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Institut
- Fakultät Wirtschaftswissenschaften (112) (entfernen)
The issue under investigation in this study is to explore the drivers and suggest methods for environmental managers to integrate environmental issues in the top management strategic decision-making. In order to make the reading easy the whole study has been written following the principle of providing the minimum information to clarify the point under discussion, no more, no less. The conclusions, the analysis, the implications and the limitations are discussed on a chapter by chapter basis, making it easier for the reader to remember the issue under discussion. The closing chapter brings together the conclusions of each chapter of the study. The study is divided into two parts. Part I: Planning describes the planning and preparation for the research and consists of the following chapters: Chapter 1 provides an overview of the interest, relevance and importance of this study. Also it proposes, through the introduction of the relevant literature, an exact wording for the research problem and a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of each process step. Chapters 2 and 3 describe and justify the chosen framework that prompts managers during interviewing and organises the resulting contents in a way that will support effective decision making. This is the end of the planning part of the study and we now move into the action part where the case studies are explained in full. Part II: Intervention comprises the following chapters: Chapter 4 is where the action begins, the first phase of the process. This chapter discusses the reasons selection and participation in the research and the process for choosing a business unit. Chapter 5 details, justifies and discusses the choices of who to interview. It outlines how the interviews were conducted and summarises the resulting contents. In Chapter 6 the general issue of who to involve in interviews is explored further for the specific case of the environmental manager. The main objective is to discuss whether and why the environmental manager had more/less/different ideas from the rest of the management team. Chapter 7 deals with the first time that the people meet as a group. For this process step the choices were about how to display and generate discussion on the contents gathered during the interviews. Chapter 8 focuses on the environmental manager’s contribution to the objective Fine-tuning discussion. Chapter 9 describes the Indicator Building process and how this may be relevant for the environmental manager. Concluding Remarks wraps up the results and discusses the need for extending this research further.
Space-related science and technologies affect our daily life. Many countries have already formulated national space regulations to regulate their space activities. China, as one space-faring country, has obtained several achievements in space science and technologies. In recent years, Chinese private space companies have sprung up quickly, which requires a stable and foreseeable legal framework to ensure development. However, compared to the other space powers, China is the only one that has not enacted any formal national space laws. Against the background of strengthening the rule of law in China, research on China's domestic space legislation is valuable and significant. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. First, to find the legal basis and necessity of national space legislation and to extract the basic content of the existing national space legislation, simultaneously, to identify the new developments in the content of other States´ legislative practices. Second, based on the study of national space legislation, to propose the essential content of China's space legislation.
In sub-Saharan Africa, women own or partly own one third of all businesses, thereby having a large potential to contribute to the economic development and societal well-being in this region. However, women-owned businesses tend to lag behind men-owned businesses in that they make lower profits, grow more slowly, and create fewer jobs. To identify reasons for this gap and effective means to promote women entrepreneurs, large parts of the entrepreneurship literature have compared male and female entrepreneurs with regard to individual characteristics, paying only limited attention to the underlying environmental conditions. This is problematic as women entrepreneurs operate under different conditions than men, with particularly pronounced differences in sub-Saharan Africa. Against this backdrop, the goal of this dissertation is to contribute to a more profound understanding of women entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa and its promotion through training by examining critical context factors. Specifically, the author analyzes two context factors that influence women's entrepreneurial performance and the success of training interventions: 1) women entrepreneurs' husbands and 2) the entrepreneurship trainer. These analyses are embedded in considerations of the cultural, social, and economic conditions women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa are facing. In Chapter 2, the author conducts a systematic literature review on spousal influence in entrepreneurship and identifies six recurrent types of influence. Complementing the literature originating from Western settings, she develops propositions on how the sub-Saharan context affects husbands' influence on women entrepreneurship in this region. In Chapter 3, she builds on a cultural theory and an economic theory of the household to develop and empirically test a theoretical model of husbands' constraining and supportive influences on women entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. The empirical results point to three distinct types of husbands that differ significantly in their impact on women entrepreneurs' business success. In Chapter 4, the author explores the influence of the trainer on the effectiveness of entrepreneurship training in sub-Saharan Africa by drawing on an unsuccessful training implementation. Qualitative analyses indicate that the use of adequate teaching methods is critical towards training success.
Consisting of three articles and a framework manuscript, this cumulative dissertation deals with sustainable compensation of chief executive officer (CEO) with a focus on climate-related aspects. Against the backdrop of the European action for sustainability and the EU Green Deal, the dissertation pays special attention to the consideration of climate-related aspects of corporate performance in CEO compensation. In this context, sustainable compensation is characterized by the consideration of long-term interests and sustainability of the company as well as by the inclusion of financial and non-financial aspects of environmental, social and governance performance (ESG) in compensation agreements. While this novel instrument of corporate governance aims to incentivize the implementation of sustainability-oriented corporate strategy, it is particularly important to unfold this incentive effect at the individual CEO level in view of their managerial discretion. The framework manuscript discusses the research objectives, the regulatory and theoretical background, the results of the dissertation and their implications in the context of regulation, research, and business practice. The essence of the dissertation are the three articles. The first article examines the current state of empirical research based on 37 articles that were published between 1992 and 2018. Based on a multidimensional research framework, the structured literature review compiles past research findings, identifies contentual and methodological foci in the research area, and derives questions for future research. The second article addresses the topic from a conceptual perspective. Taking the existing work as a starting point, a conceptual framework is derived, which organizes the determinants of carbon-related CEO compensation at societal, organizational, group and individual levels of analysis. On this basis, eight propositions are presented that seek to distinguish between the determinants which support and challenge the implementation of carbon-related CEO compensation. The third article focuses on the use of CO2-oriented performance indicators in CEO compensation. The empirical-qualitative study analyzes corporate disclosure of the 65 largest companies in the EU for the years 2018 and 2019. The study addresses the use of CO2-oriented performance indicators in corporate strategy and CEO compensation. It also examines which compensation components are determined with the help of CO2-oriented performance indicators, which type of performance indicators are used, and whether CO2-intensive and less CO2-intensive companies differ in this regard.
Im Bereich der körperlichen Belastungsmessung lässt sich die Zusammenführung von einzelnen Eindrücken zu einem Gesamturteil überall beobachten. Trotzdem sind die ablaufenden Prozesse größtenteils ungeklärt und gerade die Gewichtung der Eindrücke ist kaum nachvollziehbar. In dieser Studie wurden 60 Probanden mithilfe eines Fahrradergometers 7,5 Minuten belastet. Jeder Proband absolvierte 3 Stufen über jeweils 2,5 Minuten mit 50, 75 und 100 Watt in unterschiedlicher Reihenfolge. Alle sechs möglichen Reihenfolgen wurden getestet. Zu jeder der Stufen wurde ein Beanspruchungsurteil erhoben. Zusätzlich wurde nach einem Gesamturteil gefragt. In den Einzelmessungen zeigen sich weder ein Positions- noch ein Carry-Over-Effekt. Trotzdem setzt die erste Beurteilung einen Anker, der sich durch die Beurteilung zieht. Die Gesamturteile der Gruppen unterscheiden sich nicht signifikant voneinander. Dafür lassen sich in der Gewichtung Tendenzen erkennen. Die höchste Stufe von 100 Watt sowie die letzte Stufe scheinen besonderes Gewicht zu bekommen, wobei der Effekt der 100 Watt-Beurteilung den Recency-Effekt überdeckt.
This dissertation focused on the nature and role of organizational practices for the employment of older people and the extension of their working lives. The set of four articles is driven by the objective to further deepen our understanding of how organizations can facilitate ageing at work to the benefit of both, employees and employers. Findings are empirically based on qualitative expert interview data from Germany and the U.S. and several quantitative field studies among older employees in Germany. To bridge gaps in measurement of organizational practices related to aging at work, this dissertation proposes a new comprehensive, multifaceted, and thoroughly conceptualized measure of organizational practices related to aging at work, the Later Life Workplace Index (LLWI). Through the course of the four articles the LLWI is conceptually developed based on qualitative interview data, operationalized, validated based on multiple field studies among older workers, and applied in a multi-level study among older employees of 101 organizations. Results suggest that organizational practices are not uniform, but multifaceted in their presence within organizations and their effects for the employment of older workers. The LLWI distinguishes nine domains of practices including an age-friendly organizational climate, work design, individual development, and practices tailoring the retirement transition. Thus, it may lay the foundation for more granular organizational level research in the field. Further, this dissertation's fourth article applies the LLWI and argues based on person-environment fit and socio-emotional selectivity theory that organizational practices address different individual needs and, thus, affect employment depending on employees' individual characteristics. Results suggest that older employees' retirement intentions are effected by individual development, transition-to-retirement, and continued employment practices depending on their health resources. Application of the new measure in practice to improve organizations' response to the aging workforce and opportunities for future research based on the LLWI are discussed.
Die Fragestellung dieses Forschungsvorhabens resultiert aus der Praxis: Was ist ein christliches Hotel? Wie konkretisieren sich die christlichen Wertehaltungen im betrieblichen Alltag eines Hotels in Deutschland? Gibt es in der betrieblichen Praxis Unterschiede zwischen christlichen und nicht christlichen Hotels aus Sicht der Mitarbeiter christlicher Hotels, und wenn ja, welche sind das? Können christliche Hotels ihre Werte im Personalmarketing als Anreize verwenden? Welche Anreize erwarten die Mitarbeiter christlicher Hotels grundsätzlich von ihren Arbeitgebern? Gibt es Unterschiede in den Bewertungen der Wichtigkeit der christlichen Ausrichtung christlicher Hotels je nach Glaubenszugehörigkeit (christlich, andere, ohne) der Mitarbeiter? Da die Anwendung bzw. Konkretion christlicher Werte im betrieblichen Kontext nicht vom kulturellen außerbetrieblichen Umfeld getrennt betrachtet werden kann, beziehen sich die vorliegenden Ausführungen allein auf christliche Hotels in Deutschland. Das Objekt „Christliches Hotel“ wurde bislang in der Forschungsliteratur noch nicht näher beschrieben. Um den Forschungsgegenstand "Christliches Hotel" zunächst näher zu beschreiben, wird das in der Qualitätsdiskussion bekannte EFQM Excellence Modell herangezogen und anhand des Werteinventars unternehmensrelevanter christlicher Werte auf die Hotellerie übertragen. Dieses entwickelte EFQM Excellence Modell - auch EFQM Excellence Modell Hotel "C" genannt - dient einer ersten Konkretion des Forschungsgegenstandes und bildet zum anderen die Basis für die empirische Studie. Hierfür wurden 276 Mitarbeiter christlicher Hotels befragt, wie sie die im Rahmen des EFQM Excellence Modell Hotel "C" konkretisierten Werte im Management ihres Arbeitgeberhotels wahrnehmen und im Vergleich zu nicht christlichen Hotels und zudem bezüglich der Wichtigkeit bewerten. Die Studienergebnisse zeigen, dass die befragten Mitarbeiter christliche Hotels in den EFQM Konstrukten Führung, Strategie, Mitarbeiter und Prozesse, Produkte und Dienstleistungen sowie in den kulturbezogenen Konstrukten Christliche Werte und Ergänzende christliche Werte im Vergleich zu nicht christlichen Hotels als signifikant besser bewerten. Christliche Werte, sofern sie nicht explizit als solche bezeichnet werden, sind den Mitarbeitern christlicher Hotels in Deutschland unabhängig von ihrer Glaubenszugehörigkeit gleich wichtig. Christlich gläubigen Mitarbeitern christlicher Hotels in Deutschland ist - explizit gefragt - die christliche Ausrichtung ihres Arbeitgebers signifikant wichtiger als Mitarbeitern ohne Glaubenszugehörigkeit. Christliche Werte spielen für die Mitarbeiter christlicher Hotels in Deutschland zusammenfassend eine wichtige Rolle. Diese immateriellen Werte sind starke Beitrags- und Bleibeanreize, die christliche Hotels im Personalmarketing verwenden können. Dies gilt umso mehr, wenn die christlichen Werte von den christlichen Hotels in Deutschland nicht nur explizit als solche zusammenfassend genannt, sondern konkret und vor allem realitätsgetreu dargestellt werden.
In the early 1990s the European Commission and the national governments of the EU member states initiated an extensive deregulation and liberalization process in the European railway industry. Prior to this process, the European railway industry was characterized by loosely connected national monopoly railway companies which faced severe losses of transportation market share and required increasing subsidies. Overall, this system was not what a single European market needed: an integrated transport system that provides reliable and fast cross-border transportation of goods, services, and people. The main elements of the reforms have been the separation of infrastructure management from transport operations, the implementation of interoperability among the national railway systems, the assurance of third-party access to the infrastructure, and the introduction of independent railway regulatory systems. In general, the intention of the reforms has been to enhance competition by opening the market and to improve the economic performance of the European railway industry. The objective of this thesis is to analyze the effectiveness of the European railway deregulation process in enhancing efficiency and productivity in the European railway industry. For that purpose three empirical papers are introduced that use non-parametric and parametric benchmarking methods to evaluate the impact of different production technologies and country- and firm-specific environmental and regulatory conditions on efficiency and productivity. The first paper, ‘Testing for Economies of Scope in European Railways: An Efficiency Analysis’, conducts a pan-European efficiency analysis to investigate the performance of European railways with a particular focus on economies of vertical integration. We test the hypothesis that integrated railways realize economies of scope and, thus, produce railway services with a higher level of efficiency. To determine whether joint or separate production is more efficient, we apply an innovative two-stage data envelopment analysis super-efficiency model which relates the efficiency for integrated production to a reference set consisting of separated firms which use a different production technology. We find that for a majority of European railways economies of scope exist. The second paper, ‘Productivity Growth in European Railways: Technological Progress, Efficiency Change and Scale Effects’, analyzes the efficiency and productivity of the European railway sector in the period of deregulation (1990-2005). Using a stochastic frontier panel data model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity a distance function model is estimated in order to evaluate the sources of productivity growth: technological progress, technical efficiency change and scale effects. The results indicate that technology improvements were by far the most important driver of productivity growth, followed by gains in technical efficiency, and to a lesser extent by exploitation of scale economies. Overall, we find an average productivity growth of 39 percent within the sample period. The third paper, ‘European Railway Deregulation: The Influence of Regulatory and Environmental Conditions on Efficiency’, investigates the impact of regulatory and environmental conditions on technical efficiency of European railways. Using a panel data set of 31 railway firms from 22 European countries from 1994 to 2005, a distance function model, including regulatory and environmental factors, is estimated using stochastic frontier analysis. The results obtained indicate positive and negative efficiency effects of different regulatory reforms. Furthermore, estimating models with and without regulatory and environmental factors indicates that the omission of environmental factors, such as network density, substantially changes parameter estimates and, hence, leads to biased estimation results. The last chapter of the thesis summarizes the results of the three empirical analyses. It contains overall conclusions, highlights implications for economic policy, and provides directions for further research.
This paper-based dissertation deals with capital structures and tax policies of German family businesses. Family firms as the predominant company form in Germany are mainly characterized by the overlapping of the two spheres family and business, both having different goal systems and preferences. This also has an impact on decision making with regard to corporate finance including the application of tax avoidance policies. In Germany, bank finance is the dominant financing source for family firms but there is a preference for internal finance since it comes along with more external independency. Extant research usually bases its results on samples of publicly listed companies. These studies come up with different results regarding family firms' actual financing preferences and capture their heterogeneity only to a very little extent. In this light, the present dissertation and its three papers examine different research questions in the context of capital structure decisions and tax avoidance in family firms. All the three papers apply a quantitative empirical research design. The first paper is a comparison between capital structures of family firms and non-family firms. The paper examines differences in bank debt and trade credit ratios. Overall, the findings show that family firms have significantly higher overall and long-term debt levels compared to their non-family counterparts. The identity as a family firm, which leads to a leap of faith by banks, can be a possible explanation for these results. The second paper is an in-depth examination of drivers of bank debt levels within the group of family firms. Further, it addresses heterogeneity amongst family firms and combines survey results and corresponding financial information. This represents a first attempt to capture family firm heterogeneity and its link to financial issues. The study shows that the more power in the company is exerted via management or supervisory board by the family, the less bank debt is used. Paper three is an extension of the previous two studies as it sheds light on tax avoidance, a significant instrument to strengthen the internal financing capability of a firm. This also takes up a research gap as there is very little research on taxation in family firms. Contrary to the expectation, the study reveals that private family firms might pay less tax than their non-family peers.
This paper presents the first nonparametric test whether German works councils go hand in hand with higher labor productivity or not. It distinguishes between establishments that are covered by collective bargaining or not. Results from a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for first order stochastic dominance tend to indicate that pro-productive effects are found in firms with collective bargaining only. However, the significance level of the test statistic is higher than a usually applied critical level. This somewhat weak evidence casts doubts on the validity of results from recent parametric approaches using a regression framework that point to high positive effects of works councils on productivity.
Neben bereits seit längerer Zeit laufenden Kooperationsprojekten zwischen Statistischen Ämtern und externen Wissenschaftlern sind in jüngster Zeit bei den großen amtlichen Datenproduzenten Forschungsdatenzentren (FDZ) entstanden, die Wissenschaftlern den Zugriff auf Mikrodaten aus zahlreichen Erhebungen gestatten. In diesem Vortrag soll an ausgewählten Beispielen gezeigt werden, welche politikrelevanten Folgerungen aus Ergebnissen von Analysen mit den für die Wissenschaft neu erschlossenen wirtschaftsstatistischen Einzeldaten für Betriebe und Unternehmen gezogen werden können. Hierbei werden die Bereiche Arbeitsplatzdynamik, Exportverhalten und technische Effizienz betrachtet. Die zentrale Botschaft aus zahlreichen Studien für die Wirtschaftspolitik läßt sich in einem Satz zusammenfassen: Wirtschaftspolitische Maßnahmen sollten sich nicht an Kategorien wie Wirtschaftszweig oder Firmengröße orientieren, denn diese Einteilungen sind nicht trennscharf im Hinblick auf Eigenschaften von Betrieben wie Wachstum, Exporterfolg oder Effizienz.
Zahlreiche Untersuchungen belegen, dass die exportierenden Firmen den nur für den Inlandsmarkt produzierenden Firmen in vieler Hinsicht überlegen sind – sie sind im Durchschnitt größer, produktiver und innovativer, und sie waren dies schon, bevor sie mit dem Export begonnen haben. Eine offene Frage ist, wie und in welchem Maße die Firmen dann vom Export profitieren. Ökonometrische Auswertungen auch der Basis von Längsschnittdaten von Firmen zeigen nur selten positive Auswirkungen der Exportaktivitäten. Dies kann auch an den hierbei verwendeten Methoden liegen, denn ein Vergleich der exportierenden Firmen mit sich selbst in einer Situation ohne Export ist ja nicht möglich. Eine direkte Befragung von Exporteuren kann hier neue Erkenntnisse bringen. Eine Befragung von exportierenden Firmen aus den IHK-Bezirken Lüneburg- Wolfsburg und Stade zeigt, dass die Firmen sehr heterogen sind – nicht alle profitieren in gleicher Weise und in gleichem Maße vom Export. Große positive Effekte finden sich bei mehr als der Hälfte der Firmen bezogen auf Wachstum, Kapazitätsauslastung und Erträge sowie bei rund 40 Prozent mit Bezug auf den Ausgleich inländischer Konjunkturschwankungen. Umgekehrt sieht es bei den „Lerneffekten“ (Anregungen von Auslandskunden zur Verbesserung der Produkte; Steigerung der Produktivität als Reaktion auf höheren Wettbewerbsdruck auf Auslandsmärkten; bessere Einschätzung der eigenen Konkurrenzfähigkeit aufgrund von Kontakten mit Konkurrenten auf Auslandsmärkten und daraus folgende entsprechende Reaktionen) aus – hier überwiegen deutlich die Angaben wonach keine oder allenfalls geringe Effekte vorliegen. Was erklärt die in der Befragung festgestellten Unterschiede zwischen den Firmen in Bezug auf die Auswirkungen der Exporttätigkeit? Als zentrales Ergebnis können wir festhalten, dass bis auf den Exportanteil am Umsatz keine der anderen betrachteten Firmeneigenschaften wie Größe, Dauer der Exporterfahrung, Forschungs- und Entwicklungstätigkeit oder Auslandsniederlassungen ausschlaggebend dafür sind, ob eine Firma vom Export in verschiedener Hinsicht positiv beeinflusst wird oder nicht. Vom Export können also sehr unterschiedliche Firmen gleichermaßen profitieren, wobei tendenziell die Wahrscheinlichkeit dafür, dass ein starker positiver Effekt zu beobachten ist, mit zunehmendem Anteil des Auslandsumsatzes am Umsatz ansteigt. Simulationsrechnungen mit den geschätzten Modellen zeigen hierbei: Wenn es Effekte des Exports gibt, dann werden diese in der Regel erst ab einem Exportanteil am Umsatz von mindestens 25 Prozent deutlich.
Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht das Reiseverhalten verschiedener Generationen in Deutschland (68er, Babyboomer, Generation X und Generation Y) anhand der Kohortenanalyse. Mit Hilfe des Intrinsic Estimators und der Rohdaten der Reiseanalyse für die Jahre 1971 bis 2012 wurden Kohorteneffekte, Alterseffekte und Periodeneffekte für die verschiedenen Merkmale des Reiseverhaltens geschätzt. Deutliche Unterschiede zwischen den Generationen, die unabhängig von Alter und Jahr bestand haben sollten, wurden in Bezug auf die Wahl des Verkehrsträgers, der Unterkunft, der Reiseart und der Destination identifiziert. Bei anderen Merkmalen gab es hingegen weniger oder nur geringe Generationenunterschiede. Die Ergebnisse ermöglichen einen genaueren Blick in die Zukunft des Reisens und geben wichtige Hinweise für die tourismuswirtschaftliche Praxis.
Die Einführung von Industrie 4.0 und der damit verbundene Wandel des Produktionsumfeldes führen zu neuen Herausforderungen, bieten auf der anderen Seite aber auch neue Möglichkeiten für Unternehmen. Ausgehend von den Herausforderungen der Produktionsplanung und Steuerung als zentrales Element der Produktherstellung, z.B. Komplexität, Dynamik und neue Organisationsformen, werden bestehenden Methoden der Reihenfolgeplanung auf ihre Tauglichkeit zur Verwendung hin geprüft. Die Analyse zeigt, dass Aspekte wie die Ableitung von Handlungen und der Transfer von Wissen in unbekannten Situationen zu den größten Herausforderungen für bestehende Verfahren zählen. Die in der Arbeit neu entwickelte Methode zur dynamischen Auswahl und Anpassung von Reihenfolgeregeln in komplexen Fertigungssystemen mit bestärkendem Lernen greift diese Herausforderungen auf und untersucht mögliche Lösungsstrategien. Die im Rahmen der Arbeit neu entwickelte Methode wird über ein Spektrum an unterschiedlichsten Szenarien evaluiert und mit anderen Methoden verglichen. Dabei werden verschiedene Ausprägungen und Komplexitäts-Niveaus von Handlungen, der Beobachtungsraum und die Mengen an benötigten Daten detailliert analysiert. Schlussendlich zeigt sich, dass die neue Methode in der Lage ist, die Anforderungen an die Produktionsplanung- und Steuerung zu erfüllen und in bekannten wie in unbekannten Szenarien gut Leistung zu erbringen. Zusätzlich ist die Methode in der Lage menschenähnliche Leistungen zu bringen und kann in einem realen Anwendungsfall zur Unterstützung der Produktionsplanung und -Steuerung genutzt werden.
This dissertation investigates work ability as a concept that supports workers, employers, and societies in the extension of working lives, and how work ability is related to the level of self-determination in the transition to retirement, and ultimately life satisfaction. In the first study of this dissertation, the Work Ability Survey-R (WAS-R) was translated from English into German and then evaluated regarding its psychometric properties and construct validity. The WAS-R operationalizes work ability as the interplay of personal and organizational resources and thus allows companies to derive targeted interventions to maintain work ability. In the second study, the WAS-R was examined together with the questionnaire Work-Related Behavior and Experience Pattern (Arbeitsbezogenes Verhaltens- und Erlebensmuster, AVEM) regarding its construct validity. A striking feature of this study was the high number of participants with the answering pattern indicating low work-related ambitions and protection. Persons with this pattern are in danger of entering the risk pattern for burnout in the future. The findings support the validity of the WAS-R. In the third contribution, two studies examined the experience of control (i.e., autonomy) in the transition to retirement as a mediator between previous work ability, health, and financial well-being, and later life satisfaction in retirement. Control was found to partially mediate the relationship between work ability and later life satisfaction. Different mechanisms on later life satisfaction of work ability and health, and the subjective and objective financial situation were found. This dissertation contributes to research on and practice with aging workers in two ways: (1) The German translation of the WAS-R is presented as a useful instrument for measuring work ability, assessing individual and organizational aspects and therefore enabling employers to make targeted interventions to maintain and improve work ability, and eventually enable control during later work life, the retirement transition and even old age. (2) This dissertation corroborates the importance of good work ability and health, even in old age, as well as control in these phases of life. Work ability is indirectly related to life satisfaction in the long period of retirement, mediated by a sense of control in the transition to retirement. This emphasizes the importance of the need for control as postulated by the SDT also in the transition to retirement.
This thesis deals with the influence of sustainability communication on the purchase decision of sustainable tourism products involving German specialist tour operators. Sustainability communication is a challenge, because sustainable tourism is an abstract and vague concept which consumers find it difficult to grasp and about which they are sceptical. The service characteristics of tourism products complicate the decision making stage, which is a high-involvement situation of uncertainty to which sustainable product attributes add complexity. As an introduction, an interdisciplinary theory discussion reveals knowledge gaps in terms of the value-belief-norm theory and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM). The first article, which is the first systematic literature review on the topic, reveals that there is a limited theoretical understanding of sustainability communication, a lack of practical understanding of how to design sustainability messages, and an inadequate set of methodologies for its research. It identifies knowledge gaps concerning: the holistic approach to sustainability communication; its role in the attitude-behaviour gap; an interdisciplinary theoretical understanding focusing on belief-based social psychological theories and theories of persuasion; qualitative methods; and experimental design. The second article investigates the role of sustainability communication in the attitude-behaviour gap, employing the value-belief-norm theory to explain how information is processed by special interest customers. Interview findings show that ineffective sustainability communication is the reason for the gap and that customers unintentionally booked sustainably. The study identifies eight groups of beliefs which explain the processing of sustainability attributes. Sustainability information is effective when it is value-congruent, that is, when customers perceive they can make a difference, they begin to ascribe a responsibility to themselves. The third article investigates how to design an effective sustainability message in tour operator advertising. Drawing on the ELM, the study shows that appeal type does not significantly influence persuasion but the topic presented is important. Cultural sustainability is the sustainability topic that is most persuasive for cultural tourists, while consumer prior knowledge and issue-involvement with the topic promote successful information processing.
Financial Decisions in Family Firms. Private Equity Investors, Capital Structures and Firm Identity
(2017)
This paper-based dissertation deals with financial issues of family businesses. These businesses are mainly characterized by the overlapping of the two social systems: family and business. Thus, the involvement of an owner family can have a significant impact on corporate decision-making, for instance in terms of corporate finance decisions. In Germany, the latter is dominated by a strong orientation towards banks. Nevertheless, the relevance of external equity, as source of funding, has increased during the last years due to regulatory interventions (Basel III) and a growing number of alternative private equity providers. Against this backdrop, the present dissertation and its four papers examine different research questions in the context of capital structure decisions of family firms. These decisions are related to external equity as well as debt financing. The first paper is a structured literature review concerning the interaction of family firms and external equity investors. The paper analyzes the current state of knowledge and points out directions for future research, which is particularly relevant for a young and recently growing field of research. The second paper is a conceptual paper that deals with the differences of various types of private equity investors from the perspective of family firms looking for funding. The literature review paper revealed that existing studies so far neglected the topic of heterogeneity among investor types. Thus, the second paper represents a first attempt to close this research gap. Paper three also takes up a research gap identified by the first paper and examines the exit of private equity minority investments in family-owned businesses. The paper applies a qualitative empirical research design, which includes fourteen cases and related six interviews. The results reveal that the disinvestment phase of private equity investors only rarely leads to conflicts with owner families. The fourth paper uses a quantitative research design with a comprehensive dataset of 691 companies. The paper aims to compare the capital structures of large family and non-family firms. Overall, the findings show that family firms have significantly higher overall and long-term debt levels compared to their non-family counterparts. The identity as a family firm, which leads to a leap of faith by banks, can be a possible explanation for these results.
Derivatives are contracts between two parties, a buyer and a seller. The contract will be fulfilled in some point in the future at a predetermined price. The value of those contracts is based on an underlying entity which can be a traded asset or even the weather. Derivatives contain chances, but also risks, investor should be aware off. This thesis aims to deeply analyze two derivative products in the German market and one risk for each which influences the prices of those products. The first part of this thesis focuses on warrants and the issuer's credit risk involved. It finds evidence that the issuer's credit risk influences the connection between warrant characteristic and its prices. Over time this connection is unstable partly driven by the issuer's credit risk. The second paper of this thesis shows that issuers seem to use their credit risk systematically to influence warrant prices. Evidence is found that the changes in credit risk are not fully included in the prices directly, but that the adjustment to the new level of credit risk takes several days. In addition, the issuer's adjustment to changes in credit risk are different for credit risk increases than for credit risk decreases. Especially after financial crisis, in more stable times, evidence is found for such adverse pricing pattern. The third part of the thesis focuses on energy derivatives traded at the Europe Energy Exchange and analyses the influence of weather parameters on energy derivatives with different load profiles and time horizons. This part of the thesis finds that especially wind speed and sun hours have a strong influence on energy derivatives. However, not all products are influenced in the same manner. Products with a longer time horizon are influenced less than the product with a short horizon. Moreover, products comprising hours of the day where energy consumption is expected to be higher are influenced stronger than products comprising hours of a day with lower time consumption. The thesis shows that derivatives are not alike and that it is needed for future research to differentiate between products and the risks which are involved. Since even though we classify them all as derivatives the risks influencing the derivative´s prices do vary tremendously.
In my dissertation I explore conceptual and economic aspects of resilience, i.e. a system’s ability to maintain its basic functions and controls under disturbances. I provide methodological considerations on the conceptual level and general insights derived from stylized ecological-economic models. In doing so, I demonstrate how to frame resilience so as to economically evaluate and investigate it as an important property of ecological-economic systems. Is conceptual vagueness an asset or a liability? In chapter 1 I address this question by weighing arguments from philosophy of science and applying them to the concept of resilience. I first sketch the wide spectrum of resilience concepts that ranges from concise concepts to the vague perspective of “resilience thinking”. Subsequently, I set out the methodological arguments in favor and against conceptual vagueness. While traditional philosophy of science emphasizes precision and conceptual clarity as precondition for empirical science, alternative views highlight vagueness as fuel for creative and pragmatic problem-solving. Reviewing this discussion, I argue that a trade-off between vagueness and precision exists, which is to be solved differently depending on the research context. In some contexts research benefits from conceptual vagueness while in others it depends on precision. Assessing the specific example of “resilience thinking” in detail, I propose a restructuring of the conceptual framework which explicitly distinguishes descriptive and normative knowledge. Chapter 2 investigates the common assumption that the optimization problem within a simple selfprotection problem (spp) is convex. It is shown that the condition given in the literature to legitimate this assumption may have implausible consequences. Via a simple functional specification we analyze the (non-)convexity of the spp more thoroughly and find that for reasonable parameter values strict convexity may not be justified. In particular, we demonstrate numerically that full self-protection is often optimal. Neglecting these boundary solutions and analyzing only the comparative statics of interior maxima may entail misleading policy implications such as underinvestment in self-protection. Thus, we highlight the relevance of full self-protection as a policy option even for non-extreme losses. Chapter 3 starts from the observation that ecosystem resilience is often interpreted as insurance: by decreasing the probability of future drops in the provision of ecosystem services, resilience insures risk-averse ecosystem users against potential welfare losses. Using a general and stringent definition of “insurance” and a simple ecological-economic model, we derive the economic insurance value of ecosystem resilience and study how it depends on ecosystem properties, economic context, and the ecosystem user’s risk preferences. We show that (i) the insurance value of resilience is negative (positive) for low (high) levels of resilience, (ii) it increases with the level of resilience, and (iii) it is one additive component of the total economic value of resilience. Chapter 4 performs a model analysis to study the origins of limited resilience in coupled ecologicaleconomic systems. We demonstrate that under open access to ecosystems for profit-maximizing harvesting forms, the resilience properties of the system are essentially determined by consumer preferences for ecosystem services. In particular, we show that complementarity and relative importance of ecosystem services in consumption may significantly decrease the resilience of (almost) any given state of the system. We conclude that the role of consumer preferences and management institutions is not just to facilitate adaptation to, or transformation of, some natural dynamics of ecosystems. Rather, consumer preferences and management institutions are themselves important determinants of the fundamental dynamic characteristics of coupled ecological-economic systems, such as limited resilience. Chapter 5 describes how real option techniques and resilience thinking can be integrated to better understand and inform decision making around environmental risks within complex systems. Resilience thinking offers a promising framework for framing environmental risks posed through the non-linear responses of complex systems to natural and human-induced disturbance pressures. Real options techniques offer the potential to directly model such systems including consideration of the prospect that the passage of time opens new options while closing others. Examples are provided which illustrate the potential for integrated resilience and real options approaches to contribute to understanding and managing environmental risk.
Online advertising has become one of the most important dimension of corporate communications. In recent years, a new form of advertising on the Internet has emerged: real-time advertising. Among others, it allows companies to identify potential customers and target them with respect to their interests. In this way, real-time advertising can increase advertising effectiveness and it could, at the same time, improve user experience. With the emerge of this new form of advertising, statistical models have become even more important because they are now being increasingly used to predict online user behavior. The articles included in this dissertation analyze user-level clickstream data generated during multi-channel advertising campaigns (including TV advertising) and during real-time auctions. The goal of the analyses conducted here is to better understand advertising effects and to support decision-making in this context. Most of the analyses are based on Bayesian models. These models allow for a very flexible structure, which enables researchers to model, for instance, heterogeneity across different types of users or non-linear parameters such as users´ reaction times and exponential decay of advertising effects. In addition, these models allow for the inclusion of prior knowledge of parameter distributions, and, therefore, they are well suited for iterative analyses based on clickstream data. Bayesian models can be evaluated in different ways. Instead of only relying on statistical metrics, the articles included in this dissertation aim to estimate the economic value of these models based on their predictive performance. Although this measure can only approximate their true economic value, this approach can be used to compare and evaluate different models and to illustrate the impact of predictive analyses for companies in the context of big data. This dissertation contributes to both information systems research and marketing research and has many managerial implications. First, a process is developed to determine optimal sample sizes representing the best balance between computational costs and predictive accuracy in e-commerce in particular and big data contexts in general. In practice, this process can be used to reduce infrastructure and computational costs. Second, the articles included here describe models that can be used to measure the impact of television ads on users' online shopping behavior. The models can provide insights concerning the effectiveness of individual television ads, the interactions between different advertising channels and the difference in user behavior of TV-induced customers and their non-TV-induced counterparts. Thereby, the models could support decision-making with respect to future advertising campaigns and targeting. Third, the articles describe several possibilities to extend and improve decision support systems currently used in e-commerce and marketing. These improvements enable practitioners to predict users´ interests for arbitrary products and services by using corresponding websites as dependent variables. This approach can be used to improve the effectiveness of real-time advertising campaigns, especially those intended to raise brand awareness among customers.
In this dissertation the relation between time headway in car following and the subjective experience of a driver was researched. Three experiments were conducted in a driving simulator. Time headways in a range of 0.5 to 4.0 seconds were investigated at 50km/h, 100km/h, and 150km/h under varied visibility conditions and at differing levels of driver control over the car. The main research questions addressed the possible existence of a threshold effect for the subjective experience of time headways and the influence of vehicle speed, forward visibility, and vehicle control on the position of time headway thresholds. Furthermore, the validity of zero-risk driver behavior models was investigated. Results suggest that a threshold exists for the subjective experience of time headways in car following. This implies that the subjective experience of time headways stays constant for a range of time headways above a critical threshold. The subjective experience of a driver is only influenced by time headway once this critical time headway threshold is passed. Speed does not influence preferred time headway distances in self- and assisted-driving, i.e. time headway thresholds are constant for different speeds. However, in completely automated driving preferred time headways are influenced by vehicle speed. For higher speeds preferred time headways decrease. A reduction of forward visibility leads to a shift in preferred time headways towards larger time headways. Results of this dissertation give credence to zero-risk models of driver behavior.
This dissertation includes an introduction and five empirical papers focusing on the educational and career decision-making process of individuals in Germany. The five papers embrace different determinants of educational and career decisions including school performance, social background, leisure activities as well as professional expectations, and contribute to the existing literature in this research area. Chapter 2 of this dissertation begins by analysing the nexus between students’ time allocation and school performance in terms of grades and satisfaction with their own performance in mathematics, the German language and a first foreign language, as well as overall achievement. This chapter looks at the heterogeneity of three important extracurricular activities: student jobs, sports and participation in music. Moreover, the heterogeneity of each activity is addressed by accounting for different types of the particular activity and differences in the number of years the activity has been pursued. For this purpose, data from the German SOEP, as a representative panel survey of private households and people in Germany, in particular cross-sectional survey data of 3388 students who are about 17 years old and enrolled in a German secondary school, were used. The main findings are that having a job as a student is negatively correlated with school performance, whereas participation in sports and music is positively correlated. However, the results reveal heterogeneity in each activity, especially with respect to intensity. Chapter 3 addresses the concrete post-school decision of school students, in particular whether to study or to enter the German VET system (Vocational Education and Training). It focuses on individual risk preferences and the social background of individuals and how these determinants affect the ultimate decision to enrol in university or to start an apprenticeship given the same level of qualification. For the empirical approach data from the German SOEP were used, in particular information on individuals' educational decisions between 2007 and 2013. The results indicate that (i) individual risk preferences do not have an overall effect on the real transition; (ii) privileged individuals are more likely to take up higher education; and (iii) compared to highly educated parents, parents without an academic background are less likely to guide their children into tertiary education, regardless of how much they support their children with their school work. Chapter 4 deals with the reconsideration of educational decisions in terms of early contract cancellations in VET. In particular, the effects of a second job on the intention to cancel a VET contract early are analysed for apprentices in Germany. For the empirical approach the representative German firm-level study "BIBB Survey Vocational Training from the Trainee's Point of View 2008", conducted by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), is used. The survey contains 5901 apprentices that were interviewed during their second year of apprenticeship (205 schools, 340 classes, and 15 common occupations). Furthermore, it includes the design, procedures, basic conditions, and quality criteria of apprenticeships. The applied probit regressions show a higher intention to quit if apprentices require a secondary job to cover their living costs. In Chapter 5, new data on 191 apprentices from a vocational school, located in a northern German federal state, are used to validate the empirical results of Chapter 4. This chapter presents new insights into secondary-job-related burdens during apprenticeship. Due to limitations in the data, the applied empirical approach in Chapter 4 lacks to analyse how holding multiple jobs increases the intention to leave an apprenticeship early. Therefore, Chapter 5 includes the investigations of burdens related to the second job. The results indicate a lower intention to quit the apprenticeship if an apprentice holds a second job to cover living costs. However, secondary jobs are linked to lower quality of training, which, on the other hand, increases the intention to leave the apprenticeship early. Furthermore, the probability of secondary-job-related burdens increases with the number of working hours. Chapter 6 concludes the thesis by investigating subjective determinants of early contract cancellations in VET. It examines ten questions on what apprentices want to achieve and how unfulfilled expectations affect the intention to leave the apprenticeship early. The findings of this investigation contributes to the existing research on early contract cancellation. The questions considered include information on the performance, personal development, career development and prospects or position in society and their meaning to apprentices. For the research approach, the "BIBB Survey Vocational Training from the Trainee's Point of View 2008" is considered again. The probit and ordered probit regressions applied show significant effects of job characteristics that represent job security. The expectation of being retained after an apprenticeship and the encouragement to consistently train further decrease the intention to leave the apprenticeship early. Furthermore, women appear to be more affected by job security signals than men, but they also sort more often into occupations with lower retention probabilities. Consequently, this result may be an indication of occupational segregation rather than a sign of differences between sexes.
Die Arbeit thematisiert die Erklärung der Wahrnehmung von Produkt-, Marken- und Preiseigenschaften und die Bildung von Produkt- und Markenpräferenzen bei Auswahlentscheidungen von Urlaubsreisenden in Bezug auf die Urlaubspauschalreise und deren Einzelleistungsträger Urlaubsdestination, Reiseveranstalter und Hotel mit Hilfe des Involvementkonzeptes. Im theoretischen Teil der Arbeit werden aufgrund konzeptioneller Vorüberlegungen und einer Bewertung bestehender Involvement-Konzepte und Involvementmessinstrumente die konzeptionellen Anforderungen an ein Involvement-Messmodell formuliert. Zum Abschluss des Theorieteils wird ein allgemeines theoretisches Modell, das Involvement-Präferenz-Modell entwickelt. Ziel des Erklärungsmodells ist die Erfassung und Systematisierung der relevanten Faktoren, die das Entscheidungsverhalten von Urlaubern abbilden unter Fokussierung auf das Involvement als zentraler Steuerungsgröße. Aufgrund der herausgehobenen Stellung des Reiseveranstalters bei der Buchungsentscheidung wurde dieser in den Mittelpunkt der empirischen Analyse gestellt. Dabei galt es insbesondere kausale Abhängigkeiten zwischen den Ursachen, Formen und Konsequenzen von Involvement zu untersuchen. Die Auswertung wurde mit LISREL durchgeführt. Die Untersuchung hat gezeigt, dass unterschiedliche Involvementzustände distinkte Wahrnehmungsmuster in Bezug auf Produktqualität, Marke und Preis erzeugen und damit Form und Intensität des Entscheiderinvolvements einen kausalen Einfluss auf die Wahrnehmungsstrukturen von Urlaubsentscheidern im Hinblick auf die Wahrnehmung von Produkt-, Marken- und Preiseigenschaften von Reiseveranstaltern besitzen. Die Implikationen für das touristische Marketing und die Einsatzmöglichkeiten des Modells für die Konsumentenforschung werden zum Abschluss der Arbeit diskutiert.
Members of Western organizations differ in various diversity attributes. In response, research aims to provide evidence-based recommendations on how to effectively manage diversity in teams. Within diversity research, the diversity faultlines approach has been particularly fruitful. It considers the impact of the alignment of multiple diversity attributes in teams. Strong diversity faultlines are associated with the emergence of relatively homogeneous subgroups in teams and have an overall negative impact on team processes and outcomes. This dissertation investigates factors that mitigate the detrimental consequences of strong diversity faultlines in teams, namely pro-diversity beliefs. It extends faultline literature beyond the conventional focus on processes and outcomes related to team members by emphasizing the leaders' perspective. The three empirical papers included in this dissertation systematically examine how strong pro-diversity beliefs can help unleashing the positive effects of team diversity despite strong faultlines. The first paper highlights the role of leaders' pro-diversity beliefs in mitigating the negative impact of diversity faultlines on two team processes: perceived cohesion and social loafing. Moreover, it compares the impact of socio-demographic faultlines (based on gender and age) and experience-based faultlines (based on team tenure and education level). Data was collected in a multisource field sample with 217 team members nested in 44 teams and the corresponding leaders. The second paper takes the impact of members' pro-diversity beliefs into account. It examines whether the impact of sociodemographic faultlines on performance is contingent on leaders' and members' pro-diversity beliefs. Moreover, the research group assumed that aggregate LMX would mediate this relationship. In a multisource data set obtained from 41 teams with 219 members and the corresponding leaders working for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the investigators found partial support for their hypotheses. As expected, the impact of strong socio-demographic faultlines on diplomats' performance was least negative when both leaders and members held strong pro-diversity beliefs. The third paper zooms into processes and outcomes related to team leaders. It investigates how leaders' pro-diversity beliefs and their perceptions of members' prodiversity beliefs in teams with strong socio-demographic faultlines impact leaders´ task role assignment, performance expectation, and motivation. The research group conducted two experimental studies with students, one in Germany (N=55) and one in the US (N=134). Findings showed that strong pro-diversity beliefs held and perceived by leaders made them assign task roles that cross-cut rather than aligned with the subgroup structure created by faultlines. Moreover, leaders' perceptions of members' pro-diversity beliefs, but not their own beliefs, had a positive impact on their motivation, mediated by their performance expectation.
Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem Thema der Erlebnisqualitätsmessung. Hierfür werden sowohl der Erlebnisbegriff als auch der Customer Experience Management Ansatz herangezogen als auch Modelle zur Qualitätsmessung analysiert. Das Customer Experience Management kann als Weiterentwicklung des klassischen Qualitätsmanagements verstanden werden und integriert insbesondere die Ansätze des Markenmanagements. Schließlich liefert der empirische Teil der Arbeit wesentliche Erkenntnisse darüber, wie Erlebnisqualität gemessen werden kann und wodurch sie beeinflusst wird. Dies erfolgt am Beispiel einer durch einen Reiseveranstalter organisierten Badepauschalreise, sodass die Ergebnisse unmittelbar in Implikationen für die künftige Gestaltung einer Urlaubsreise münden.
Der Begriff Blockchain tritt zum ersten Mal in Verbindung mit der Kryptowährung Bitcoin im 21. Jahrhundert auf. Das anfänglich beschriebene Protokoll von Bitcoin hat sich mittlerweile zu einem Phänomen entwickelt, dass unter dem Begriff Kryptoökonomie zusammengefasst wird. Mittlerweile ist Bitcoin nicht mehr die einzige Kryptowährung: Innerhalb der letzten sieben Jahre hat sich ein großes, vielseitiges Universum von Kryptowährungs- und Kryptotransaktionssystemen entwickelt. Diese Arbeit vergleicht zwei dieser Kryptowährungssysteme: das erwähnte dezentrale Zahlungssystem Bitcoin sowie Ethereum, eine Entwicklungsplattform für dezentrale Applikationen. Zuerst wird ein allgemeiner und historischer Überblick gegeben. Die beiden Systeme Bitcoin und Ethereum, die Blockchain und Geld und Währungsdefinition werden betrachtet. Anschließend werden für ein besseres Verständnis der Blockchain relevante Aspekte der Kryptografie vorgestellt. Besonderer Fokus liegt dabei auf asymmetrischen Algorithmen und Hash-Funktionen. Daraufhin werden die Bitcoin Blockchain und die Ethereum Blockchain gesondert und detaillierter beleuchtet. In der Folge werden Bitcoin und Ethereum im Allgemeinen und die Blockchains jener im Speziellen miteinander verglichen. Die Vergleichspunkte orientieren sich sowohl an ökonomischen als auch an technischen Gesichtspunkten. Abschließend wird das Ergebnis des Vergleichs präsentiert und ein Fazit gezogen.
Due to the financial markets disturbances of 2007/2008, a considerable number of financial intermediaries such as banks, credit institutions and asset management companies noticed substantial liquidity shortages, difficulties to refinance their operations as a result of a drying out of appropriate refinancing sources, and withdrawals of deposits by consumers. These turbulences in the financial markets forced governments and central banks to increase liquidity provisions to ensure a sufficient aggregate liquidity of the financial industry. Furthermore, policy-makers decided on bailouts of banks or on supporting financial intermediaries by governmental warranties or liquidity provisions to avoid a substantial number of insolvencies of banks and other financial institutions that may have rapidly deteriorated the global financial industry. In the aftermath of the crisis, politicians and economists discussed these decisions controversially because interventions by governments and central banks appear to have a deep impact on the global economy particularly in the financial industry. Moreover, legislative and regulatory authorities decided on increasing their vigilance, particularly with focus on principal-agent problems within certain sectors of the financial industry. A considerable amount of recent research papers has focused on the dynamics of liquidity shortages that suggest the recent crisis being related to both an increasing funding liquidity risk and an emerging market liquidity risk. Self-amplifying interdependencies appear to connect these two dimensions of liquidity risk that during the period 2007 to 2008 have led to the contagion effects in the global financial industry. Only little research work so far has provided evidence from the financial crisis in 2007/2008 while focusing on the German financial industry. Thus, my doctoral dissertation covers three research papers that address the occurrence of substantial liquidity risk and default probability within the German financial industry over the course of the financial crisis of 2007/2008. My first publication co-authored with Daniel Schmidt, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, entitled ‘Consumer reaction to tumbling funds - Evidence from retail fund outflows during the financial crisis 2007/2008’ focuses on funding liquidity risk of German retail funds. Contrary to the findings reported in some of the extant literature, our study indicates that over the past few years a change in investors’ behavior patterns means that investment decisions are made at short notice, and that shares are redeemed in a discriminatory manner when funds perform poorly. By using data assembled from 1672 retail funds in Germany over the period March 2008 to April 2010, we are able to show that in general, both the prior fund performance and prior net redemptions have a statistically significant influence on fund outflows. Moreover, there are indications that in recent crises situations that have resulted in the withdrawal of shares investors react fast to market signals. My second research paper entitled ‘Leveraging and risk-taking within the German banking system: Evidence from the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008’ examines the risk-taking attitudes of distinguishable German banking sectors. This study intends to examine whether the German banking system displays pro-cyclical behavior during 2000 to 2011, and to what extent specific sectors of the German banking system show significant balance sheet operations to increase their leverage during years of booming asset prices. The results of this study demonstrate that different sectors of the German banking system did operate their business more or less pro-cyclical. It also provides empirical evidence that certain banking sectors did favor refinancing their assets by short-term borrowing in the interbank market to increase their leverage during periods of extraordinary high returns in financial markets. Moreover, this study shows that banks, which operate above average leverages, tend to report a high volatility of return on assets and low distances-to-default. Finally, my third paper entitled ‘Are private banks the better banks? An insight into the ownership structure and risk-taking attitudes of German banks.’, and co-authored with Thomas Wein, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, tries to enlighten the influence of the different principal-agent relationships on the risk-taking attitudes of German banks. In this study, we propose our hypothesis that the distinguishable principal-agent relationships of German banks are significantly influencing the risk-taking attitudes of bank managers. Particularly, we intend to substantiate the theory that banks owned by dispersed shareholders or federal state authorities face a higher relevance of principal-agent problems than other banking sectors due to a missing ability to monitor bank managers. Our results underline that these problems appear to mislead bank managers showing an unreasonable risk-taking behavior. In a first stage, we rely on a theoretical model explaining that from the bank owners’ viewpoint three factors of the principal-agent relationships are determining the probability of choosing the optimal portfolio of risky assets. These factors cover the ability to control bank managers, the risk pooling capabilities of bank owners and bank managers, and the incentives of seeking high returns. To support our hypothesis we apply an empirical study to the distances-to-default of different German banking sectors. This demonstrates that risk-taking attitudes of banks are closely related to banks’ ownership. Consequently, our findings offer evidence, that legislative and regulatory authorities should increase their vigilance in terms of principal-agent problems within certain sectors of the banking industry.
This work investigates how managers/consultants (practitioners) of different ranks are engaged in patterns of behavior (practices) in socially situated contexts (practice) attempting to shape preferred shared interpretations of reality to achieve their goals. Following this line of inquiry, the work aims at (1) advancing our understanding of the role of practitioners in shaping managerial realities and (2) investigating how practitioners actually shape managerial realities, particularly focusing on "reality-shaping" practices and their content. The dissertation comprises a set of four complementary articles investigating these research questions empirically based on in-depth, empirical case studies and theoretically within various managerial contexts (client-consultant relationship, CEO post-succession strategic change process, evolutionary initiative development) and considering different actor perspectives (top managers, middle managers, consultants and clients). Resulting from this variety, the articles rely on and contribute to different, at times distant, research fields and therewith scholarly discussions. However, the literature on sensemaking and sensegiving offers a suitable overarching theoretical frame which is used in this work to synthesize the key contributions of the four articles.
Vor dem Hintergrund der 2004 durchgeführten Reform auf dem Handwerksmarkt sollte anhand einer theoretisch-empirischen Analyse überprüft werden, ob Informationsasymmetrien bezüglich der Qualität auf dem Handwerksmarkt in unterschiedlicher Stärke auftreten und dementsprechend auch eine differenzierte Regulierung erfordern sowie inwieweit marktendogene und wirtschaftspolitische Lösungsmöglichkeiten zum Abbau von Informationsasymmetrien auf dem deutschen Handwerksmarkt wirken. Als empirische Datengrundlage wurde dazu eine Haushaltsumfrage durchgeführt, die neben der Ermittlung des Informationsnachfrageverhaltens auch die Beurteilung handwerklicher Qualität durch private Bauherren zum Ziel hatte. Die Befragung zeigt, dass trotz des Meisterbriefes Informationsasymmetrien auf den einzelnen Märkten bestehen, so dass eine über alle Gewerke geltende und den Wettbewerb stark einschränkende Regulierung in Frage gestellt werden muss. Die aus den Ergebnissen der Befragung deutlich gewordene Anwendung marktendogener Reputationsmechanismen zur Lösung von Informationsasymmetrien macht gleichzeitig den Schutz der Konsumenten als Regulierungsbegründung fraglich. Dies wird verstärkt durch die in der Befragung deutlich gewordene hohe Nutzung spezialisierter Dritter, die aufgrund ihrer Fachkenntnis keinen expliziten Verbraucherschutz benötigen sollten. Die Handwerksnovelle 2004 stellt somit insbesondere durch die Auflockerung der Marktzutrittsbeschränkungen aus informationsökonomischer Sicht einen Schritt in die richtige Richtung dar.
The dissertation consists of three scientific papers and a synopsis. The synopsis addresses the relevance of the dissertation and lists the key factors for the sustainability transition in the electricity system as a common denominator of the three papers. The relevance of the dissertation results, on the one hand, from the urgency of the sustainability transition in the electricity system and an insufficient transition willingness of the eastern European Member States. On the other hand, the Multi-Level-Perspective as one of the most important scientific frameworks to grasp transitions does not provide a sufficient explanation of its mechanisms. Moreover, Demand Response aggregators as new enterprises on the European electricity market and potential reform initiators are still under researched. The following key factors for the sustainability transition of the electricity system have been identified: supply security concerns, Europeanisation, policy making and the dominance of short-term oriented economic evaluation. Paper#1 sheds light on the roots of this problem in the context of Poland. It suggests that unfavorable regulation is symptomatic of the real, underlying barriers. In Poland, these barriers are coal dependence and political influence on energy enterprises. As main drivers, supply security concerns, EU regulatory pressure, and a positive cost-benefit profile of DR in comparison to alternatives, are revealed. A conceptual model of DR uptake in electricity systems is proposed. Applying a social mechanisms approach to the Multi-Level Perspective, paper#2 conceptualizes mechanisms of socio-technical transitions and of gaining legitimacy for transitions as co-evolutionary drivers and outcomes. Situational, action-formational, and transformational mechanisms that operate as drivers of change in a socio-technical transition require corresponding framing and framing contests to achieve legitimacy for that transition. The study illustrates the conceptual insight with the case of the coal dependent Polish electricity system. Paper #3, a qualitative study reveals Demand Response (DR) aggregators as institutional entrepreneurs that struggle to reform the still largely supply-oriented European electricity market. Unfavourable regulation, low value of flexibility, resource constraints, complexity, and customer acquisition are the key challenges DR aggregators face. To overcome them they apply a combination of strategies: lobbying, market education, technological proficiency, and upscaling the business. The study highlights DR aggregation as an architectural innovation that alters the interplay between key actors of the electricity system and provides policy recommendations including the necessity to assess the real value of DR in comparison to other flexibility sources by taking all externalities into account, a technology-neutral approach to market design and the need for simplification of DR programmes, and common standards to reduce complexity and uncertainty for DR providers.
Maximizing the value from data has become a key challenge for companies as it helps improve operations and decision making, enhances products and services, and, ultimately, leads to new business models. While enterprise architecture (EA) management and modeling have proven their value for IT-related projects, the support of enterprise architecture for data-driven business models (DDBMs) is a rather new and unexplored field. The research group argues that the current understanding of the intersection of data-driven business model innovation and enterprise architecture is incomplete because of five challenges that have not been addressed in existing research: (1) lack of knowledge of how companies design and realize data-driven business models from a process perspective, (2) lack of knowledge on the implementation phase of data-driven business models, (3) lack of knowledge on the potential support enterprise architecture modeling and management can provide to data-driven business model endeavors, (4) lack of knowledge on how enterprise architecture modeling and management support data-driven business model design and realization in practice, (5) lack of knowledge on how to deploy data-driven business models. The researchers address these challenges by examining how enterprise architecture modeling and management can benefit data-driven business model innovation. The mixed-method approach of this thesis draws on a systematic literature review, qualitative empirical research as well as the design science research paradigm. The investigators conducted a systematic literature search on data-driven business models and enterprise architecture. Considering the novelty of data-driven business models for academia and practice, they conducted explorative qualitative research to explain "why" and "how" companies embark on realizing data-driven business models. Throughout these studies, the primary data source was semi-structured interviews. In order to provide an artifact for DDBM innovation, the researchers developed a theory for design and action. The data-driven business model innovation artifact was inductively developed in two design iterations based on the design science paradigm and the design science research framework.
In Zeiten, in denen die Gastronomie mit starken Umsatzeinbußen zu kämpfen hat, wie es in den vergangenen Jahren der Fall war, ist es für die Unternehmen von großer Bedeutung, ihre Konzepte so zu gestalten, daß sie den Erwartungen der Verbraucher soweit wie möglich entsprechen. Hierfür ist umfangreiche Kenntnis über die Gäste bzw. potentiellen Gäste erforderlich, um sich gegenüber den Mitbewerbern erfolgreich auf dem gastronomischen Markt zu positionieren bzw. zu profilieren.
In the face of uncertainty, ecosystems can provide natural insurance to risk averse users of ecosystem services. We employ a conceptual ecological-economic model to analyze the allocation of (endogenous) risk and ecosystem quality by risk averse ecosystem managers who have access to financial insurance, and study the implications for individually and socially optimal ecosystem management, and policy design. We show that while an improved access to financial insurance leads to lower ecosystem quality, the effect on the free-rider problem and on welfare is determined by ecosystem properties. We derive conditions on ecosystem functioning under which, if financial insurance becomes more accessible, (i) the extent of optimal regulation increases or decreases; and (ii) welfare, in the absence of environmental regulation, increases or decreases.
Organizational culture is widely acknowledged to be a driver of organizational effectiveness. However, existing empirical research tends to focus on investigating the links between individual, isolated culture dimensions and effectiveness outcomes. This approach is at odds with the theoretical roots of organizational culture and does not do justice to the complex reality that most organizations face. This issue is addressed by this dissertation, which is comprised of four studies. Study 1 investigated the psychometric quality and cultural equivalence of three culture measures in a German context, based on a sample of 172 employees in a bank. The results suggested that the German versions of the Denison Organizational Culture Survey and the Organizational Culture Profile performed satisfactorily, while results regarding the GLOBE survey fell short of expectations. Study 2 reviewed the literature on the link between culture and effectiveness with a focus on studies that treat organizational culture as a holistic phenomenon. The review yielded four kinds of holistic approaches (aggregation-based, agreement-based, moderation- or mediation-based, and configuration-based). Study 3 investigated how a change in organizational culture induced by an M&A project impacts employee commitment. Based on a sample of 180 employees in a German organization, the findings suggest that individuals perceive cultural change differently, that cultural stability is positively related to employee commitment, and that group-level leader-member exchange and individual self-efficacy moderate this relationship. Study 4 introduced a new theoretical perspective (set theory) and a novel methodology (fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis) to the field of organizational culture. Across two samples (1170 employees in a financial service provider and 998 employees in fashion retailer), results indicated that culture dimensions do not operate in isolation, but jointly work together in achieving different effectiveness outcomes.
This cumulative dissertation embraces four empirical papers addressing socio-economic issues relevant to policy-makers and society as a whole. These papers cover important aspects of human life including health at birth, life satisfaction, unemployment periods and retirement decisions. The analyses are carried out applying advanced econometric methods and are based on data sets consisting of survey data as well as administrative records. The first joint paper investigates the causal impact of prenatal exposure to air pollution on neonatal health in Italy in the 2000s combining detailed information on mother's residential location from birth certificates with PM10 concentrations from air pollution monitors. Variation in local weekly rainfall is exploited as an instrumental variable for non-random air pollution exposure. Using quasi-experimental variation in rainfall shocks allows to identify the effect of PM10, ruling out potential bias due to confounder pollutants. The paper estimates the effect of exposure for both the entire pregnancy period and separately for each trimester to test whether the neonatal health effects are driven by pollution exposure during a particular gestation period. This information enhances our understanding of the mechanisms at work and help prevent pregnant mothers from most dangerous exposure periods. Additionally, the effects of prenatal exposure to PM10 are estimated by maternal labor market status and maternal education level to understand how the pollution burden is shared across different population groups. This decomposition allows to identify possible mechanisms through which environmental inequality reinforces the negative impact of early-life exposure to air pollution. This study finds that average PM10 and days with PM10 level above the hazard limit reduce birth weight, gestational age, and measures of overall newborn health. Effects are largest for third trimester exposure and for low-income and less educated mothers. The second joint paper updates previous findings on the total East-West gap in overall life satisfaction and its trend by using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 1992 to 2013. Additionally, the effects are separately analyzed for men and women as well as for four birth cohorts. The results indicate that reported life satisfaction is, on average, significantly lower in East than in West German federal states and that part of the raw East-West gap is due to differences in household income and unemployment status. The conditional East-West gap decreased in the first years after the German reunification and remained quite stable and sizable since the mid-nineties. The results further indicate that gender differences are small. Finally, the East-West gap is significantly smaller and shows a trend towards convergence for younger birth cohorts. The third joint paper explores the effects of a major reform of unemployment benefits in Germany on the labor market outcomes of individuals with some health impairment. The reform induced a substantial reduction in the potential duration of regular unemployment benefits for older workers. This work analyzes the reform in a wider framework of institutional interactions, which allows to distinguish between its intended and unintended effects. The results based on routine data collected by the German Statutory Pension Insurance and a Difference-in-Differences design provide causal evidence for a significant decrease in the number of days in unemployment benefits and increase in the number of days in employment. However, they also suggest a significant increase in the number of days in unemployment assistance, granted upon exhaustion of unemployment benefits. Transitions to unemployment assistance represent an unintended effect, limiting the success of a policy change that aims to increase labor supply via reductions in the generosity of the unemployment insurance system. The fourth, single-authored paper explores how an increase in the early retirement age affects labor force participation of older workers. The analysis is based on a social security reform in Germany, which raised the early retirement age over several birth cohorts to boost employment of older people and ultimately alleviate the burden on the public pension system. Detailed administrative data from the Federal Employment Agency allow to distinguish between employment and unemployment as well as disability pensions and retirement benefits claims. Using a Regression Kink design in a quasi-experimental framework, the author shows that the raised early retirement age had positive employment effects and negative effects on retirement benefits claims. The results also show that some population groups are more sensitive to a reduction in retirement options and more likely to seek benefits from other government programs. In this respect, the author finds that workers in manufacturing sector respond to the raised early retirement age by claiming benefits from the disability insurance program designed to compensate for reduced earnings capacity due to severe health problems. The treatment heterogeneity analysis further suggests that high-wage workers are more likely to delay exits from employment, which is in line with incentives but might also indicate an increased inequality within the affected birth cohorts induced by the reform. Finally, women seem to rely on alternative sources of income such as retirement benefits for women, or spouse's or partner's income not observed in the data. All things considered, workers did not adjust to the increased early retirement age by substituting early retirement with other government programs but rather responded to the reform in line with the policy intent. At the same time, the findings point to heterogeneous behavioral responses across different population groups. This implies that raising the early retirement age is an effective policy tool to increase employment only among older people who have the real choice to delay employment exits. Therefore, reforms that raise statutory ages should ensure social support for workers only marginally attached to the labor market or not able to work longer due to potential health problems or other circumstances.
Viele Betriebsgastronomien in Deutschland sehen sich vor die Herausforderung steigender Gästeansprüche, zunehmenden Kostendrucks und oftmals auch konkurrierender Speisenanbieter gestellt. Hinzu kommt in vielen Betrieben die Forderung der Gäste oder des Managements nach einem Angebot gesundheitsfördernder Speisen und Getränke. Dieses kann z. B. durch die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung e. V. (DGE) zertifiziert werden. Die innerbetriebliche Umsetzung und Kommunikation des erweiterten, gesundheitsfördernden Speisenangebotes muss indes gesteuert werden. Hierfür bietet sich die Erstellung einer Balanced Scorecard nach Kaplan und Norton an. Diese berücksichtigt neben finanzorientierten Kennzahlen auch ausdrücklich qualitative Ziele und stellt deren wechselseitige Einflüsse in Ursache-Wirkungs-Ketten dar. Die vorliegende Bachelorarbeit spezifiziert eine Balanced Scorecard auf die Anforderungen einer Betriebsgastronomie, die ein DGE-zertifiziertes Speisenangebot etablieren möchte. Zu diesem Zweck werden für die vier Perspektiven einer Balanced Scorecard strategische Ziele vorgeschlagen und deren Ursache-Wirkungs-Beziehungen grafisch in einer Strategy Map dargestellt. Die ebenfalls durchgeführte empirische Untersuchung DGE-zertifizierter Betriebe zeigt, dass durch die Einführung eines gesundheitsfördernden Speisenangebotes die Mitarbeiterzufriedenheit und Mitarbeitergesundheit positiv beeinflusst werden kann. Zudem ist eine Steigerung des Umsatzes durch die Gewinnung neuer Gäste und den Zusatzverkauf komplementärer Produkte möglich.
Essays on Say-on-Pay: theoretical analysis, literature review and empirical evidence from Germany
(2019)
The dissertation contains four journal articles together with a framework manuscript. The overall subject is the so-called Say-on-Pay (SOP) vote. SOP is a law that enables shareholders to vote on the appropriateness of executive compensation during the firms’ annual general meeting. The dissertation investigates SOP votes from different angles. While the framework provides a background for the relevance of the work, outlines existing research gaps, covers an in-depth discussion and concludes relevant research questions, the four articles present the essence of the dissertation. The first article is a theoretical paper on the recent advances of behavioural agency theory. It serves as a theoretical foundation for the empirical work of the dissertation. Although principal-agent theory has gained a prominent place in research, its negative image of self-serving managers is frequently criticized. Consequently, scholars advocate the utilization of positive management theories, such as stewardship theory. This paper reviews the literature of both theoretical concepts and describes how behavioural characteristics allow for a mutually beneficial symbiosis of the two theories. The second article establishes the foundation of the scholarly knowledge in the field by systematically reviewing the empirical literature. The review covers 71 empirical articles published between January 1995 and September 2017. The studies are reviewed within an empirical research framework that separates the reasons for shareholder activism and SOP voting dissent as input factor on the one hand and the consequences of shareholder pressure as output factor on the other. The implications are analysed, and new directions for further research are discussed by proposing 19 different research questions. Building on the research gaps defined in the literature review, the third article is an empirical manuscript. In this paper, a hand-selected sample of 1,676 annual general meetings with 268 management-sponsored SOP votes in 164 different companies between 2010 and 2015 in Germany is analysed. The analysis focused on the structure, rather than the level, of executive compensation by applying a sample-selection model and panel data regression. Finally, the fourth paper investigates the rare setting of voluntary SOP votes. Using 1,841 annual general meetings of listed firms in Germany between 2010 and 2016, the effects of financial and non-financial (sustainable) performance on SOP voting likelihood and voting results are tested.
Die negativen Auswirkungen des modernen Konsumverhaltens sind heute weithin bekannt. Dennoch ist insbesondere die Modebranche weiterhin durch sehr niedrige Preise, kurze Produktlebensdauer und Massenkonsum gekennzeichnet. Eine Veränderung des Konsumverhaltens in der breiten Bevölkerung hin zu einer Reduktion von Neukäufen, einer langen Nutzungsdauer der vorhandenen Kleidung und zum Kauf ökologisch und sozial verträglich hergestellter Produkte ist aber dringend notwendig. Ein wichtiger Erfolgsfaktor für die effektive Ansprache der Konsumierenden ist die Berücksichtigung handlungsrelevanter Persönlichkeitsmerkmale auf Seiten der Zielgruppe. Die wissenschaftliche Literatur zu Prädikatoren nachhaltiger Verhaltensweisen weist darauf hin, dass persönliche Werte eine wichtige Rolle für dessen Umsetzung spielen. Gleichzeitig wirkt sich insbesondere im Kleidungskonsum auch das Geschlecht bzw. Gender der Konsumierenden auf das Verhalten aus. Ausgehend von dieser Datenlage werden in dieser Arbeit drei Themen mit Relevanz für die Nachhaltigkeitsforschung - persönliche Werte, Geschlecht/Gender und nachhaltiger Kleidungskonsum - zusammengeführt und auf ihre komplexe Wirkungsbeziehung hin untersucht. Auf Grundlage von Fokusgruppeninterviews wird erforscht, welche individuellen Wertorientierungen sich in welcher Weise und welcher Konstellation positiv auf ein nachhaltiges Kleidungskonsumverhalten auswirken und welche geschlechterspezifischen Unterschiede hierbei erkennbar werden. Durch die Berücksichtigung persönlicher konsumrelevanter Motivatoren und deren individueller Ausprägung werden Potenziale für eine zielgerichtete Verstärkung nachhaltigen Konsumverhaltens in der breiten Bevölkerung aufgedeckt. Dazu werden (1) vier Wertorientierungen mit Einfluss auf nachhaltigen Kleidungskonsum identifiziert, (2) ihre kausale Beziehung zu nachhaltigem Kleidungkonsum analysiert, (3) die geschlechtlichen Unterschiede berücksichtigt und (4) mit Gender ein Ansatzpunkt für die Erklärung der gefundenen Unterschiede angeführt. Zur Aufarbeitung der Daten wird die fsQCA zur Untersuchung des Themas nachhaltiger Kleidungskonsum angewandt. Die Natur dieser Auswertungsmethode, welche statt kausaler unidirektionaler Zusammenhänge zwischen zwei Variablen Schnittmengen zwischen zwei oder mehr Phänomenen untersucht, trägt zu einer neuen Perspektive auf die Beziehung zwischen Werten und nachhaltigem Kleidungskonsum bei. Eine Forschungsleistung dieser Arbeit besteht darin, gerade das Zusammenspiel der verschiedenen Werte zu betrachten und damit ein tieferes Verständnis von wichtigen Einflussfaktoren für nachhaltigen Kleidungskonsum zu ermöglichen - ein Ansatz, der über die bisher existierenden Forschungserkenntnisse hinausgeht. Aus den gewonnenen Resultaten werden Handlungsempfehlungen für die Kommunikation von NGOs und Unternehmen mit nachhaltiger Ausrichtung abgeleitet, wie eine zielgerichtete Ansprache zur Intensitätssteigerung dieser bereits vorhandenen Bedingungen gestaltet werden kann.
Many dynamics are reshaping the global macroeconomics and finance. This cumulative dissertation empirically examines the impacts of two major global dynamics, the disaster risks and the China's rise, on the global economy. Chapter 1 introduces the motivation and summarizes the dissertation. Chapter 2 investigates how geopolitical risks affect financial stress in the whole financial system and its sub-sectors (banking, stock, foreign exchange, bond) of major emerging economies. Chapter 3 shows how different disaster risks (financial, geopolitical, natural-technological) can explain the returns and risk premiums of stock and housing in advanced economies between 1870 and 2015. Chapter 4 examines how the rise of China is contributing to higher economic growth in emerging economies, especially after the Global financial crisis of 2007-2008. Chapter 5 illustrates how a close trade and investment relation with China has helped African countries to reduce poverty and to improve their income distribution.
This dissertation analyses external appointees and successions on boards and consists of three papers which are all empirical in nature. It provides insights into the present literature from a meta-perspective, enlarges the understanding of external successions to German executive bank boards and extends the rare number of studies on the internal supervisory bodies of bank institutions. The first paper highlights the existing literature: conducting a literature search process, the paper aggregates 102 empirical results from 28 journal articles and working papers published between 1990 and 2017. The meta-analysis focuses on how researchers address the build-in issue that outsiders are not randomly assigned to firms. The results reveal that the relationship of outside successions and performance varies significantly with the methodological characteristics of the original studies. The following two papers concentrate on successions in banking institutions. More specifically, the second study examines the appointments of executive directors external to the bank and the consequences of that appointment on bank performance. The study addresses in particular alternative explanations, i.e. outside selection and/or joint endogeneity, while examining external executive appointments and their consequences on bank performance. The second empirical paper lend significant support to the view that some outsiders are better predisposed to helping the bank turn around poor performance and that the selected proxies of managerial ability, which are based on the historical return on assets and risk-return efficiency measured at outsiders' former banks, are able to identify such good outsiders. Finally, the third paper considers the link between the executive and the supervisory board. The study points to the conclusion that newly appointed executives to the supervisory board differ from their non-appointed counterparts with a particular set of experiences. The study provides evidence for the view that the pre-appointment financial situation, measured by several proxies of bank risk and performance, has significant influence on the decision to appoint such an experienced member to the supervisory board. This dissertation is framed by an introduction and concluding chapter where the author reflects on the research questions of her empirical studies, summarizes the results and identifies some possibilities for future research.
Mit der vorliegenden Arbeit werden die bis Ende 2020 entstandenen gesetzlichen Strukturen und Instrumente zum Ausbau erneuerbarer Energien aus rechtswissenschaftlicher Perspektive eingeordnet, um der Frage nachzugehen, mit welchen Ansätzen und in welchem Umfang der Rechtsrahmen die verschiedenen Entwicklungen zur Erreichung der Ausbauziele für die erneuerbaren Energien einerseits und damit deren Beitrag zur Erreichung der Klimaschutzziele steuern kann. Darüber hinaus wird beleuchtet, welche Reformperspektiven aus den bisherigen Entwicklungen abgeleitet werden können oder sollten. Dazu werden die Strukturen und Elemente des Erneuerbare-Energien-Rechts sowie dessen Entwicklungslinien herausgearbeitet und bewertet. Dieser Schritt erfolgt durch die Analyse einzelner, für das Recht der erneuerbaren Energien prägender Strukturen und Entwicklungsschritte, etwa der Schaffung neuer Instrumente wie der Nutzungspflicht erneuerbarer Energien, der Beschreibung der prägenden Strukturelemente und Wirkungszusammenhänge in dem sich im Laufe von 30 Jahren herausgebildeten Recht der Erneuerbaren Energien im Stromsektor oder anhand der Einordnung von tiefgreifenden gesetzgeberischen Veränderungen wie der Umstellung auf Ausschreibungen im Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz. Diese Einzelbeobachtungen werden dann in Beziehung zueinander gesetzt, Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede der hinter den Entwicklungen erkennbaren Gründe herausgearbeitet und in einen übergeordneten Gesamtkontext. Die Arbeit gliedert sich in vier Schritte, die sich einer kurzen einleitenden Problemskizze in Teil 1 anschließen: die grundlegende Analyse zu Recht und Klimaschutz sowie zur Rolle des Rechts bei der Transformation (Teil 2), eine umfassende Bestandsaufnahme zu den Bausteinen des Erneuerbare-Energien-Rechts, den Entwicklungslinien und deren Einordnung (Teil 3), ein Zwischenfazit, das die Gründe für die beobachteten Entwicklungslinien und Strukturen zusammenfasst und eine Einordnung des Rechts der erneuerbaren Energien in den größeren Kontext des Umweltenergierechts (Teil 4) sowie abschließend ein auf einer Einordnung des Rechts der erneuerbaren Energien in den Kontext der neu entstehenden Klimaschutzgovernance beruhenden Ausblick auf mögliche Themenfelder der weiteren Rechtsfortbildung (Teil 5).
In this dissertation, the author focuses on the link between (internal) corporate governance structures and processes and firms financial reporting quality. Specifically, the dissertation aims to provide insights into the following general research question: What is the effect of different corporate governance stakeholders on the financial reporting quality of a firm? The author provides insights into this question through three different articles. Paper #1 explores the relationship between family firm status and earnings management and synthesizes and explains previous research findings with the help of meta-analytic methods that are still uncommon in financial accounting research. The authors find a negative relationship between family firms and earnings management on average across 37 primary studies (and 305 effect sizes in total). Furthermore, they show that the considerable variation in size and direction of primary effect sizes can be explained by researchers choice of study design, earnings management proxy and different institutional settings. The second paper explores institutional owners as a different set of shareholders and their impact on financial reporting quality. The study enables the authors to compare the results against the backdrop of the previous chapter and to see different rationales that managers in institutionally-owned companies might have to engage in earnings management. Here, the authors study 511 effect sizes from a total of 87 primary studies and find that the average effect is slightly negative, meaning institutional owners on average can get more transparent earnings figures from the companies they invest in. Similar to the work they did on family firms, they find considerable heterogeneity between results from primary studies. Specifically, their multivariate meta-regression models can explain 26% of the variability in effect sizes, mainly attributable to study design choices. The third paper is concerned with managers and how managerial personality drives the propensity to engage in fraudulent accounting activities. The author uses a primary sample of 956 professionals, who work in accounting and finance departments, and ask them to rate their immediate superior on dark triad personality traits, as well as common actions taken by management to obscure and manipulate earnings figures. He finds that managers with high ratings for dark triad personality traits engage to a greater extent in fraudulent accounting practices, than managers scoring low on the dark triad scale. Moreover, the author can show that traditional risk management mechanisms, like internal audit departments, are only partially effective. Specifically, he finds that only internal audit departments that are fully staffed by external personnel can curb the adverse effect of dark triad managers on financial reporting quality. This suggests that managers with dark personalities can take advantage of mixed or entirely in-house internal audit departments. Overall, this dissertation contributes significantly to both literature streams of corporate governance and financial reporting quality. This work can explain a significant degree of heterogeneity in previous findings on the link between different kinds of ownership and earnings management. Further, it stresses that the considerable variation in current findings is not mainly attributable to cross-country differences, as previously suggested, but in no small part attributable to study design features. Finally, the author can provide additional evidence on current research linking executive personality traits and financial reporting practices.
On 25 October 2016, the European Commission presented a proposal for a directive on a Common Corporate Tax Base (CCTB Proposal), which contains a comprehensive concept for the harmonisation of profit calculation regulations within the EU. Against this current background, the objective of the present work is to contribute to the implementation of the CCTB by identifying ambiguities and conceptual weaknesses in the design of the profit determination system of the CCTB Proposal and developing concrete recommendations for action for adjustments in the course of the further legislative procedure. In the first article, selected profit calculation rules of the CCTB Proposal will be analysed in detail and compared with the provisions on profit calculation under German commercial and tax law and the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) recognised across member states. Based on the legal comparison, questions of interpretation and inadequacies of the profit calculation system will be considered and proposals for adjustments to various regulatory areas will be submitted. Furthermore, in the second article, within the framework of a holistic study, expert interviews will be used as an empirical-qualitative research design to generate reliable assessments on the part of the various stakeholder groups affected by the implementation of the future directive or involved in its elaboration. The results show the extent to which the profit determination rules of the CCTB Proposal in their current form are suitable for national and EU-wide implementation and in which areas the various expert groups still see concrete need for adaptation. Based on these expert assessments, the third article finally develops a proposal to reduce the threat of legal uncertainty in interpretation issues criticised by the experts. Based on economic maxims developed by the European Commission and existing accounting principles of the current CCTB Proposal, the EU Accounting Directive and IFRS, a system of specific European tax principles will be developed which could be implemented within the framework of the CCTB Proposal.
The dissertation analyzes the role of large banks in the context of financial (in)stability. Based on the underlying "too big to fail"-problem (TBTF), the three included papers investigate the reasons for the instability of banking systems on a national and international level. Already in advance, but at least since the years 2007/2008 with the escalation of the financial crisis, especially large banks are under critical supervision of regulators and the society. There exist numerous aspects that should to be taken into account when addressing TBTF which complicates the finding of a solution to the problem. In particular, the thesis investigates three major issues in this context: (1) The contribution of the size of a bank to the development of financial crises or the exposure of large banks to systematic risk and contagious spillovers. (2) The spillover effects from one banking system to another and the importance of banks' foreign asset holdings for the transmission of sovereign risk on foreign banks. (3) The impact of the degree of competition in the German banking market on the stability of the banking system.