infonet-economy

Due to substantial changes in competition, capital market conditions, and supervisory frameworks, holistic analysis of an insurance company’s assets and liabilities takes on special relevance. An important tool in this context is dynamic financial analysis (DFA). DFA is a systematic approach to financial modeling in which financial figures are projected under a variety of possible…

We present a simple new explanation for the diversification discount in the valuation of firms. We demonstrate that, ceteris paribus, limited liability of equity holders is sufficient to explain a diversification discount. To derive this result, we use a credit risk model based on the value of the firm's assets. We show that a conglomerate can be regarded as an option on a…

We reconsider the evidence of Lechner, Miquel and Wunsch (2004, 2005) on the effectiveness of training programmes for the unemployed conducted in East and West Germany in the period 1993-1994 by investigating whether, and if so, how overall policy conclusions depend on the particular choice of the outcome variable. We find that different measures of employment and earnings provide…

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a nonparametric method from the area of operations research that measures the relationship of produced outputs to assigned inputs and determines an efficiency score. This efficiency score can be interpreted as a performance measure in investment analysis. Recent literature contains intensive discussion of using DEA to measure the performance of…

Jay Wright Forrester's distinghished career at MIT led to his founding the field of system dynamics. By adopting servomechanistic ideas he created a new approach to simulating the behavior of social systems, to explaining that behavior and to crafting effective long-term policies. he established the subject as an academic discipline at MIT's Sloan School and led high-…

This article provides a discursive perspective on the dilemmas of sameness and difference feminisms and their consequences for change projects. It explores how equal opportunity officers dealing with gender issues and introducing equality legislation in practice construct the meaning of equal opportunities. The analysis of the interpretative repertoires and ideological dilemmas drawn…

Labor market policy evaluation studies often rely on a merged database from different administrative entities, where part of the information might be archived with varying quality in different sources. Suppose that one observes inter alia a variable of dubious quality for the entire population and the same variable for a subgroup, say the treated, with good quality from an extra…

The present text examines how the organizational input variable "family" and the financial output variable "return" are interrelated. This question is crucial since there are serious doubts brought forward by Schulze et al. (2003) whether family firms really exhibit the ideal precondition of low agency costs as hypothesized by Fama and Jensen (1983a and 1983b).…