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Introduction: The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 highlighted the importance of financial cycle fluctuations. While the regulatory response was to mandate higher bank capital requirements during the financial cycle upswing, academic research focussed on identifying the best performing early warning indicators to forecast financial cycle fluctuations that have proven to be often unrelated to business cycle changes. To safeguard the global financial system against the financial cycle fluctuations, Basel Committee of Banking Supervisors, based on first strands of empirical evidence, proposed the credit-to-GDP gap as the headline indicator tied to the countercyclical capital buffer. However, later research on this indicator identified certain concerns, among them subpar performance for economies with short available data series.

Aim of the Study: To this end this study aims to analyse various financial cycle indicators from a unique perspective of their potential viability under limited historical data availability.

Methods: For this purpose, a meta-study of existing research is carried out as well as an empirical study to compare performance of certain indicators for the sample of six countries in the Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European region, where long data series are not available.

Main Findings: It was found that certain approaches, among them calculation of raw credit growth rate and application of Hamilton filter, can supplement or possibly even outperform the Basel credit-to-GDP gap indicator under limited data availability.

Conclusion: Author concludes that for limited time series Basel credit-to-GDP gap can be potentially outperformed by other indicators and further research in this currently under-studied field is warranted.

Originality of the Paper: By using various financial cycle indicators that already proven their early warning prediction powers from previous research, this study focusses on their potential viability under limited historical data availability. Respective findings might be appreciated for supplementing policy-makers’ toolkits as complementary indicators in cases where there is no available long time series for financial cycle estimation, for example, such as countries that entered market economies relatively late.

Meta-synthesis of the research evidence adds value to the process of literature reviewing, providing useful knowledge for researchers, practitioners and policymakers. The aim of the chapter is to explain what meta-synthesis involves and how it illuminates our understanding of concepts. Previous papers on meta-synthesis (by the author) have reviewed research strategies in information behaviour research and methods for meta-synthesis, discussed application of meta-synthesis to research on information behaviour of women, and proposed methods suitable for integrating information literacy research. Meta-synthesis methods have been applied to many areas of social science research. The literature review examines how to reduce the risks involved in suitable for integrating qualitative research or qualitative and quantitative research; outlines the main approaches used in meta-synthesis before explaining the processes used in a meta-synthesis of research on information behaviour of women, reflects on the meta-synthesis methods used, and which might have been used, and shows what meta-synthesis achieves. Meta-synthesis should be used more in information behaviour research, but it is a rigorous process, requiring time and effort to get useful results. On the other hand, meta-synthesis provides more new knowledge, and a deeper understanding of our ideas, than a conventional literature review.

This chapter outlines the challenges that research and practice in higher education have faced in measuring students' competences and learning outcomes. Particular attention is given to the systematic and institutional contexts in Germany. Based on the outlined national and international contextual framework, the Germany-wide program “Modeling and Measuring Competences in Higher Education (KoKoHs)” is discussed in terms of its two central working stages, key outcomes and lessons learned. In particular, the central results of the second phase are presented for the first time and integrated into the current state of international research. Based on this analysis, perspectives for further research on student learning in higher education and implications for practice and policy are derived.

This paper introduces a conceptual framework to assess the foreign market entry behavior of emerging market multinationals (EMMs). By introducing strategic cognition as the underlying theoretical perspective, this paper postulates that different levels of institutional voids in home markets shape the strategic cognition of EMMs, influencing their market entry behavior due to the prevalence of organizational imprinting in the early stages of internationalization. The paper aims to contribute to the strategic cognition literature by introducing emerging markets as a relevant context in which to apply and extend current thinking. Additionally, it aims to contribute to the institutional voids literature by providing a cognitive framework of behavioral patterns that is rationalized by institutional voids. Finally, the paper contributes to the entry mode literature by proposing strategic cognition as a relevant moderator for foreign entry mode choices, particularly those of EMMs.

Precise and rigorous international comparative research requires methodological reflections and determinations at each step of the empirical research process. This chapter analyzes the precision and rigor of international comparative higher education research by diagnosing their comparative methodology, particularly their country selection and case sampling. It evaluates 202 studies that have been published in journals of both higher education and comparative education, because international comparative higher education intellectually and institutionally intersects both interdisciplinary fields. The major empirical findings show a relative lack of explicit and elaborate justification strategies, as well as a lack of comparative methodology. But they also show that the intellectual and institutional context, represented here in the form of the journals, influences the implementation of comparative methodology. The use of comparative methodologies is more thorough in the context of comparative education, where a continuous debate about the theoretical and methodological aspects of comparative studies takes place. One of the implications of the study is that the debate regarding comparative methodologies within higher education research should be intensified.

Purpose: The study elaborates the contextual conditions of the academic workplace in which gender, age, and nationality considerably influence the likelihood of self-categorization as being affected by workplace bullying. Furthermore, the intersectionality of these sociodemographic characteristics is examined.

Basic Design: The hypotheses underlying the study were mainly derived from the social role, social identity, and cultural distance theory, as well as from role congruity and relative deprivation theory. A survey data set of a large German research organization, the Max Planck Society, was used. A total of 3,272 cases of researchers and 2,995 cases of non-scientific employees were included in the analyses performed. For both groups of employees, binary logistic regression equations were constructed. the outcome of each equation is the estimated percentage of individuals who reported themselves as having experienced bullying at work occasionally or more frequently in the 12 months prior to the survey. The predictors are the demographic and organization-specific characteristics (hierarchical position, scientific field, administrative unit) of the respondents and selected interaction terms. Using regression equations, hypothetically relevant conditional marginal means and differences in regression parameters were calculated and compared by means of t-tests.

Results: In particular, the gender-related hypotheses of the study could be completely or conditionally verified. Accordingly, female scientific and non-scientific employees showed a higher bullying vulnerability in (almost) all contexts of the academic workplace. An increased bullying vulnerability was also found for foreign researchers. However, the patterns found here contradicted those that were hypothesized. Concerning the effect of age analyzed for non-scientific personnel, especially the age group 45–59 years showed a higher bullying probability, with the gender gap in bullying vulnerability being greatest for the youngest and oldest age groups in the sample.

Interpre4tation and Relevance: The results of the study especially support the social identity theory regarding gender. In the sample studied, women in minority positions have a higher vulnerability to bullying in their work fields, which is not the case for men. However, the influence of nationality on bullying vulnerability is more complex. The study points to the further development of cultural distance theory, whose hypotheses are only partly able to explain the results. The evidence for social role theory is primarily seen in the interaction of gender with age and hierarchical level. Accordingly, female early career researchers and young women (and women in the oldest age group) on the non-scientific staff presumably experience a masculine workplace. Thus, the results of the study contradict the role congruity theory.

Purpose: Previous research identified a measurement gap in the individual assessment of social misconduct in the workplace related to gender. This gap implies that women respond to comparable self-reported acts of bullying or sexual discrimination slightly more often than men with the self-labeling as “bullied” or “sexually discriminated and/or harassed.” This study tests this hypothesis for women and men in the scientific workplace and explores patterns of gender-related differences in self-reporting behavior.

Basic design: The hypotheses on the connection between gender and the threshold for self-labeling as having been bullied or sexually discriminated against were tested based on a sample from a large German research organization. The sample includes 5,831 responses on bullying and 6,987 on sexual discrimination (coverage of 24.5 resp. 29.4 percentage of all employees). Due to a large number of cases and the associated high statistical power, this sample for the first time allows a detailed analysis of the “gender-related measurement gap.” The research questions formulated in this study were addressed using two hierarchical regression models to predict the mean values of persons who self-labeled as having been bullied or sexually discriminated against. The status of the respondents as scientific or non-scientific employees was included as a control variable.

Results: According to a self-labeling approach, women reported both bullying and sexual discrimination more frequently. This difference between women and men disappeared for sexual discrimination when, in addition to the gender of a person, self-reported behavioral items were considered in the prediction of self-labeling. For bullying, the difference between the two genders remained even in this extended prediction. No statistically significant relationship was found between the frequency of self-reported items and the effect size of their interaction with gender for either bullying or sexual discrimination. When comparing bullying and sexual discrimination, it should be emphasized that, on average, women report experiencing a larger number of different behavioral items than men.

Interpretation and relevance: The results of the study support the current state of research. However, they also show how volatile the measurement instruments for bullying and sexual discrimination are. For example, the gender-related measurement gap is considerably influenced by single items in the Negative Acts Questionnaire and Sexual Experience Questionnaire. The results suggest that women are generally more likely than men to report having experienced bullying and sexual discrimination. While an unexplained “gender gap” in the understanding of bullying was found for bullying, this was not the case for sexual discrimination.

The chapter provides an integrated analytical account of the contributions of the volume. Next to the results from a comprehensive literature review on gazelle growth factors, two further content blocks of the volume are summarized, one on gazelles in Germany and one on specific under-researched topics, that is, gazelles’ internationalization and gazelles’ corporate citizenship. The chapter highlights main findings and avenues for further research, including a short discussion on the use of the term “gazelle”.