Contributions published at Strategic Management and Business Policy (Egon Franck)

We show that both talent and popularity significantly contribute to stars' market values in German soccer. The talent-versus-popularity controversy on the sources of stardom goes back to Rosen (1981) and Adler (1985). All attempts to resolve the controversy empirically face the difficulty of accurately identifying talent. In professional sports, rank-order tournaments help in ascertaining talent. Analyzing a team setting, we use 20 different performance indicators to estimate a player's talent according to his ability to increase the team's winning probability.

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The impact of intra-team pay dispersion on team productivity is a highly discussed issue. On the one hand, wage differentials provide incentives for higher employee effort. On the other hand, pay inequality may reduce team cohesiveness and increase feelings of relative deprivation leading to lower performance. Analysing nonlinear effects of wage dispersion in professional soccer, we find empirical evidence that team performance is strongest when there is either very high or very low wage inequality. Medium levels produce the weakest team performance. In addition, we show that the pay structure affects the team's playing style even after controlling for team and coach heterogeneity. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications as well as the limits of generalization.

We empirically investigate the performance effect of team-specific human capital in highly interactive teams. Based on the tenets of the resource-based view of the firm and on the ideas of typical learning functions, we hypothesize that team members’ shared experience in working together have a positive effect on team performance, but at diminishing rates. When we hold constant a team’s stock of general human capital and other potential drivers, we find support for this prediction. We also discuss the implications concerning investment decisions into human capital as well as the transferability of our findings to other contexts.

Inferring the implicit price of an environmental good hinges on ceteris paribus conditions that are often hard to justify. This paper uses an unexpected change in flight regulations as source of exogenous variation and identifies aircraft noise effects from price adjustments in the market for rental apartments. Controlling for spatial and apartment heterogeneity, we find that aircraft noise reduces apartment rents by about 0.5% per decibel. Our results indicate (i) that noise discounts are overestimated in cross-sectional studies because aircraft noise tends to be negatively correlated with omitted neighborhood and housing amenities and (ii) that noise effects are unlikely to be constant over the entire noise range.

Forderungen nach mehr Aktionärsdemokratie finden zunehmende gesellschaftliche und auch akademische Akzeptanz. Der Beitrag er- läutert, weswegen sie dennoch falsch sind, und empfiehlt eine Rück- besinnung auf die Kernelemente der Board Primacy im Falle anste- hender Aktienrechtsrevisionen.

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In most developed countries, the provision of water is organized at a local level. The costs and tariffs vary significantly, even between adjacent water utilities. Such heterogeneity is an obvious indication of the sector’s overall inefficiency and stresses a need for institutional adjustments. We show that cooperation by water trade and the introduction of competition by common carriage between adjacent utilities are valuable alternatives to improve the industry’s efficiency, even when mergers are not feasible. Because both approaches require the physical connection of neighboring networks, they may have similar effects. This paper analyzes and compares the relevant welfare gains and shows that production efficiency and retail prices may differ depending on the initial cost differential, the application of regulations and the distribution of bargaining power. Using a theoretical model, we show that at higher initial production cost differentials, welfare is higher under competitive conditions, even in a lower-bound benchmark case without any regulation.

Inferring the implicit price of an environmental good hinges on ceteris paribus conditions that are often hard to justify. This paper uses an unexpected change in flight regulations as source of exogenous variation and identifies aircraft noise effects from price adjustments in the market for rental apartments. Controlling for spatial and apartment heterogeneity, we find that aircraft noise reduces apartment rents by about 0.5% per decibel. Our results indicate (i) that noise discounts are overestimated in cross-sectional studies because aircraft noise tends to be negatively correlated with omitted neighborhood and housing amenities, and (ii) that noise effects are unlikely to be constant over the entire noise range.

Verlagstext (http://www.nzz-libro.ch): Begrenzte Reserven und der wachsende Energiehunger aufstrebender Volkswirtschaften schaffen Unsicherheiten über die künftige Energieversorgung. Energie ist nicht mehr nur im Fokus der Wirtschafts- und Klimapolitik, sondern auch der Sicherheits- und Aussenpolitik. Dennoch oder gerade deshalb fehlt es in der Schweiz an einer kohärenten Energiestrategie. Viele Ansätze vernachlässigen den internationalen Kontext, die Zusammenhänge zwischen den Energieträgern und die Funktionsweise der Märkte. Urs Meister stellt hier die globalen, europäischen und nationalen Märkte und Versorgungsstrukturen für Öl, Gas und Strom dar und zeigt auf, welchen Risiken die Schweiz ausgesetzt ist. Das Buch schliesst eine Lücke, indem es die Energieversorgung der Schweiz im internationalen Kontext untersucht, auf entstehende Probleme hinweist und Lösungsvorschläge präsentiert.