Contributions in Merlin

Knowledge of the statistical distribution of the prices of emission allowances, and their forecastability, are crucial in constructing, among other things, purchasing and risk management strategies in the emissions-constrained markets. This paper analyzes the two emission permits markets, CO2 in Europe, and SO2 in the US, and investigates a model for dealing with the unique stylized facts of this type of data. Its effectiveness in terms of model fit and out-of-sample value-at-risk-forecasting, as compared to models commonly used in risk-forecasting contexts, is demonstrated.

Behavioral Finance hat bahnbrechende Erkenntnisse zur Psychologie von Investoen hervorgebracht. Sie können helfen, den Prozess der Kundenberatun in Banken zu verbessern.

Transfer restrictions have a long tradition in professional sports but came under heavy attack in recent years (e.g. Bosman ruling, Monti system). Based on a bargaining model with stochastic player productivity, we show that less restrictive transfer rules reallocate ex post bargaining power from players to clubs. This reallocation is efficient and in the ex ante self-interest of players. The right to charge transfer fees enables clubs to insure their players. The players, in turn, benefit by converting risky future income into riskless current income. Overall, player utility is higher under more than under less restrictive transfer rules.

Previous studies in positive psychology have indicated that work satisfaction is an important determinant of individual well-being. Research has suggested that people are most satisfied with their work when they are doing what they are drawn to naturally. We provide further evidence on this issue from a large representative data set, the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The 2005 wave of the SOEP contains a battery of personality questions as well as detailed information on personal life and work life. We extract the Big Five personality factors and one character strength: vitality. The main results are based on regression analysis. The analysis supports the hypothesis that certain personality clusters are more predominant in some occupations than in others. Furthermore, an alignment between personal profile and occupational profile tends to be related positively to satisfaction. These results indicate that ignoring mental aspects of work has its price in terms of well-being. They also highlight the importance of studying the way we structure work and harness personality and individual strengths within positive psychology.

We present a model of structural change due to non-linear Engel-curves for consumer goods. Goods are sequentially introduced starting out as a luxury with high income elasticity and ending up as a necessity with low income elasticity. Although this leads to rising and falling sectoral employment shares, the model exhibits a steady growth path along which the Kaldor facts are satisfied. Extending the basic model to the case of endogenous product innovations shows that complementarities between aggregate and sectoral growth may give rise to multiple equilibria.

We describe the architecture of a novel ontology and rule editor ACE View. The goal of ACE View is to simplify viewing and editing expressive and syntactically complex OWL/SWRL knowledge bases by making most of the interaction with the knowledge base happen via Attempto Controlled English (ACE). This makes ACE View radically different from current OWL/SWRL editors which are based on formal logic syntaxes and general purpose graphical user interface widgets. ACE View integrates two mappings, ACE ?OWL/SWRL and OWLACE, and is implemented as a plug-in for Prot ?eg ?e 4.

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The implementation of innovations changes the processes, the utilisation of resources and the organisation of a company. Due to these changes, both staff and management have to adjust their actions and their way of thinking. Innovative introductions into organisations are realised through complex business and IT projects. These are also known as transformation projects. This diploma thesis deals with the social effect of the success factor information in the management of complex IT projects. These are considered here as self-creating social systems. The successful implementation of IT projects depends greatly upon well-established coordination. Therefore, not only staff members and project management, but also stakeholders have to be integrated into any coordinated innovative project. The management of such projects requires a systematic view of information as a success factor. In the first part, this thesis develops a project-managing concept with interventions from the point of view of the project manager. These interventions are information measures which support the project manager in the correction of any disruption to the coordination of the system. The second part analyses how the management will react, through the intervention of virtual teams. These teams have to overcome geographical, temporal and organisational barriers. In particular, different methods are defined which support the project manager in the organising of project portals. The final part is a conceptual accompaniment of the project ëmioBookí, in the context of leadership based information.

We empirically investigate the effect of financial distress on corporate ownership and control. Our analysis is based on a panel of 267 German firms that suffered from repeated interest coverage shortfalls between 1996 and 2004. We track each firm’s development over the distress cycle with particular attention to corporate ownership, restructuring, and management turnover. We find a significant decrease in ownership concentration. Private investors gradually give up their dominating role and thereby cease to be an effective source of managerial control. By contrast, ownership representation by banks and outside investors almost doubles. Shareholdings by executive and non-executive directors also substantially increase but have no effect on managerial tenure. Forced management turnover is mostly initiated by outside investors and banks and often occurs subsequent to debt restructurings, block investments, and takeovers.

Workflows have been widely used for coordinating structured processes, whereas group support systems are used to facilitate ad hoc and unstructured collaboration activities. In many business settings, it is beneficial to use both workflows and group support systems. However, how to integrate workflow systems and group support systems have not been well studied in the literature. In this paper, we propose a scalable middleware framework, namely event management system, which can support high-degree decoupling between workflow and groupware. The event management architecture and its main functionalities as well as the implementation techniques are presented. We delineate the applicability of event-based integration by comparing with other integration paradigms.