Real estate and real estate finance as a research field—an international overview

We present a citation-based analysis of the most important journals on real estate and real estate finance over a time period from 1986 to 2010. For each year, those three articles with the highest number of citations according to Google Scholar are identified. A thorough analysis of all 75 selected articles reveals that the focus of interest has been on (1)empirical research, (2) mainly using data ofresidential real estate, with (3) the primary objective of evaluating real estateinvestment until the midst 1990s. In order to derive reliable risk-return relations for real estate investment, (4) asset pricing as the main task of real estateappraisal is in the centre of attention, too. Appraisal issues have relatively gained importance for the last fifteen years in comparison to investment issues. Interdisciplinary aspects and sustainable issues are only very rarely integrated in appraisal methods, the focus is primarily on maximizing economic returns. Therefore, our citation analysis confirms that the Financial Management Approach of Dasso and Woodward (1980) is the predominant approach particularly in the United States. Our findings regarding our basic sample of articles are cross-checked by several robustness tests. For future research activities, it seems to be quite promising to focus on the one hand on interdisciplinary aspects and on the other hand to contribute to the theoretical foundation of real estate with the aim of developing a common body of knowledge.     

Führung in Familienunternehmen: Besonderheiten der Entscheidungsfindung und Verhaltenssteuerung und deren Auswirkung auf den Unternehmenserfolg

This paper draws on a survey design to investigate whether family ownership and leadership have an influence on the decision-facilitating and decision-influencing roles of management control. Moreover, we investigate whether the more intuitive decision making in family firms which is often said to be caused by a lack of professionalism, is indeed a disadvantage. The results indicate significant differences in the use of management controls between family firms and non-family firms. However, in contrast to the prevailing view in literature, the performance of family firms is not affected negatively by their specific way of making decisions and by their more centralized management style. According to our data, the prevailing characterization of family firms as being less professionally managed seems questionable.     

Wird die Relevanz von Ertragsteuern für die Unternehmensrechnung nach rechtlichen oder ökonomischen Kriterien beurteilt?

Textbooks in the areas of Management Accounting, Finance and Valuation treat taxes very differently. Finance and Valuation increasingly consider tax effects. Management Accounting considers taxes only if they meet certain legal “cost” criteria. These criteria follow tax law rules, but not economic rules and primarily consider tax effects of the local business tax only. This view is also reflected in recent cost accounting regulations. We present evidence from a survey of managers and chambers of commerce, according to which practitioners’ views of whether the local business tax is a cost are heterogeneous. The majority of managers do not consider the local business tax as a cost and do not pass it on to customers. The chambers of commerce however still consider the local business tax as a cost.     

Moralische Arbeitsteilung

In modernity, organizations are the most powerful actors. All the more important is the “dark side” of organizational morality. While organizations, on the one hand, ensure or claim to ensure efficiency and reliance they have, on the other, a considerable potential to suppress the moral point of view and to produce or fabricate legitimation. The paper concentrates on this dark side—on problems of the moral division of labor, the organization of hypocrisy, legitimation through procedures, rent-seeking and the related corporate power vis-à-vis law, regulation and politics.     

Deriving Behavior Model Parameters from Survey Data: Self‐Protective Behavior Adoption During the 2009–2010 Influenza A(H1N1) Pandemic

In this paper, we demonstrate how public opinion surveys can be designed to collect information pertinent to computational behavior modeling, and we present the results of a public opinion and behavior survey conducted during the 2009–2010 H1N1 influenza pandemic. The results are used to parameterize the Health Belief Model of individual health‐protective decision making. Survey subjects were asked questions about their perceptions of the then‐circulating influenza and attitudes towards two personal protective behaviors: vaccination and avoidance of crowds. We empirically address two important issues in applying the Health Belief Model of behavior to computational infectious disease simulation: (1) the factors dynamically influencing the states of the Health Belief Model variables and (2) the appropriateness of the Health Belief Model in describing self‐protective behavior in the context of pandemic influenza.     

The effect of accounting standards on Big Bath behavior

This paper investigates the influence of accounting standards on systematic earnings understatement. To isolate the effect of reporting regulations from those of other institutional drivers of earnings management, Holthausen (2003) proposes analyzing reporting practices in a country undergoing a transition in accounting standards. We respond to this call by analyzing earnings management practices of large German-listed companies before and after their transitions from German GAAP to IFRS. Specifically, we focus on Big Bath behavior following Chief Financial Officer turnovers between 1999 and 2006. Our findings provide evidence of the effect of accounting standards on the existence of this particular earnings understatement pattern. However, while we detect Big Bath behavior for our sample of German GAAP firms, we find no such indication for those firms reporting under IFRS. Controlling for alternative explanations such as self-selection bias does not change our findings. We conclude that accounting standards seem to have a considerable influence on earnings management behavior, independent of managers’ and auditors’ incentives.     

CDS and rating announcements: changing signaling during the crisis?

In parallel with the development of credit derivatives market, researchers have begun to explore the relationship between Credit Default Swap (CDS) market and rating events. Many papers, via classical event-study methodology, show that CDS market is able to signal future negative rating events announced by credit rating agencies. In this work, we incorporate into the event-study methodology the ability of Markov switching models in modeling state-dependent means and variances. This approach allows to get over the drawbacks of the classical methodology, which ignores the heteroscedasticity and volatility clustering often affecting financial time series. The proposed methodology is applied to study the reactions of CDS quotes to reviews for downgrading and effective downgradings announced by the three major credit rating agencies (Fitch Ratings, Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s), in order to examine if and to what extent CDS market anticipates announcements related with a company’s creditworthiness. The analysis, focusing mainly on volatility, is performed on two periods, 2004–2006 and 2007–2009, in order to verify whether a change in the signaling power of CDS quotes can be ascribed to recent financial turmoils.     

Innovation in family firms: an empirical analysis linking organizational and managerial innovation to corporate success

Family firms play a significant role in national economies worldwide, accounting e.g. for 85% of all enterprises in the OECD countries as well as for the majority of companies in Central Europe. Previous scholarly research on family firms has mostly focused on the question of how they differ from public corporations, describing family firms as being more conservative, less risk-raking, or reluctant to grow—in sum, as being less entrepreneurial than their non-family counterparts. Similarly, the existing literature often criticizes the lack of innovation in family firms. But since innovation has long been discovered as one of the key drivers to company success, it is surprising that its role in family firms has been mostly neglected in existing academic research so far. The aim of this article is therefore to study the role of (managerial and organizational) innovation in family firms compared to non-family firms on the basis of an empirical survey of 533 companies from Finland, using structural equation modelling (MPlus) for the statistical analyses.