Obesity has become a major health issue. Research in economics has provided important insights as to how technological progress reduced the relative price of food and contributed to the increase in obesity. However, the increased availability of food might well have overstrained will power and...

The question of whether the CEO should also serve as chairman of the board is one of the most hotly debated issues in the recent corporate governance discussion. While agencytheoretic arguments advocate a separation of decision and control functions, the empirical evidence focusing on U.S....

It is often argued that Black-Scholes (1973) values overstate the subjective value of stock options granted to risk-averse and under-diversified executives. We construct a “representative” Swiss executive and extend the certainty- equivalence approach presented by Hall and Murphy (2002) to...

This paper investigates the role that discrimination plays in the educational marginalization of foreign youth commonly observed in European countries with a long guestworker tradition. Economic theory offers two basic explanations for discrimination of this form: taste-based discrimination...

This paper empirically examines the impact of temporary agency work on firm performance using panel data from German establishments. Thereby, special attention is devoted to the question, whether there are performance differences between firms using temporary agency workers (TAWs) as a buffer...

In this paper we analyzed the violations of UIP for the Swiss Franc against the Dollar, the Euro, the Yen, the Pound and the Canadian Dollar using recent data up to fall 2008. This exercise provides the following main results : first the Swiss interest rate puzzle disappeared, i.e. mean returns...

Camera surveillance has recently gained prominence in policy proposals on combating terrorism. We evaluate this instrument of counterterrorism as resting on the premise of a deterrence effect. Based on comparative arguments and previous evidence on crime, we expect camera surveillance to have a...

Owing to changes in the business environment, there has been a tremendous adoption of innovative workplace organisation (WO) and human resource (HR) practices during the last few decades. Assuming a holistic perspective on human resource management (HRM), the present study establishes the...

The allocation of decision-making authorities may be seen as the last link in a causal relationship starting from changes in environment and continuing to business strategy. Changes in task complexity, which can be measured by the introduction of a diversi ca- tion or an outsourcing strategy,...