Search

The dissertation addresses considerations for optimized corporate decision making. The first essay analyzes the influence of hetero- vs. homogeneous ability-based group matching on moral hazard. The second challenges performance measures when assessing wage schemes, arguing for cost-efficiency measures. The third develops a cause-effect-model of employee fairness perception's influence on behavior when designing wage schemes. Die Dissertation adressiert Fragen zu optimierten Unternehmensentscheidungen. Das erste Essay analysiert den Einfluss hetero- vs. homogener, fähigkeitsbasierter Gruppenzusammensetzung auf Moral Hazard. Das Zweite hinterfragt Performance-Maße zur Beurteilung von Lohnschemata und argumentiert für Kosteneffizienz-Maße. Das Dritte entwickelt ein Ursache-Wirkungsmodell von Fairness-Wahrnehmungen auf Mitarbeiterverhalten.

Mechanisms used to allocate licenses to newcomers differ in various respects, and one of them being the information revealed by the regulator. The author analyzes the impact of information revelation on the market structure, the market outcome, welfare, and on the maximum transfers the regulator can charge from potential entrants. The findings are related to the economic literature on the implementation of efficient market structures.

Due to the liberalization of the European electricity market, boundary conditions for market participants have changed significantly. In order to reach the long-term goal of a European internal market for electricity, strong political measures are necessary in all electricity markets within the European member states. Since security and efficiency of public power supply are both central requirements for all economic and industrial sectors, those attributes must not be endangered through political measures which aim for reaching the internal market. In the electricity industry, investment decisions are usually cost-effective for periods of several decades. As a consequence, inefficient investments cannot be corrected in the short-run. Political boundary conditions thus need to ensure adequate planning dependability for all market participants. Additionally, all future requirements for the electricity market need to be considered by political players. However, existing research studies often focus on static market models that are not able of identifying dynamic interactions between market components like generation and transmission of electricity, or focus on subsystems of the European electricity market like single countries or electricity exchanges. In this thesis, a new model based on game theory approaches is developed for the European electricity market. On the basis of this model, the impact of fundamental characteristics of the electricity market on the market outcome - e.g. bid prices of power suppliers - can be quantified. Afterwards, the improvements of the model that are required to enable realistic analyses of the real market are discussed. It is shown that a model that corresponds to all of those requirements is not eligible for analyzing the long-term development of the European electricity market, given the geographical area under consideration and the level of detail that is chosen in this thesis. As a consequence, a combined economical-technical model of the European electricity market is developed in this thesis additionally. This model enables comprehensive analyses of the dynamic development of the markt subject to decisions of political players and exogenous boundary conditions. The model is based on both a description of the European interconnected transmission system and a description of all power suppliers that are currently active in the European market. All power suppliers are modeled with their individual generation capacities and technologies. In order to guarantee a realistic evaluation of investment decisions of power suppliers, uncertainties of boundary conditions which are of relevance for those decisions are modeled by means of scenario trees. Thus the impact of political decisions and exogenous boundary conditions becomes transparent in sensitivity analyses. The behavior of power suppliers and potential investors again is input data for investment decisions of network operators that aim on developing the network corresponding to the expected future distribution of load and generation, given an adequate rate of return for invested capital. By using the model of the European electricity market and the market simulation tool which are both developed in this thesis, dynamic interactions between components of the system can be identified. Additionally, the impact of political boundary conditions on the development of the market can be evaluated. Furthermore, differences between short-term and long-term impacts of politico-economic measures can be quantified. Finally, possible applications and the capability of the developed models and methods are demonstrated in this thesis.

This thesis analyzes self-reporting as a tool in optimal law enforcement. In particular, the contribution focuses on the option value created by a self-reporting scheme if violators receive private information about their detection or conviction probability extit{after} they have committed a crime (ex-post asymmetric information). This option value creates a drawback of amnesty programs that has not been taken into account in the literature. We derive optimal fine reductions for different crime characteristics (i.e. different degrees of ex-post heterogeneity) analyze the relationship between fine reductions for violators that have not yet been convicted and violators who start to cooperate with the authority already after a litigation started. The remainder of the thesis focuses on self-reporting as a useful enforcement tool against criminal teams. If members of such teams act non-cooperatively in the self-reporting stage, we show that they can be driven into Prisoner's Dilemma situations such that aggregated team fines increase due to a reduction of fines for single self-reporters. Finally, we apply our theoretical findings to a detailed comparison of the corporate leniency programs recently enacted in the EU and the USA.

The main difference between the New Basel Capital Accord („Basel II”) and the currently valid regulation is that the amount of equity capital that a bank has to allocate to company loans in Basel II is determined by the riskiness of the individual company loans. The risk information is either provided by external credit assessment agencies („Standard Approach”) or by the bank itself („Internal-Ratings-Based (IRB-) Approach”). The economic literature has not yet analyzed the effects of this regime for the investment incentives of banks in rating systems and the resulting welfare consequences. This is the reason why the dissertation focuses on the following questions: 1. Which incentives for investments in rating systems are set by Basel II ? 2. What are the welfare consequences from opportunistic behavior of banks who choose to apply the IRB-Approach ? 3. Which welfare differences result from the application of two different credit rating regimes ? 4. Do banks invest too little or too much in rating systems from a welfare standpoint of view ? The main result of the paper is that the IRB-Approach does not maximize the welfare in all cases. The reason is that banks with modern risk assessment systems have an incentive to use their private information to increase the risk of their portfolios. This opportunistic behavior leads to higher negative external effects. It works therefore contrary to the positive external effects that result from the increased credit risk quantification abilities of IRB-banks. The economic model that focuses on this trade-off shows that the banking regulator prefers for markets with a high proportion of defaulting loans banks which apply the IRB-Approach. In „safer” markets with a low proportion of defaults, banks which use the standard approach are preferred as they do not have private information. If the financing through banks creates large positive externalities, IRB-banks perform better than the banks with the Standard Approach. In what investments in rating systems are concerned, the model shows that over- as well as underinvestment is possible. The opportunistic behavior of the IRB-banks is the reason why the IRB-Approach is not preferable in all cases. If the regulator cannot eliminate opportunistic behavior the goals of Basel II are endangered. The reason is that the instrument of capital standards itself is not sufficient to make the IRB-Approach preferable in all cases as it cannot compensate opportunistic behavior entirely. This means that the implementation of Basel II can have disadvantages even before considering implementation costs.

The subject of the thesis is the investigation of strategies of internationalization performed by the German textiles- and clothing industry. The study is based apart from an evaluation of the literature for the topics globalization and internationalization mainly on an own empirical analysis in form of a written questionnaire. The organization of the written questioning was coordinated with the important professional associations and compromises 122 textiles- and clothing enterprises. As background the literature relating to the themes globalization and internationalization is presented, within a special attention is put to the topic direct investments. The different motives for direct investments are classified and analyzed and in a second step the economical effects of direct investments are deducted from theoretical and empirical point of view. The following view of the characteristic of the textiles and the clothing industry shows among others the fact, that this branch is able in particular to realize an international distribution of the different activities within the production process, due to the characteristic of the "textiles chain". The following presentation of the German textiles and clothing industry, based on selected economic characteristics, reveals the fact that this industry has past a continuous decline and the enterprises have reacted in different manners. In this context it is important whether the enterprises carry out a tailoring, since this labor intensive component plays a crucial role due to the important factor labor costs. Within the own empirical study, following topics are investigated: international activities, motives for internationalization, location factors, competitive ability and the evaluation of political measures. The evaluation of the test results takes place by using the instruments of the “bivariat average value comparison” and the linear regression. The results show that enterprises with tailored work have a higher internationalization degree. Among the factors for direct investments, market orientation and low labor costs play by far the most important role. As a summary it can be further concluded that the high labor costs, which can be found in Germany, represent a substantial location disadvantage and the enterprises see themselves compelled to invest abroad. However for enterprises without tailoring, market orientated foreign investments play the primary role. One on of the most discussed items in current debates on the textiles and clothing market are still political trade issues. An aspect, which has to be judge on in the future, is the gradual abolition of the privileged position of the textile and the clothing industry with the termination of the Agreements on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) at the end of 2004.