Relative Performancebewertung und Produktmarktwettbewerb

Relative Performance Evaluation aims at reducing incentive risk imposed on a manager, and at influencing product market choices. Thereby, firm owners can choose stronger effort incentives, and they may reduce the degree of competition with the firm’s competitors. Within a principal/agent-model, we explore the interrelation between characteristics of product market competition, performance evaluation, and incentives. Our results show that a firm’s optimal performance evaluation significantly depends on the characteristics of product market competition. This implies that a firm’s optimal choice of performance evaluation is firm- and industry-specific. Hence, our results support the industry-selection-approach recently applied in empirical compensation studies.     

Analysing the Gender Wage Gap (GWG) Using Personnel Records

We use monthly personnel records of a large German company for the years 1999–2005 to analyse the gender wage gap (GWG). The unconditional GWG is 15 per cent for blue‐collar and 26 per cent for white‐collar workers. Different returns to entry age explain a substantial part of the GWG as well as segregation of men and women in different hierarchical levels. The relative GWG increases with increasing tenure for blue‐collar but declines for white‐collar workers. Taking into account the different impact of general and firm‐specific human capital on white‐collar and blue‐collar occupation, this is consistent with theories of statistical discrimination.     

Si-GARCH: Construction and validation of a new method for the detection of breaking points in models

In this article, we define a new method (Si-GARCH) for signal segmentation based on a class of models coming from econometrics. We make use of these models not to perform prediction but to characterize portions of signals. This enables us to compare these portions in order to determine if there is a change in the signal’s dynamics and to define breaking points with an aim of segmenting it according to its dynamics. We, then, expand these models by defining a new coefficient to improve their accuracy. The Si-GARCH method was tested on several thousands of hours of biomedical signals coming from intensive care units.     

Resource Immobility and Sustained Performance: A Systematic Assessment of How Immobility Has Been Considered in Empirical Resource‐based Studies

The core notion of the resource‐based view (RBV) is that the possession of certain resources can result in superior performance and, in order for this performance to be sustained, these resources cannot be perfectly mobile. Whereas previous reviews have mainly focused on the relationship between resources and temporary performance, no studies have systematically analyzed the extent to which empirical RBV studies have specifically considered immobility of resources. By analyzing a sample of 218 empirical RBV studies, the authors found that 17% of the studies directly measured some dimension of immobility (by, for example, actually measuring the level of social complexity, unique history, tacitness or tradability). Fewer than 2% of the studies measured the outcome of resource immobility, i.e. sustained performance differences. Based on these results, this paper discusses the consequences of overlooking this key dimension of the RBV (i.e. immobility) and suggests that, and discusses how, future research should consider resource immobility to a greater extent.     

Inequality,ethnic diversity,and redistribution

Seminal political economy models from Meltzer and Richard, among others, theorize that, in democracies, more inequality should lead to more redistribution. Most country-level empirical studies find weak support for this prediction. This paper makes two contributions to this debate. First, I identify some of the key shortcomings of previous tests and provide a new empirical analysis that corrects for these limitations. Using a dataset covering 89 developed and developing democracies, I find that inequality is associated with more redistribution. Second, I show that inequality’s effect on redistribution is weaker in democracies in which the poor – defined as the people with income below the median – are divided along ethnic lines than in those in which they are ethnically unified. Taken together, these results suggest that although economic inequality increases redistribution, the magnitude of the relationship is conditional on how inequality interacts with other social cleavages, such as ethnicity.     

Simultaneous Inference for Model Averaging of Derived Parameters

Model averaging is a useful approach for capturing uncertainty due to model selection. Currently, this uncertainty is often quantified by means of approximations that do not easily extend to simultaneous inference. Moreover, in practice there is a need for both model averaging and simultaneous inference for derived parameters calculated in an after‐fitting step. We propose a method for obtaining asymptotically correct standard errors for one or several model‐averaged estimates of derived parameters and for obtaining simultaneous confidence intervals that asymptotically control the family‐wise Type I error rate. The performance of the method in terms of coverage is evaluated using a simulation study and the applicability of the method is demonstrated by means of three concrete examples.     

The Prevalence of Paraphilic Interests and Behaviors in the General Population: A Provincial Survey

Paraphilic sexual interests are defined as unusual or anomalous, but their actual occurrence in nonclinical samples is still unknown. This study looked at desire for and experience of paraphilic behaviors in a sample of adult men and women in the general population. A secondary goal was to compare the results of two survey modes—traditional landline telephone versus online. A total of 1,040 persons classified according to age, gender, education, ethnic background, religious beliefs, area of residency, and corresponding to the norm for the province of Quebec were interviewed. Nearly half of this sample expressed interest in at least one paraphilic category, and approximately one-third had had experience with such a practice at least once. Voyeurism, fetishism, frotteurism, and masochism interested both male and female respondents at levels above what is usually considered to be statistically unusual (15.9%). Interestingly, levels of interest in fetishism and masochism were not significantly different for men and women. Masochism was significantly linked with higher satisfaction with one’s own sexual life. As expected, the online mode generated more acknowledgment of paraphilic interest than the telephone mode. These results call into question the current definition of normal (normophilic) versus anomalous (paraphilic) sexual behaviors.