Stefan Schembera, Implementing corporate social responsibility: Empirical insights on the impact and accountability of the UN Global Compact, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 316, 2012. (Working Paper)
The implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is crucial for organizational legitimacy in today’s globalized world. In the absence of a global governance system, several initiatives have emerged to support companies in designing, implementing and communicating CSR. However, research has so far mainly neglected to empirically evaluate the impact of such initiatives on organizational practices. This study aims to close this gap by analyzing on a large quantitative basis how business participants in the largest voluntary CSR initiative - the UN Global Compact (UNGC) - embed CSR into their organizations. Drawing on insights from institutional and stakeholder theory, I derive determinants of UNGC implementation and analyze the accountability of the initiative. My study contributes to the literature in several ways: I develop a theoretical model to describe and explain variation in UNGC implementation, and scrutinize the new measure for UNGC implementation. My results show that the initiative affects organizational practices: Contrary to the bluewashing arguments of UNGC critics, the level of CSR implementation increases with the time of membership in the UNGC. However, my findings also suggest that the declared participant information still lacks credibility - higher UNGC implementation levels are not associated with significantly less UNGC scandals. Implications for CSR research, the Global Compact and its participants are discussed. |
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Christian Vögtlin, Ina Maria Kaufmann, Leadership and legitimacy, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 308, 2012. (Working Paper)
The article links leadership and legitimacy in globalizing business. It forwards a framework for analyzing how actors in organizations may build and maintain organizational legitimacy through different strategies. The discussion connects strategies for legitimizing organizational conduct across levels of analysis, highlighting the role of leadership in this process. The article builds on organizational discourse analysis to explain how individual actors may shape societal perceptions around organizational legitimacy. The presented framework highlights three generic strategies and the corresponding processes associated with leading toward legitimacy. In this way, it emphasizes mechanisms for gaining and maintaining legitimacy for each strategic response of the organization in relation to rhetorical tactics used to influence discourses and the resulting necessary leadership resources. The framework offers future theoretical and empirical research directions for the analysis of legitimacy discourses. |
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Consuelo Vasquez, Dennis Schoeneborn, Viviane Sergi, Project organizing as negotiation of (dis)ordering, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 304, 2012. (Working Paper)
This paper proposes to study the constitution of organization at the interstice of order and disorder. By putting forward the processual, heterogeneous, and fragmented nature of organization, it explores the mediating role of communication in organizational becoming (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). More specifically, the paper focuses on how organizations overcome the inherently precarious, contingent, and disorderly character of their existence in and through language use. Taking a communicative centered approach, the paper argues for considering language-in-use as intrinsically embedding both order and disorder. To do so it relies on the empirical material of three extensive qualitative case studies in three distinct project-based organizations: a science and technology diffusion program, a software development company, and a management consulting firm. The transversal analysis of these studies shows that efforts of ordering are continuously haunted by disordering, that is, the plurality of many potential orders, which are at work in communication. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the key and yet paradoxical role of ordering devices (in the three cases studied inscribed in texts), which are designed to create and maintain order, and because of their language-based nature, generate contingency and undecidability. Language is indeed a source of ambivalence (Weick, 1990). As such, the call for order can (usually does) trigger disorder and the other way around. |
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Patrick Haack, Dennis Schoeneborn, Dirk Martignoni, Corporate responsibility as myth and ceremony: bad, but not for good, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 305, 2012. (Working Paper)
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Daniel Halbheer, Florian Stahl, Oded Koenigsberg, Donald R Lehmann, Sampling strategies for information goods, In: Columbia Business School Working Paper, No. 118, 2012. (Working Paper)
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Daniel Halbheer, Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg, Self-serving behavior in price-quality competition, In: SSRN, No. 2130414, 2012. (Working Paper)
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Stefano Nigsch, Andrea Schenker-Wicki, Shaping performance: do international accreditations and quality management really help?, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 326, 2012. (Working Paper)
In recent years, international accreditations from private providers have gained importance among business schools all over the world. Higher education managers increasingly see these accreditations as a way of assuring and developing quality in order to comply with international standards, enhance performance, and increase reputation. However, given that an accreditation process requires a great deal of resources and that it might increase bureaucratization and control, international accreditations remain highly disputed in academia. This paper contributes to the discussion, providing quantitative empirical evidence regarding the effect of international accreditations on the research performance of business schools. On the basis of an international survey, we analyse how the acquisition of an AACSB and/or EQUIS accreditation affects the institutions’ position in the Top 1000 Business School Ranking of the Social Science Research Network, as compared to other quality management approaches. We find that international accreditations are positively related to research performance, while other forms of quality management do not exhibit any significant relationship to ranking positions. These results point to the importance of professional coaching in quality management. Because of AACSB and EQUIS’s high standards concerning a coherent strategy and the quality of faculty, applying for an international accreditation seems to be a useful way to improve a business school’s research performance. |
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Leif Brandes, Marc Brechot, Egon Franck, The temptation of social ties: When interpersonal network transactions hurt firm performance, In: ISU Working Paper, No. 159, 2012. (Working Paper)
We introduce agency concerns to social capital theory and predict that managers can use individual social capital to reduce personal effort costs, which is not in the best interest of the firm. To test this prediction, we collect data on all 8,019 hiring decisions from general managers in the National Basketball Association between 1981 and 2011. We find that managers have a clear preference for hiring players through social ties. The probability that a manager hires players from an NBA franchise to which he is socially tied is 27.6% higher than for an untied franchise. To isolate the motivation for this behavior, we complement our data with information on the sporting performance of teams. In line with agency theory, we find that the hiring of players through social ties reduces team performance. The effect is large: on average, each social-tie player reduces team winning percentage by 5.4%. Overall, this paper documents first empirical evidence that decision makers’ use of individual social capital can lead to reduced firm-level performance. |
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Johannes Meuer, Henric van der Ent, Revisiting system theories in Strategic Human Resource Management - A set-theoretic analysis of high performing firms in the UK, In: Economics of Education Working Paper Series, No. 076, 2012. (Working Paper)
Prior research has produced ambiguous support for theories on the nature and construction of Human Resource Management (HRM) systems. This ambiguity may be a function of the inherent limitations of the methodologies used in previous studies. We resume efforts by using a configurational methodology to analyze high performing HRM systems of 374 UK based firms. We reveal the multi-dimensional nature of successful and unsuccessful HRM systems. By providing a typology for comparing the interdependencies among vital and peripheral functions, we are able to describe and explain competitive advantages that rest in the orchestrating themes and integrative mechanisms of HRM systems. |
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Stephan Nüesch, Dual-class shares, external financing needs, and firm performance, In: SSRN, No. 1773206, 2012. (Working Paper)
This paper explores the effect of dual-class shares on firm performance using a unique law change in Switzerland as a source of exogenous variation. Unlike most of the related literature we do not adopt a one-size-fits-all approach but allow the effect to vary depending on a firm’s need for external finance. Based on nine years panel data of both firms affected and unaffected by the law change, we find that dual-class shares neither harm nor benefit firm performance on average. However, dual-class shares increase firm performance if the firm requires external finance and dual-class shares decrease firm performance if the firm does not require external finance. |
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Raphael Flepp, Egon Franck, Stephan Nüesch, Does bettor sentiment affect bookmaker pricing?, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 324, 2012. (Working Paper)
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Stephan Nüesch, Aircraft noise, health, and residential sorting: evidence from two quasi-experiments, In: IZA, No. 6744, 2012. (Working Paper)
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Felix Kübler, Larry Selden, Xiao Wei, When is a Risky Asset "Urgently Needed"?, In: NCCR, No. 828, 2012. (Working Paper)
The demand for commodities in standard applications typically is increasing in income, whereas the demand for the risk free asset in the classic portfolio problem often decreases with income. The latter is shown to occur if and only if the consumer is uncertainty preferences over assets satisfy the condition that the risk free asset is more readily substituted for the risky asset as the quantity of the risky asset increases. In this case, the risky asset is said to be "urgently needed" following the terminology of Johnson in his classic 1913 certainty analysis [19]. The asset and certainty settings differ in critical ways which result in a much greater likelihood for the urgently needed preference property to be satisfied in the portfolio problem. We provide several sufficient conditions for when the risky asset will be urgently needed and a surprisingly simple, complete characterization for widely popular members of the HARA (hyperbolic absolute risk aversion) class. For more general preferences, two examples are given where it is possible to fully describe the region of asset space in which the risky asset is urgently needed. Finally, using a standard representative agent model we show that the risky asset being urgently needed is equivalent to the equilibrium (relative) price of the risky asset increasing with its own supply. |
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Kerstin Pull, Birgit Pferdmenges, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Knowledge production process, diversity type and group interaction as moderators of the diversity-performance link: An analysis of university research groups, In: ISU Working Paper, No. 158, 2012. (Working Paper)
In our paper, we explore the diversity-performance link in knowledge production and argue it to be the result of two countervailing effects (resource vs. process perspective). Theoretically, we show that the relative strength of the two effects crucially depends on moderating factors that relate to specificities of the knowledge production process, the type of diversity and group interaction. We empirically test our hypotheses based on an original data set of 45 university research groups from different disciplinary fields which are by nature expected to produce new knowledge and are faced with complex tasks. Employing traditional OLS regressions as well as non-parametric LOWESS analyses, our hypotheses are largely born out by the data. In particular, we find a U-shaped relation between cultural diversity and performance in research groups from the humanities & social sciences and a negative link between functional diversity and per-formance in research groups from the natural sciences. As the disciplinary fields proxy different underlying knowledge production processes, the implications of our study can be generalized to other settings and help derive general conclusions for the management of diversity and future competitiveness strategies in knowledge intensive economies. |
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Uschi Backes-Gellner, Yvonne Oswald, Learning for a bonus: How financial incentives interact with preferences, In: Swiss Leading House "Economics of Education" Working Paper, No. 79, 2012. (Working Paper)
This paper investigates the effect of financial incentives on student performance and analyzes for the first time how the incentive effect in education is moderated by students’ risk and time preferences. To examine this interaction we use a natural experiment that we combine with data from surveys and economic experiments on risk and time preferences. We not only find that students who are offered financial incentives for better grades have on average better first- and second-year grade point averages, but more importantly, we find that highly impatient students respond more strongly to financial incentives than less impatient students. This finding suggests that financial incentives are most effective if they solve educational problems of myopic students. |
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Simone Balestra, Uschi Backes-Gellner, When a Door Closes, a Window Opens? Long-term Labor Market Effects of Involuntary Separations, In: Swiss Leading House "Economics of Education" Working Paper, No. 72, 2015. (Working Paper)
This study estimates the earning losses of workers experiencing an involuntary job separation. We employ, for the first time in the earning losses literature, a Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimator with fixed effects that has several advantages with respect to conventional fixed effects models. The Poisson estimator allows considering the full set of involuntary separations, including those with zero labor market earnings because of unemployment. By including individuals with zero earnings and by using our new method, the loss in the year of separation becomes larger than in previous studies. The loss starts with roughly 30 percent and, although it quickly shrinks, it remains at around 15 percent in the following years. In addition, we find that compared to other reasons for separation, the earning loss pattern is unique for involuntary separations, because no other type of separation implies such permanent scarring. This latter finding makes us confident that the self-reported involuntariness of a separation is a reliable source of information. |
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Conrad Meyer, Peter Fiechter, Discretionary measurement of Level 3 fair values during the 2008 financial crisis, In: FAWPS, No. 1, 2012. (Working Paper)
The measurement of fair values, particularly in the absence of quoted prices in active markets, is complex and difficult to verify. This paper examines whether banks use fair value estimates based on unobservable inputs (i.e., Level 3) to manage earnings during the 2008 financial crisis. Using a sample of 291 U.S. bank holding companies, we find that banks use discretionary Level 3 gains or losses to smooth earnings. We benchmark our findings against loan loss provisions (LLP), but we do not find consistent evidence that banks use LLP to smooth earnings, mainly because better corporate governance mechanisms effectively reduce discretion. However, better corporate governance does not reduce measurement discretion in Level 3. This finding suggests that monitoring mechanisms prevent excessive discretion for loans—which are measured at amortized cost—but have yet to develop to prevent similar discretion for investments that are measured at fair value. |
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Mathias Beck, Lukas Schönenberger, Andrea Schenker-Wicki, How managers can deal with complex issues: a semi-quantitative analysis method of causal loop diagrams based on matrices, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 323, 2012. (Working Paper)
The increasing complexity of the modern world creates both higher risks and new interdependencies in the socioeconomic environment. To cope with these challenges powerful new tools must be applied to find sustainable solutions. System dynamics is a field that offers potential assistance in dealing with complex issues. However, managers and politicians often lack the knowledge and necessary skills to apply quantitative methods in their decision-making process. In contrast, qualitative approaches are easily understood and handled but have limited capacities for analysis. To address this gap, we have developed a bundle of tools tailored for managers and politicians facing complex problems. These tools enable executives to recognize effective levers and assess potential consequences of specific interventions in a highly interconnected system. The approach detailed here equips decision makers with a powerful method to develop, test, and communicate strategies to find long-term sustainable solutions for complex issues in business and society. |
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Lukas Schönenberger, Andrea Schenker-Wicki, Mathias Beck, Analysis of a terror network from a system dynamics perspective, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 322, 2012. (Working Paper)
Terrorism is a complex problem and therefore simple solutions focusing just on one aspect are destined to fail. We have to capture terrorism in its entirety and system dynamics offers various tools to support us. We developed a semi-quantitative system dynamics approach aiming to characterize relationships between different variables and their impact on the system as a whole. The authors established a network to model terrorism consisting of 16 variables and performed different analysis to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms behind terrorism. We showed how to determine which variables are suited for intervention and described in detail their effects on the influence of the terrorist organization. The paper gives also an insight how to elicit elements that destabilize and ultimately break down the terror network. Because we clarify our approach using fictitious numbers, the relevance of this work is not so much in specific policy recommendations that it proposes as in the framework for reasoning that it provides. |
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Dominik van Aaken, Violetta Splitter, David Seidl, Why do corporate actors engage in pro-social behavior? A Bourdieusian perspective on corporate social responsibility, In: UZH Business Working Paper Series, No. 319, 2012. (Working Paper)
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice this paper develops a novel approach to the study of CSR. According to this approach, pro-social activities are conceptualized as social practices that are employed by individual managers in their personal struggles for social power. Whether such practices are enacted or not depends on the (1) particular features of the social field in which the managers are embedded, (2) the individual managers’ socially shaped dispositions and (3) their respective stock of different forms of capital. By combing these three concepts the Bourdieusian approach provides a particularly fruitful theoretical lens on CSR phenomena, not least as this allows reconciling seemingly competing conceptualizations in the existing CSR literature such as economic vs. non-economic motivation as drivers of CSR activity, micro- vs. macro-level explanations and voluntaristic vs. deterministic views of managers’ behaviors. |
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