Contributions in Merlin

We study the prices that individual banks pay for liquidity (captured by borrowing rates in repos with the central bank and benchmarked by the overnight index swap) as a function of market conditions and bank characteristics. These prices depend in particular on the distribution of liquidity across banks, which is calculated over time using individual bank-level data on reserve requirements and actual holdings. Banks pay more for liquidity when positions are more imbalanced across banks, consistent with the existence of short squeezing. We also show that small banks pay more for liquidity and are more vulnerable to squeezes. Healthier banks pay less but, contrary to what one might expect, banks in formal liquidity networks do not. State guarantees reduce the price of liquidity but do not protect against squeezes.

Well-functioning groups enforce social norms that restrain opportunism. We study how the assignment to the top or bottom of the caste system affects the altruistic punishment of norm violations. Individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy exhibit a much lower willingness to punish norm violations that hurt members of their own caste. We can rule out self-selection into castes and control for wealth, education and political experience. We thus plausibly identify the impact of caste status on altruistic punishment. The lower willingness to punish may impair the low castes’ ability to enforce contracts, to ensure property rights and sustain cooperation.

Heterogeneity in size and productivity is central to models that explain which manufacturing firms export. This study presents descriptive evidence on similar heterogeneity among international banks as financial services providers. A novel and detailed bank-level data set reveals the volume and mode of international activities for all German banks. Only a few, large banks have a commercial presence abroad, consistent with the size pecking order documented for manufacturing firms. However, the relationship between internationalization and productivity also yields two inconsistencies with recent trade models. First, virtually all banks hold at least some foreign assets, irrespective of size or productivity. Second, some fairly unproductive banks maintain commercial presences abroad.

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Purpose Extant research on CSR communication has focused primarily on external communication, i.e. what firms communicate to their environment. At the same time, a large part of this literature exhibits a mechanistic understanding of communication that implies the possibility of a package-like transfer of information and meaning from sender to receiver. However, this notion of communication can be criticized for neglecting the constitutive role of communication for organizations. As an alternative, these authors propose a theoretical perspective known as “communi-cation constitutes organizations” (CCO). The CCO view allows for grasping organizations as holistic and polyphonic communicative entities. Hence, what are the implications for CSR communication when we switch from a mechanistic to a constitutive notion of communication? Design/Methodology/Approach This is a conceptual paper. We apply the CCO view to CSR communication. Findings Our application of the CCO view yields three main findings: (1) CSR communication represents only one of several communicative practices that collectively constitute the organization and that evolve in competition with one another; (2) CSR communication is not only a function of (large-scale) formal organizations, but as a communicative activity it can itself also form the constitutive basis for the emergence of rudimentary, local, and temporary forms of organizing; (3) According to the CCO view, organizations are constituted and stabilized by various non-human entities (e.g., texts or other artifacts) that “act” on their behalf. Thus, CSR communication would need to take also into account the agency and responsibility of these non-human entities, which in some cases lack concrete individual human creators who could be held accountable for. Originality/Value Our paper links the literature on CSR communication to broader debates in organizational communication studies. By applying the CCO view, we arrive at a new understanding of CSR communication that allows for comprehending the legitimacy and accountability of organizations as holistic communicative phenomena and helps to transcend a one-sided accentuation of the external side of CSR communication.

An isochrone in a spatial network is the minimal, possibly disconnected subgraph that covers all locations from where a query point is reachable within a given time span and by a given arrival time. In this paper we formally define isochrones for multimodal spatial networks with different transportation modes that can be discrete or continuous in, respectively, space and time. For the computation of isochrones we propose the multimodal incremental network expansion (MINE) algorithm, which is independent of the actual network size and depends only on the size of the isochrone. An empirical study using real-world data confirms the analytical results.

With the rapid growth of the social web an increasing number of people started to replicate their off-line preferences and lives in an on-line environment. Consequently, the social web provides an enormous source for social network data, which can be used in both commercial and research applications. However, people often take part in multiple social network sites and, generally, they share only a selected amount of data to the audience of a specific platform. Consequently, the interlinkage of social graphs from different sources getting increasingly important for applications such as social network analysis, personalization, or recommender systems. This paper proposes a novel method to enhance available user re-identification systems for social network data aggregation based on face-recognition algorithms. Furthermore, the method is combined with traditional text-based approaches in order to attempt a counter-balancing of the weaknesses of both methods. Using two samples of real-world social networks (with 1610 and 1690 identities each) we show that even though a pure face-recognition based method gets outperformed by the traditional text-based method (area under the ROC curve 0.986 vs. 0.938) the combined method significantly outperforms both of these (0.998, p = 0.0001) suggesting that the face-based method indeed carries complimentary information to raw text attributes.

Business-critical legacy applications often rely on relational databases to sustain daily operations. Introducing Semantic Web technology in newly developed systems is often difficult, as these systems need to run in tandem with their predecessors and cooperatively read and update existing data.A common pattern is to incrementally migrate data from a legacy system to its successor by running the new system in parallel, with a data bridge in between. Existing approaches that can be deployed as a data bridge in theory, restrict Semantic Web-enabled applications to read legacy data in practice, disallowing update operations completely.This paper explains how our RDB-to-RDF platform OntoAccess can be used to transition legacy systems into Semantic Web-enabled applications. By means of a case study, we exemplify how we successfully made a bridge between one of our own large-scale legacy systems and its long-term replacement. We elaborate on challenges we faced during the migration process and how we were able to overcome them.

Semantic caching is a technique used for optimizing the evaluation of database queries by caching results of old queries and using them when answering new queries. CoopSC is a cooperative database caching approach, which extends the classic semantic caching approach by allowing clients to share their local caches in a cooperative matter. Cache entries of all clients are indexed in a distributed data structure constructed on top of a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay network. This distributed index is used for determining those cache entries that can be used for answering a specific query. Thus, this approach decreases the response time of database queries and the amount of data sent by database server, because the server only answers those parts of queries that are not available in the cooperative cache. The approach has been validated and experiments show that CoopSC improves the performance of range queries.