Suchergebnisse

AbstractEmployee shareholder associations (ESAs) have emerged as a novel, and widely underestimated actor in the European corporate arena, established to collect and pool the shares and voting power held by a company's employees. As such, they parallel existing institutions for employee representation, potentially empowering employees in their role as shareholders and possibly even providing a counterweight to traditional company owners. Unfortunately, we know little about the actual functioning, the inner workings, and, particularly, the ESAs' contributions to date. To address these shortcomings this paper explores the limitations but also the potential of ESAs in large, German listed companies to contribute to employee share ownership (ESO), to organizational democracy (OD), and to corporate sustainability (CS). Our findings show that, as far as ESOs and OD are concerned, in the specific German context, ESAs usually do not offer alternatives to (or even to compete with) existing employee representation but are instead rather dependent on cooperation with them. Regarding CS, any contribution here is closely linked to the ESAs' own principles and depends on the extent to which the ESA management takes them seriously and prioritizes them over other objectives.

Der Verfasser gibt zunächst einen Überblick über Basismodelle industrieller Beziehungen, wobei er das liberale Markt-Modell, das soziale Markt-Modell und das Konflikt-Modell unterscheidet. Er vertritt im Folgenden die These, dass sich die industriellen Beziehungen in den meisten mittel- und osteuropäischen Staaten in Richtung auf prekäre, neoliberale Arbeitsverhältnisse entwickelt haben. Diese These wird unter Rückgriff auf aktuelle Untersuchungen belegt. Im Vordergrund stehen dabei die neuen EU-Länder Polen, Tschechien und Ungarn, die zu den am weitesten entwickelten und am besten untersuchten Transformationsländern gehören. Indikatoren einer prekären Liberalisierung zeigen sich für diese Länder auf externer und nationaler Ebene sowie auf Branchen- und Unternehmensebene. (ICE2)

A general growth model with explicit resource reallocation costs is set up. A new feature is the property of hysteresis (i.e. a continuum of stationary equilibria) in closed-economy growth models. Employing a linear model the hysteresis range and the consequences for the long-run growth rate are determined analytically. The most important conclusions are the following: (1) An economy's long-run position may depend critically on the initial intersectoral allocation pattern as well as on the efficiency of the resource reallocation sector; (2) if we interpret the resource reallocation sector as a specific part of the education sector, there is a straightforward possibility for the government to reduce the range of hysteresis and hence the dependence on initial conditions; (3) international trade is an important device to overcome the negative consequences of high resource reallocation costs for long-run growth.

The discussion of companies' compliance with corporate governance standards and codes has widely neglected the situation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Accordingly, the authors examine a sample of 151 SMEs listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2006 (before the financial crisis) and 2012 (after the financial crisis) and, thus, required to declare whether they comply with the recommendations of the German Corporate Governance Code or not. While code compliance seems to be quite homogenous comparing different branches, the authors found that company size has a positive impact on code compliance. With regard to a remarkably high number of recommendations a lot of companies do not comply to, company size might be a major problem, why the existing GCGC does not fit very well to the situation of SMEs. This is why, most remarkably, code compliance does not exert any significant influence on either market reaction or on operating performance of SMEs.
Keywords: corporate governance, SMEs, Germany, firm performance. JEL Classification: G3, G34, M10, L25