Self-report to self-control? A note

This note establishes that escalating penalty regimes with the option to self-report crimes may allow present-biased offenders to obligate themselves to refrain from committing future crimes. Self-reporting of a committed crime increases the expected costs of future criminal opportunities, possibly allowing offenders to deter their future selves from seeking immediate gratification.     

How to Spend Public Money Efficiently: A Cost-Effectiveness Model Illustrated Using the EU’s “Youth”-Program

Since it is crucial for public entities to spend the taxpayer’s money effectively and efficiently, we have analyzed the methods used to check for the two criteria in the European Union’s “Youth”-program. We find that the currently applied method is not theoretically sound and hardly politically justifiable. Therefore, we present a new approach which includes the important aspects that a public organization needs to respect. It is theoretically correct and fulfills economic standards; it is valid in political standards; it is feasible; and it is easily understandable for a large public. We singled out two factors which are readily observable and a good proxy for the decision if a project is worthy to be supported by public funds: the number of people reached and the quality of the program proposed.     

Gentrifizierung in Wien, Chicago und Mexiko Stadt

The lack of comparative gentrification research is regularly addressed by the scientific community. Despite the vast amount of isolated case-studies from different urban contexts, there are only few comparisons of gentrified neighborhoods on a global level. It is hypothesized that to a large extent the lack of international comparisons is based on the limits of quantitative secondary data. Therefore, a qualitative research project was designed to develop an analytical scheme of categories. An actor-analysis was conducted in three neighborhoods in Vienna, Chicago and Mexico City. The semi-structured interviews were analyzed in a qualitative content analysis and then linked to the theoretical gentrification-framework. The result, an analytical scheme of 14 categories, provides a new approach to face the significant lack of international comparisons.     

Trade openness and income inequality: New empirical evidence

We examine how trade openness influences income inequality within countries. The sample includes 139 countries over the period 1970–2014. We employ predicted openness as instrument to deal with the endogeneity of trade openness. The effect of trade openness on income inequality differs across countries. Trade openness tends to disproportionately benefit the relative income shares of the very poor, but not necessarily all poor, in emerging and developing economies. In most advanced economies, trade openness increased income inequality, an effect that is driven by outliers. Our results suggest a strong effect of trade openness on inequality in China and transition countries.     

Die Verbreitung moderner Managementkonzepte im Mittelstand

Within existing studies on the diffusion of modern management concepts, such as Lean Management, Business Process Reengineering or Shareholder Value Management, small and medium-sized enterprises are frequently examined as a homogeneous group of hesitant adopters. Differences among small and medium-sized companies with regard to concept adoption can thus hardly be explained by referring to existing research. In this paper, we argue that differences in adoption patterns of modern management concepts across small medium-sized companies can be explained on the basis of their resource endowment and embedment in different social environments. We thereby employ central arguments from organizational diffusion theory. Based on a multivariate analysis of online-survey data on the diffusion of 22 modern management concepts among 272 German SMEs, our results show that adoption decisions are mainly based on relationships to local organizational environments, whereas concept awareness can be best explained by media-exposure.     

The impact of life stage and societal culture on subordinate influence ethics: A study of Brazil,China, Germany,and the U.S.

In this paper, we investigate the effects of societal values and life stage on subordinate influence ethics. Based on the evolving crossvergence theory of macro-level predictors of values evolution, we demonstrate the applicability of crossvergence theory in the micro-level context. Furthermore, our study provides the first empirical multi-level analysis of influence ethics utilizing a multiple-country sample. Thus, we illustrate how the breath of crossvergence can be expanded to provide a multi-level theoretical foundation of values and behavior evolution across cultures. Specifically, we integrate micro-level life stage theory and macro-level societal culture theory to concurrently assess the contributions of each theory in explaining subordinate influence ethics across the diverse societies of Brazil, China, Germany and the U.S. Consistent with previous research, we found significant societal differences in influence ethics. However, we also found that life stage theory played a significant role in understanding influence ethics. Thus, our findings expand the crossvergence perspective on societal change, indicating that key micro-level predictors (e.g., life stage) should be included in cross-cultural research.     

Organisationsentwicklung in M&A Prozessen

Technical issues like legal matters or different types of due diligence predominate during the execution of mergers and acquisitions. Personnel issues only get considered during the post-merger integration phase. However, the success of mergers and acquisitions depends considerably on the early and correct involvement of the human resource and organization development (OD) department in every phase of the merger.     

The Risk of a Mortality Catastrophe

We develop a continuous-time model for analyzing and valuing catastrophe mortality contingent claims based on stochastic modeling of the force of mortality. We derive parameter estimates from a 105-year time series of U.S. population mortality data using a simulated maximum likelihood approach based on a particle filter. Relying on the resulting parameters, we calculate loss profiles for a representative catastrophe mortality transaction and compare them to the “official” loss profiles that are provided by the issuers to investors and rating agencies. We find that although the loss profiles are subject to great uncertainties, the official figures fall significantly below the corresponding risk statistics based on our model. In particular, we find that the annualized incidence probability of a mortality catastrophe, defined as a 15% increase in aggregated mortality probabilities, is about 1.4%—compared to about 0.1% according to the official loss profiles.