  We employ the recently introduced generalized microcanonical inflection point
method for the statistical analysis of phase transitions in flexible and
semiflexible polymers and study the impact of the bending stiffness upon the
character and order of transitions between random-coil, globules, and
pseudocrystalline conformations. The high-accuracy estimates of the
microcanonical entropy and its derivatives required for this study were
obtained by extensive replica-exchange Monte Carlo simulations. We observe that
the transition behavior into the compact phases changes qualitatively with
increasing bending stiffness. Whereas the $\Theta$ collapse transition is less
affected, the first-order liquid-solid transition characteristic for flexible
polymers ceases to exist once bending effects dominate over attractive
monomer-monomer interactions.
