Economy & Society

War and peace: The case for power sharing

There has long been an association between politics and violence. Factional disagreements can often lead to prolonged violence. At the same time, there is apparent evidence that the prospect or reality of power sharing can reduce violence – as with the Good Friday agreement and paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, for example. At a time when factional violence, within a country or region, is evident in numerous parts of the world, research that examines how to prevent that violence is particularly relevant.

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Operational management

Designing solutions to complex problems

Organizational life, and indeed the world, is full of complex, poorly defined, so called “ill-structured” problems that need solving. While teams have a variety of tools to choose from to help tackle these problems, those tools invariably fail to address both the challenges of working collaboratively and of addressing the specific problem at hand.

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Economy & Society

The case for investing in good quality early child care

Two researchers look at the controversial issue of whether Early Child Care for very young children (under the age of three) provides benefits over care at home. And if so, whether it benefits children to a different degree depending on their circumstances.

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Finance & Insurance

Beyond life expectancy: A different approach to comparing the impact of life saving measures on future demographics

Making accurate predictions about population trends is difficult. However a good grasp of demographic trends is also essential both for policymakers and many companies. Changes in Iife expectancy is a relatively blunt tool for measuring the impact of interventions, such as a new drug, or safety law, on different causes of death. Séverine Arnold and her co-authors offer a more sophisticated approach which enables interventions to be measured in terms of their relative impact on the age distribution of future populations, including old age dependency ratios.

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Leadership & Behavior, Technology

Disrupting human resource development: The impact of immersive virtual reality

Interpersonal skills training is about to get a little less personal, it seems. A new paper from Marianne Schmid Mast and co-authors suggests that our role-playing training partners of the future may not be our colleagues or managers, but virtual humans instead.

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Economy & Society

A change of mind: A more effective approach to shaping attitudes towards social and economic issues

Research suggests that, perhaps instinctively, people tend to prefer stability and the status quo to transformation and new ideas, even when they are personally disadvantaged as a result. The tacit approval of inequality despite its proven negative impact on society is a good example. Patrick Haack, Assistant Professor at HEC Lausanne and Jost Sieweke, Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam investigate why we think and behave this way. In doing so they provide persuasive new insights on how to change prevailing attitudes and behavior.

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Finance & Insurance

When it’s good to be stressed: US banking regulation and the Financial CHOICE Act

Diane Pierret and Roberto Steri share a keen research interest in the regulatory environment for banking as is evident from their recent co-authored paper Stressed Banks. In this Q&A, they talk about the paper, the post-crash regulatory environment for banking, and some potentially serious implications of the proposed Financial CHOICE Act in America, both for risk taking in US banking and the stability of the global financial system.

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Technology

Effective data Management in a digitally driven world

In this Q&A, Christine Legner talks about the Competence Center Corporate Data Quality (CC CDQ), the data excellence model that the consortium has produced, and the need for organisations to think about data and its management in new ways, as many corporations engage in the digital transformation of their business.

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Finance & Insurance

The impact of guaranteed interest rates on long term investments in insurance products

As longevity increases ensuring that people have sufficient finances in later life has become a greater challenge for governments, whether that funding provision involves the public or private sector, or a mix of both. Joël Wagner’s research focuses largely on the topics of risk management and insurance including recent work on long term investment products like life insurance savings contracts.

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Leadership & Behavior

The leadership IQ dilemma: when super smart people are perceived as ineffective leaders

General intelligence is an essential characteristic for good leadership. Research by John Antonakis and colleagues on the relationship between IQ and perceptions of effective leadership reveals that a leader’s optimal IQ level depends on the average intelligence of the group being led; too high or too low leader IQ may spell disaster for the leaders.

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