Contributions in Merlin

This paper constructs a growth model that is consistent with salient features of the recent Chinese growth experience: high output growth, sustained returns on capital investment, extensive reallocation within the manufacturing sector, falling labor share and accumulation of a large foreign surplus. The building blocks of the theory are asymmetric financial imperfections and heterogeneous productivity. Some firms use more productive technologies, but low-productivity firms survive because of better access to credit markets. Due to the financial imperfections, high-productivity firms — which are run by entrepreneurs — must be financed out of internal savings. If these savings are sufficiently large, the high-productivity firms outgrow the low-productivity firms and attract an increasing employment share. The downsizing of the financially integrated firms forces a growing share of domestic savings to be invested in foreign assets, generating a foreign surplus. A calibrated version of the theory can account quantitatively for China’s growth experience during 1992-2007.

Goal of this thesis is supporting software engineering tasks with Microsoft Surface. Two prototypes were developed. The first prototype addresses agreeing on a good object-oriented design through the course of a Class Responsibility Collaboration (CRC) brainstorming session. The second prototype supports developers in reverse-engineering. It deals with how the new user interface paradigm fosters cooperation when developers collaborate on recovering a high-level design from a given code base. The evaluation shows that both prototypes work well and lead us to new ideas for enhancing the current ones.

This paper seeks to empirically identify what factors make it more or less likely for people to survive in a life-threatening situation. Three factors relate to individual attributes of the persons onboard: physical strength, economic resources, and nationality. Two relate to social aspects: social support and social norms. The Titanic disaster is a life-or-death situation. Otherwise-disregarded aspects of human nature become apparent in such a dangerous situation. The empirical analysis supports the notion that social norms are a key determinant in extreme situations of life or death.

We analyze proprietary internal capital allocation data from a large retail banking group consisting of member banks and a headquarters organization. We find that capital allocations from headquarters compensate for deposit shortfalls on the bank level, suggesting that the headquarters offers deposit smoothing to member banks. We then analyze how the distribution of influence within the group relates to capital allocations and lending behavior. More influential banks are allocated more funds from headquarters, and their loan growth is less sensitive to their deposit base. The effects of influence are stronger if banks have a greater demand for deposit smoothing.

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The paper introduces a simple framework for analyzing the environmental effects of local transportation policies, and it reviews some evidence. In several cases, subsidies for local public transportation have led to substantial reductions in road transportation and have thereby reduced externalities. Some but not all estimates suggest positive overall welfare effects of such policies. In the rare cases where road pricing has been applied, it has helped to reduce automobile transportation, and it has led to environmental improvements. The experience with specific driving restrictions like “days without cars” and “low emission zones” has been mixed. Local transportation policy can have a useful role to play as a complement to national policy instruments, but neither efficiency nor effectiveness can be taken for granted.

This paper uses a panel data set containing universities across eight European countries to model an output distance function and analyze the impact of three competitive funding types on the production frontier and the university effciency. We find little evidence for an effect of the budget share financed by tuition fees or private funds on the production frontier, but a significantly negative impact of international public funds. Similarly, only international public funds have an effect on effiency. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis, that competitive funding reduces the frontier due to monitoring costs, but increases competition and therefore decreases ineffciency. Our findings remain robust to the inclusion of country-specific dummies and time trends, the use of lagged values and country averages as instruments and the variation of the identification strategy for university effciency.

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This study re-examines the hypothesis that explicit, compensation-based incentives of mid-level managers are adjusted to the level of implicit incentives provided by the possibility of moving to higher-level positions. Using compensation data from a large multinational corporation, I find that, after controlling for the position’s scope and level of accountability, bonus-based incentives are stronger for managers who (1) have fewer organizational levels left to climb, (2) face weaker implicit incentives from getting promoted to the next level, and (3) face weaker implicit incentives from getting promoted to the top of the organization. The findings are consistent with the notion that implicit incentives are taken into consideration in the design of explicit incentive contracts. In particular, the results support the prediction that explicit incentives are optimally stronger in situations with weaker implicit incentives.