Germany's Short Time Compensation Program: macroeconom(etr)ic insight

Short Time Compensation [STC] was a key program in Germany to fight the crisis. However, STC is quite an old tool: in the past 100 years it has been used quite often and is very multifunctional. It stabilized employment in every kind of macroeconomic shock. After a brief look into the institutional and quantitative development of STC in Germany, this paper tries to answer the question whether STC prevents Schumpeterian creative destruction and structural change in economic downturns. With the help of a VAR-Model we can analyze interdependencies between the business cycle, STC and unemployment, finding evidence for a bridging function of STC. A closer look at the pro-cyclical average stoppage supports the thesis that most of the enterprises using STC are fundamentally economically healthy, that is, STC does not prevent structural change in downturns.Short Time Compensation, VAR, Paradox, structural change

Morphologies, metastability and coarsening of quantum nanoislands on the surfaces of the annealed Ag(110) and Pb(111) thin films

Morphological evolution of heteroepitaxial nanoislands toward equilibrium (coarsening) is computed using the detailed continuum model that incorporates the quantum size effect. Results reveal the metastability of the "magic" heights, show the morphological transitions and the surface diffusion routes by which a quantum island reaches its stable height, and provide the coarsening laws for the island density and area, thus clarifying the kinetic morphology pathways in the growth of an ultrathin metal films.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Physic

Reference-Dependent Preferences in Multi-Issue Bargaining

Game theoretic bargaining models usually assume parties to have exogenously given preferences from the beginning of a negotiation on. Preferences in these models do not depend on the history of offers made during a negotiation. This paper argues that preferences are based on issue-wise reference points changing during the bargaining process as result of the counterpartys offers

Taxonomy of knowedge management research in hospitality and tourism

The hospitality industry is operating in an ever increasing knowledge-based economy, where hotels have to increase customer satisfaction and retention levels, lower employees turnover rates and operating expenses, maximize profits and strive to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. “Knowledge management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in the face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combinations of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings” (Civi, 2000, p.166). Knowledge Management (KM) is not a new concept. It has its origins back in 1959 when Peter F. Drucker created the term “the knowledge worker” (Haag, 2000). Since the 1995 introduction of knowledge management to the business and hospitality industry, different interpretations, concepts and definitions are used to best describe the main idea of knowledge management. Many scholars have published different definitions of knowledge management and emphasized the importance of continued KM research (Groff & Jones, 2003; DiMattia & Oder, 1997; Skyrme, 2002). However, there is no clear consensus on the definition of KM as a process nor there is an established theme on KM research to describe the direction and the impact of findings of published research on this topic