Corporate governance in Germany : institutional background and empirical results

Corporate governance is currently a topic of great worldwide interest to academics, legislators, and practitioners. In addition to several academic articles, it has prompted active involvement of the OECD, the EU, the German Monopolkommission, the Bundestag, and several other institutions. Especially in comparison to the Anglo-American system, German corporate governance is characterized by lesser reliance on capital markets and outside investors, but a stronger reliance on large inside investors and financial institutions to achieve efficiency in the corporate sector. Since data on German corporations have become more easily available in recent years, the discussion has lately become more scientific and started to focus on studying the benefits and costs of the German system. The empirical results presented in this survey focus on the relation between ownership structure and firm performance in Germany. I summarize several empirical studies on this topic and put them into context to the institutional and legal environment in Germany. Due to data restrictions on unlisted firms, most results are based on corporations trading in official markets, representing the first-tier stock market in Germany. These firms have to publish large blockholdings exceeding 25% in their annual report. While this type of ownership data has been accessible for several years, information on voting control has only become available with the 1995 transposition of the European Union’s Transparency Directive into national law (Wertpapierhandelsgesetz, WpHG)

The most general cosmological dynamics for ELKO Matter Fields

Not long ago, the definition of eigenspinors of charge-conjugation belonging to a special Wigner class has lead to the unexpected theoretical discovery of a form of matter with spin 1/2 and mass dimension 1, called ELKO matter field; ELKO matter fields defined in flat spacetimes have been later extended to curved and twisted spacetimes, in order to include in their dynamics the coupling to gravitational fields possessing both metric and torsional degrees of freedom: the inclusion of non-commuting spinorial covariant derivatives allows for the introduction of more general dynamical terms influencing the behaviour of ELKO matter fields. In this paper, we shall solve the theoretical problem of finding the most general dynamics for ELKO matter, and we will face the phenomenological issue concerning how the new dynamical terms may affect the behaviour of ELKO matter; we will see that new effects will arise for which the very existence of ELKO matter will be endangered, due to the fact that ELKOs will turn incompatible with the cosmological principle. Thus we have that anisotropic universes must be taken into account if ELKOs are to be considered in their most general form.Comment: 9 page

Eleven spherically symmetric constant density solutions with cosmological constant

Einstein's field equations with cosmological constant are analysed for a static, spherically symmetric perfect fluid having constant density. Five new global solutions are described. One of these solutions has the Nariai solution joined on as an exterior field. Another solution describes a decreasing pressure model with exterior Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime having decreasing group orbits at the boundary. Two further types generalise the Einstein static universe. The other new solution is unphysical, it is an increasing pressure model with a geometric singularity.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, revised bibliography, corrected eqn. (3.11), typos corrected, two new reference

Transparency of ownership and control in Germany

We first analyze legal provisions relating to corporate transparency in Germany. We show that despite the new securities trading law (WpHG) of 1995, the practical efficacy of disclosure regulation is very low. On the one hand, the formation of business groups involving less regulated legal forms as intermediate layers can substantially reduce transparency. On the other hand, the implementation of the law is not practical and not very effective. We illustrate these arguments using several examples of WpHG filings. To illustrate the importance of transparency, we show next that German capital markets are dominated by few large firms accounting for most of the market’s capitalization and trading volume. Moreover, the concentration of control is very high. First, 85% of all officially listed AGs have a dominant shareholder (controlling more than 25% of the voting rights). Second, few large blockholders control several deciding voting blocks in listed corporations, while the majority controls only one block

Stable Roommate Problem with Diversity Preferences

In the multidimensional stable roommate problem, agents have to be allocated to rooms and have preferences over sets of potential roommates. We study the complexity of finding good allocations of agents to rooms under the assumption that agents have diversity preferences [Bredereck et al., 2019]: each agent belongs to one of the two types (e.g., juniors and seniors, artists and engineers), and agents' preferences over rooms depend solely on the fraction of agents of their own type among their potential roommates. We consider various solution concepts for this setting, such as core and exchange stability, Pareto optimality and envy-freeness. On the negative side, we prove that envy-free, core stable or (strongly) exchange stable outcomes may fail to exist and that the associated decision problems are NP-complete. On the positive side, we show that these problems are in FPT with respect to the room size, which is not the case for the general stable roommate problem. Moreover, for the classic setting with rooms of size two, we present a linear-time algorithm that computes an outcome that is core and exchange stable as well as Pareto optimal. Many of our results for the stable roommate problem extend to the stable marriage problem.Comment: accepted to IJCAI'2

Literature, planning and infrastructure: Investigating the southern city through postcolonial texts

This article explores the ways in which postcolonial literary and other cultural texts navigate, decode and in some cases re-imagine the infrastructures that organize urban life, particularly in the postcolonial cities of Johannesburg, London and Delhi. Readings of Ivan Vladislavić, Mark Gevisser Brian Chikwava, Selma Dabbagh, Rana Dasgupta and Manju Kapur consider the constantly shifting relationship between urban planning, the organization of public space, and various other forms of human intervention, and suggest that the ways in which urban spaces are mapped in creative practice can explore, negotiate and at times disrupt and reconstruct that relationship