This introduction sketches out what relevance wood and wood products have had in Europe's industrial societies. It also summarizes some peculiarities of the wood-based businesses caused by both the materiality of wood and the ecologies of forests. Most importantly, the introduction...

This working paper aims at improving the comparability of forecast quality measures of in-solvency prediction studies. For this purpose, in a first step commonly used accuracy measures for categorial, ordinal and cardinal insolvency predictions are presented. It will be argued, that ordinal...

This working paper aims at improving the comparability of forecast quality measures of insolvency prediction studies. For this purpose, in a first step commonly used accuracy measures for categorical, ordinal and cardinal insolvency predictions are presented. It will be argued, that ordinal...

The paper revisits the impact of uncertainty on the decision problem of a bank. The bank extends risky loans to private investors and sells deposits to savers at fixed rates. The uncertainty under which deposit/loan-portfolios are chosen by banks is endogenized through an information system that...

We analyze the spatial interaction among regions in North America and in Western Europe. We use a gravity model extended by a spatial correlation structures where data allows to evaluate the level of impact and the length of the spatial tail. This allows us to address to effects external to the...

The paper examines the economic role of market transparency on the decision problems of an international firm. Transparency is described in terms of the informativeness of a publicly observable signal. With higher transparency, the signal conveys more precise information about the random foreign...

Over the last decade, German multinationals created about two million jobs abroad with increasing foreign direct investment (FDI). While there are many reasons for firms to go multinational and probably just as many for Germany's high unemployment, this paper aims to investigate the relationship...

Basel II changes risk management in banks strongly. Internal rating procedures would lead one to expect that banks are changing over to active risk control. But, if risk management is no longer a simple "game against nature", if all agents involved are active players then a shift from a...

Within the prospect theory the paper examines production and hedging decisions of a competitive firm under price uncertainty. We consider the prospect theory for the firm's utility function in the two moment model known as (mu,sigma)-preference. In contrast to the literature our findings show...