The management of football clubs has increasingly become a complex endeavour due to their evolution into multifaceted enterprises and the rising complexity of stakeholder relationships. Clubs vary in their ability to navigate this complexity, making management quality a decisive factor in gaining a competitive edge. The 2024 edition of the FoMa Q-Score ranking builds on the framework developed by ZÜLCH & PALME (2017), evaluating management quality across four key dimensions: Sporting Success, Financial Performance, Fan Welfare Maximization, and Leadership & Governance. These dimensions, as confirmed by leading football executives (CRUZ, SCHREGEL & ZÜLCH, 2022), provide an objective assessment of the critical success factors for professional football clubs. The increased competition at the top of the Bundesliga in the 2023/2024 season has reinforced the business model of German football, underscoring that sporting success alone is not enough to come out as a top-tier club in this encompassing ranking. Achieving long-term competitiveness and stability requires a solid financial foundation, effective fan engagement, and strong leadership from club executives. As the league progresses beyond the pandemic era, these trends reflect a lasting and sustainable shift. With forthcoming changes in European competition formats and the associated increases in revenues, clubs are strategically position-ing themselves for enduring success. The FoMa Q-Score, acknowledged in both academic and practical spheres, continues to offer valuable insights. This tool enables clubs to benchmark their strategies against peer group clubs and beyond, ensuring they maintain or enhance their competitive standing.

The article on legal forms in Switzerland provides an overview on important legal aspects corporations and entrepreneurs need to understand to make informed decisions about which legal form to embark on. It starts with an introduction into the general laws and regulations with regard to setting up and running a business and provides an overview on possible legal forms. It uses a structured analysis framework to analyze seven relevant legal forms: the sole proprietorship (Einzelfirma), the ordinary partnership (Einfache Gesellschaft), the General partnership (Kollektivgesellschaft), the partnership limited by shares (Kommanditgesellschaft), the silent partnership (Stille Gesellschaft), the corporation (Aktiengesellschaft) and the limited liability company (GmbH). The article ends with a discussions and evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of the different legal forms and provides exemplary recommendations depending on the individual case of the founders.

Given the still ambiguous empirical evidence, this paper analyzes the eironmental regulation-productivity nexus using an extended Neo-Schumpeterian productivity model. Thereby, the paper adds to the literature in three ways: First, shadow prices of energy along with industrial energy prices are employed as relative measures of eironmental policy stringency. To ensure the robustness of the results, the model is also estimated for five alternative regulatory measures that have been applied in prior research. Second, the study addresses the potential endogeneity of the eironmental regulation, innovation, and trade openness measures as a source of the inconclusive results. Third, as one of few analyses on the Porter Hypothesis, the paper utilizes a cross-country multi-sectoral dataset including also newly industrialized countries and former transition economies. The estimates show that the positive effects of increases in eironmental policy stringency on productivity, which are often found in the more recent studies, change to insignificant and partly negative effects once endogeneity is fully controlled for. Hence, no support for the strong Porter Hypothesis can be found. Instead, more stringent eironmental regulation fosters innovation and, therefore, has an indirect, yet not dominant, positive effect on productivity growth.

We suggest a weak version of differential monotonicity for redistribution rules: whenever the differential of two persons’ income weakly increases, then their post-redistribution rewards essentially change in the same direction. Together with efficiency, non-negativity, and the null society property, weak differential monotonicity essentially characterizes redistribution via taxation at a …fixed rate and equal distribution of the total tax revenue, i.e., a flat tax and a basic income.

The significant heterogeneity among family firms has emerged as a commonly accepted paradigm in the research field. This systematic literature review establishes how the heterogeneity affects the board of directors, an institution that typically forms the most important pillar in the formal governance system of family businesses. As one of the first, the review provides an overview on the family-related factors that determine the board of directors’ tasks, composition, and processes. The systematic analysis, clustering, and synthesis of previous research yields six main determinants that are specific to the boards of family firms, namely generational stage, family culture, family power, family experience, CEO family stakes, and director kinship ties. From a methodological perspective, a heavy reliance on survey-based quantitative research can be observed in existing studies. For future research, I suggest a stronger focus on the dynamic evolution of the board over time, an integration of alternative theories in addition to agency theory, as well as the use of qualitative research strategies, such as case study research, to better understand the internal processes and evolution of family firm boards.