Leadership Structure and Corporate Governance in Switzerland

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. companies is not conclusive. In this context evidence from a country with a different practice of CEO succession may provide important new insights with respect to the question of whether one leadership structure should generally be preferred to the other one. This article fills this gap by investigating the valuation effects of leadership structure in Switzerland where – in contrast to the U.S. – a separation of the CEO and chairman functions is common. Consistent with the majority of prior research focusing on the U.S., the authors found no evidence of a systematic and significant difference in valuation between firms with combined and firms with separated functions. They also investigated whether leadership structure is related to firm-level corporate governance characteristics and found a similar curvilinear relationship between leadership structure and managerial shareholdings as is observed between firm value and managerial shareholdings. An implication is that possible agency costs associated with a combined function are mitigated by a higher incentive alignment of the CEO/chairman through an adequate level of managerial shareholdings. Over the last few years corporate governance became an important investment criterion, which is for example reflected in the emergence of various corporate governance ratings. The authors of this article additionally investigated whether firm value is significantly related to firm level corporate governance as measured by a broad survey-based index for a representative sample of Swiss firms. They documented a positive and significant relationship between the corporate governance index and firm valuation. This finding is robust to controlling for a series of additional governance mechanisms related to ownership structure, board characteristics, and leverage as well as a potential endogeneity of these mechanisms.Leadership structure; Firm valuation; Corporate governance; Managerial shareholdings

Development and Application of a Model for the Cross-Flow Induced by Mixing Vane Spacers in Fuel Assemblies

CFD investigations of the flow in a 5x5 rod bundle with mixing vane spacer grid were performed with single-phase and two-phase flow conditions. A non-linear k-epsilon model was used to simulate secondary flow and non-isotropic turbulence. A detailed analysis of the results showed that mixing vane induced swirling flow strongly affects the cross-flow. A model was developed to predict the forced cross-flow between the sub-channels and implemented into the sub-channel analysis code COBRA-FLX

Global voneinander lernen: Was hat die Bioethik mit dem Entwicklungsgefälle zu tun ?

Was hat Bioethik mit dem Entwicklungsgefälle zu tun? Die sozialethische Antwort gibt Markus Zimmermann-Acklin

On the Credibility of the Euro/Swiss Franc Floor: A Financial Market Perspective

The sheer existence of EUR/CHF put options with strike prices below the EUR/CHF 1.20 ?oor, trading at non-zero cost, challenged the full credibility of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in enforcing the lower barrier implemented in September 6, 2011 and abandoned on January 15, 2015. We estimate the risk-neutral break probabilities of a realignment of the ?oor from market prices of put options, using an extension of the Veestraeten option pricing model which assumes that the underlying security price exhibits a lower barrier. We estimate probabilities considerably di?erent from zero, even when the exchange rate traded far above the EUR/CHF 1.20 ?oor. We observe a drastic increase in the break-probabilities after August 2014, reaching a level of nearly 50%. The credibility of the SNB in maintaining the ?oor, as seen from the option market, was thus substantially lower than publicly claimed

Attachment working models as unconscious structures: An experimental test

Internal working models of attachment (IWMs) are presumed to be largely unconscious representations of childhood attachment experiences. Several instruments have been developed to assess IWMs; some of them are based on self-report and others on narrative interview techniques. This study investigated the capacity of a self-report measure, the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA; Armsden & Greenberg, 1987), and of a narrative interview method, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985), to measure unconscious attachment models. We compared scores on the two attachment instruments to response latencies in an attachment priming task. It was shown that attachment organisation assessed by the AAI correlates with priming effects, whereas the IPPA scales were inversely or not related to priming. The results are interpreted as support for the assumption that the AAI assesses, to a certain degree, unconscious working models of attachment