model were tested.     

Ability, individual development and optimal selection decisions

The paper analyzes different selection policies in education and business. We show that incorrect self-perceptions combined with imperfect performance measurement may cause significant welfare losses in selective educational systems, in particular if selection starts too early. Of course, these welfare losses can be mitigated by an investment in better ability assessment. However, an affirmative action policy could serve the same purpose as such an investment. We apply our analysis also to diversity management in firms. Based on positive discrimination we establish an efficiency argument for diversity management.     

The impact of acquisitions on firm performance: A review of the evidence

This paper presents a review of empirical research on the impact of acquisitions on firm performance. The evidence suggests that, in the short run, acquisitions have at best an insignificant impact on shareholder wealth. Long‐run performance analysis reveals overwhelmingly negative returns, while the evidence using accounting performance measures is mixed. The review also examines the impact of bid characteristics on performance. The acquisition of hostile targets, transactions that are paid for with cash and acquisitions of larger targets are associated with superior (or at least less negative) performance, while there is mixed evidence on the benefits of related acquisitions. A number of recent studies find that acquirers with superior pre‐bid performance tend to experience significant underperformance in the post‐bid period.