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Prior literature has shown deviations between ETF prices and their net-asset-value (NAV) to exist. Fulkerson and Jordan (2013, p. 31) question “if there exists a true tradeable strategy” to exploit these inefficiencies. The purpose of this paper is to implement a profitable daily long-short trading strategy based on price/NAV information and explicitly accounting for trading costs.

For a sample of European sector ETFs, the authors analyze gross and net returns of a long-short trading strategy in the capital asset pricing model and Fama-French three-factor model.

The authors document positive gross excess return for the long-short trading strategy in all sample periods, but net excess returns to be positive only between 2008 and 2010.

The results document a profitable long-short trading strategy exploiting deviations between ETF prices and NAV and highlight the impact of trading costs in ETF markets. Due to the limited availability of historic trading cost data, the research uses a comparatively small sample size.

The net profitability of long-short trading in ETFs is only found in times of high uncertainty in the stock market.

The inclusion of trading costs enables a detailed comparison between gross and net returns in ETF trading, addressing potential limits to arbitrage.

The tragedy of the War has come very close to librarians in the death of Mr. W. G. C. Gladstone, M.P., from wounds received in action in Flanders on April 14th. About two years ago he became interested in the new Libraries Bill, and took charge of it in the House of Commons. He worked assiduously, and his historic name, and his genial, unaffected manner won over men on all sides of the House, insomuch that the backers of the Bill included members of every political complexion. War has intervened, and prevented the Bill's progress, and now our Parliamentary leader has given his life for a greater cause. Regret for his loss is widespread throughout the country, and no one will feel it more keenly than librarians.

The digital humanities offer many new methods to scholars interested in metal studies. This chapter demonstrates two such methods, that is, stylometric clustering and topic modelling, by interpreting the collected lyrics of over 8,000 metal bands. This allowed the authors to identify general trends that would be hard to derive by personally reading lyrics. This analysis showed several recurring medieval topics in metal lyrics, for example, a Fight for Glory expressed with words like ‘die’, ‘glory’, ‘warriors’, and ‘victory’. The authors were also able to distinguish metal bands with medieval references from those without – a line of research that could help in categorising (new) bands – and track the stylistic development of bands over time. Such statistical methods might help scholars not only by allowing for large-scale studies, yet also by providing inter-subjective feedback for theories.

This paper analyses the link between educational qualification structure and information technology (IT) in the service production process. The analysis is based on 1996 cross‐sectional data for approximately 1,000 West German firms. The empirical evidence indicates that IT capital and high‐skilled labor are complements in the production process: firms with higher IT investment output ratios employ a larger fraction of high‐skilled workers at the expense of unskilled workers. To a lesser extent, the positive IT effect carries through for workers with vocational degrees including masters and technicians. Furthermore, we find that firms’ expectations of the future size of their high‐skilled workforce are positively related to their initial IT investment output ratio. To account for censoring in the employment variables, the empirical analysis uses Powell’s Censored Least Absolute Deviations estimators as well as standard Tobit estimators.

This study aims to investigate the suitability of a multi-step prototyping strategy for producing pneumatic rotary vane actuators (RVAs) for the development of lightweight robots and actuation systems.

RVAs typically have cast aluminum housings and injection-molded seals that consist of hard thermoplastic cores and soft elastomeric overmolds. Using a combination of additive manufacturing (AM), computer numerical control (CNC) machining and elastomer molding, a conventionally manufactured standard RVA was replicated. The standard housing design was modified, and polymeric replicas were obtained by selective laser sintering (SLS) or PolyJet (PJ) printing and subsequent CNC milling. Using laser-sintered molds, actuator seals were replicated by overmolding laser-sintered polyamide cores with silicone (SIL) and polyurethane (PU) elastomers. The replica RVAs were subjected to a series of leakage, friction and durability experiments.

The AM-based prototyping strategy described is suitable for producing functional and reliable RVAs for research and product development. In a representative durability experiment, the RVAs in this study endured between 40,000 and 1,000,000 load cycles. Frictional torques were around 0.5 Nm, which is 10% of the theoretical torque at 6 bar and comparable to that of the standard RVA. Models and parameters are provided for describing the velocity-dependent frictional torque. Leakage experiments at 10,000 load cycles and 6 bar differential pressure showed that PJ housings exhibit lower leakage values (6.8 L/min) than laser-sintered housings (15.2 L/min), and PU seals exhibit lower values (8.0 l/min) than SIL seals (14.0 L/min). Combining PU seals with PJ housings led to an initial leakage of 0.4 L/min, which increased to only 1.2 L/min after 10,000 load cycles. Overall, the PU material used was more difficult to process but also more abrasion- and tear-resistant than the SIL elastomer.

More work is needed to understand individual cause–effect relationships between specific design features and system behavior.

To date, pneumatic RVAs have been manufactured by large-scale production technologies. The absence of suitable prototyping strategies has limited the available range to fixed sizes and has thus complicated the use of RVAs in research and product development. This paper proves that functional pneumatic RVAs can be produced by using more accessible manufacturing technologies and provides the tools for prototyping of application-specific RVAs.

Despite much progress in the field of family business research, there is still no unequivocal quantitative evidence on how many family businesses are generally transferred within the family and how many are sold to nonfamily members. Accordingly, the purpose of our paper is to overcome this data problem and to try to get a better estimate of these rates.

To determine a better estimate of intrafamily successions in Germany, we conducted a meta-analysis of 33 samples from 27 studies covering 75,522 firms facing or having already faced a business transfer.

Our results indicate that 62% of these family firms are (planned to be) transferred to family members. This type of industry strongly determines the mode of succession. However, methodological issues like study quality and sample design also influence estimated succession rates.

Policymakers need robust statistics so they can base their actions and economic policies on reliable information. However, in the absence of official statistics – as in the case of family firms handing over their company within or outside the family – information is difficult to generate. Our findings provide a generalizable estimate of prevalence rates, providing German policymakers, and those in other countries when applying these methods, with useful information.

This paper suggests that a theory of family firm succession needs to consider more deeply the context in which succession decisions occur. By exploring variables affecting succession rates such as firm size and industry but also methodological issues like sample design and study quality, our analysis also provides a better understanding of central determinants of successions within and outside the family.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between transformational leadership and effort-reward imbalance as well as the moderating role of overcommitment and subjective well-being. In particular, the study focuses on the transformational leadership component individualized consideration and its relationship with effort-reward imbalance.

Using linear hierarchical regression analyses, the authors tested four hypotheses on a broad sample of 229 German employees.

The results confirm the expected relationship between transformational leadership and effort-reward imbalance and that the strongest relationship exists with individualized consideration. However, there is no support for the hypothesized moderating effects.

First, the recruitment of the sample via fora and periodicals may bias the results. Second, the dependent and the independent variables were assessed with the same method, thus facilitating a common method bias. Third, the study underlies a cross-sectional design which does not allow drawing conclusions on causality.

The findings provide implications for leaders by showing that the most effective leadership behaviours are those encompassed by the transformational leadership component individualized consideration when it comes to reducing negative health effects of adverse working conditions. Furthermore, the results suggest that overcommitment plays a major role for employees’ effort-reward imbalance and should thus be addressed by specific training measures.

Researchers have devoted little attention to revealing how effort-reward imbalance can be avoided or reduced by leaders. The study attempts to fill this gap by exploring the relationship between effort-reward imbalance and transformational leadership.