Examining world-wide purchasing power parity

We examine long-run PPP between Germany, Great Britain, Japan and the United States over the period 1930–1996 using multivariate cointegration techniques. Bilateral PPP between the four countries is examined in one system (as opposed to e.g. series of trivariate systems). In all of the statistical analysis, asymptotic tests are augmented by parametric bootstrap analogues, whereby we reduce, if not eliminate, the size distortion typically present in small-sample studies. The cointegration analysis provides support for the necessary conditions for PPP (i.e. cointegrating relations are found) but not for the sufficient conditions (i.e., the coefficients in the cointegrating relations are far from what PPP predicts). These results are at odds with results from other studies that also analyze long-horizon data sets.First version received: November 2000/Final version received: February 2003Comments by Stefan Norrbin, Lee Ohanian, Anders Vredin, seminar-participants at Sveriges Riksbank (the central bank of Sweden) and at the Econometric Society European Meeting in Santiago de Compostela are gratefully acknowledged.     

The Extent of Collective Bargaining and Workplace Representation: Transitions between States and their Determinants. A Comparative Analysis of Germany and Great Britain

The institutions of collective bargaining and worker representation are eroding in many nations, not least in Germany and Britain. This is the first article to explore transitions into and out of these arrangements. Using successive waves of the German IAB Establishment Panel and both cross‐sectional and panel components of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey for the period 1998–2004, we find industrial relations are in flux, with many workplaces switching into and out of collective bargaining and other agencies of worker representation, respectively, works councils in Germany and joint consultative committees in Britain. Yet although there are some commonalities in behaviour, the driving forces behind the decline in collective bargaining differ markedly in the two countries.     

Inter-firm trust in buyer–supplier relations: Are knowledge spillovers and geographical proximity relevant?

This paper empirically examines the impact of knowledge spillovers and geographical proximity on inter-firm trust in buyer–supplier relations. In particular, the effects of incoming knowledge spillovers from vertically related firms and firms’ appropriability problems are analyzed. The results suggest that there is a positive relationship between incoming knowledge spillovers from business partners and the level of inter-firm trust. Firms’ appropriability problems, however, lead to a decrease in inter-firm trust. Firms that cannot protect their technical knowledge have a greater perception of customer (supplier) opportunism. Furthermore, estimation results indicate that inter-firm trust between geographically close partners exceeds inter-firm trust between distant partners.     

金融监管一体化模式：德国的经验与启示

近年来，金融监管一体化模式逐渐成为了一些重要国家金融监管体制变革的选择，其中包括曾以全能银行模式与分业监管并行闻名于世的德国。德国的一体化监管模式变革，既有与英国等国模式的共性，也在组织架构、权力安排，特别是一体化监管机构与央行的关系上，显示出其独特性。一体化模式变革适应了金融各业边界越来越模糊的客观需要，提升了德国金融业竞争力。对处于变革中的中国金融监管体制而言，德国一体化模式的引入与运作具有启示意义。     

Phasing out: Routine tasks and retirement

This paper studies the link between task content of jobs and exits to retirement by older workers. This research provides a comparative analysis of retirement timing in Germany and Great Britain. In Germany, workers in more routine jobs had between one and two percentage points higher probability leaving the labor market faster when compared to workers in less routine occupations. The relationship is robust and relatively constant over time. In Great Britain, by contrast, workers from routine and non-routine jobs appear to leave the labor market with a similar timing. I contend that institutional characteristics can explain the differences across countries.     

Friedrich List and the Imperial origins of the national economy

This essay offers a critical reexamination of the works of Friedrich List by placing them in the context of nineteenth-century imperial economies. I argue that List's theory of the national economy is characterised by a major ambivalence, as it incorporates both imperial and anti-imperial elements. On the one hand, List pitted his national principle against the British imperialism of free trade and the relations of dependency it heralded for late developers like Germany. On the other hand, his economic nationalism aimed less at dismantling imperial core–periphery relations as a whole than at reproducing these relations domestically and expanding them globally. I explain this ambivalence with reference to List's designation of imperial Britain as the prime example of successful economic development and a model to be emulated by late industrialisers. List thereby fashioned his ideas on national development out of the historical experience of an empire whereby he internalised its economic logic and discourse of the civilising mission. Consequently, List's national economy culminated in an early vision of the global north–south relations, in which the global industrial-financial core would expand to include France, Germany and the USA, while the rest of the world would be reduced to quasi-colonial agrarian hinterlands.     

ECONOMIC RELATIONS BETWEEN WOMEN AND THEIR PARTNERS: AN EAST AND WEST GERMAN COMPARISON AFTER REUNIFICATION

abstract

This article compares women's and men's economic relations in East and West Germany following the 1990 reunification to exemplify the impact of varying opportunity structures on women's relative contribution to family income. West Germany's takeover set in motion a rapid transformation of East German institutions and employment structures. The analysis shows that women in West Germany became less dependent on their partners in the 1990s, largely because fewer women were housewives without earnings. In contrast, the contributions of women to the family economy in East Germany fell between 1990 and 1996. Afterwards, women in East Germany regained some of their economic power because of their partners' increasing difficulties sustaining employment. A multivariate analysis showed that the fact that women in West Germany were more likely to work less or not at all – especially if they were married or had children – accounted for much of the difference.     

Common trends in prices and exchange rates. Tests of long-run purchasing power parity

The empirical validity of long-run purchasing power parity is investigated using multi-variate cointegration techniques. Both bilateral and multilateral PPP is examined. The data set is monthly and covers almost 22 years (January 1970–August 1991) for four countries — Germany, Japan, the U.S., and Great Britain. While three cointegrating relations are detected among the set of nominal exchange rates and domestic price levels (or equivalently, there exists a reduced number of common stochastic trends) none of these satisfy the linear constraints implied by PPP. We conclude that neither bilateral nor multilateral PPP can be supported by the behavior of the data.     

英国和德国可再生能源产业激励政策和实施效果的比较

英国和德国都是国际上控制气候变化和开发可替代能源的积极倡导者,但目前,两国在可再生能源的开发和利用方面存在较大的差距:截至2012年,英国和德国可再生能源在最终能源消费中的占比分别为4.1%和12.6%;可再生能源的总装机容量分别为15538和76017MW。究其原因,主要是由两国不同的能源政策造成的,英国采取的是类似配额制的可再生能源义务令制度,而德国采用的是固定上网电价机制。事实证明,德国的入网电价体系优于英国的可再生能源义务令,因为它在一定时期内能为可再生能源发电商提供稳定的回报。英国尽管在可再生能源的开发和利用方面落后于德国,但英国自然条件优越,开发利用可再生能源的潜力巨大,加上政府的积极努力,英国可再生能源产业的发展有望得到较大改观。     

A framework for the decomposition of poverty differences with an application to poverty differences between countries

We propose an Oaxaca-Blinder-like decomposition of poverty differences. The decomposition is based on a parametric model of the income distribution and can be used to decompose differences in poverty rates across countries or years. Poverty differences are decomposed into differences in the underlying distribution of poverty-relevant characteristics and differences in the incidence of poverty conditional on these characteristics. We illustrate our method by comparing levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. Our results suggest that the higher aggregate poverty rates in the USA and in Britain relative to Germany were mostly accounted for by higher poverty rates conditional on characteristics, which were partly offset by a more favourable distribution of poverty-relevant characteristics, in particular higher employment rates.This paper is part of the research programme of the TMR Network ‘Living Standards, Inequality and Taxation’. Financial support from the European Union (Contract #ERBFMRXCT980248), the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the University of Essex, and the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG) is gratefully acknowledged. The data used in this study were made available by Cornell University (Cross-National Equivalent File), the University of Michigan (Panel Study of Income Dynamics), the UK Data Archive (British Household Panel Survey), and the German Institute for Economic Research (German Socio-Economic Panel). Martin Biewen would like to thank the Institute for European Studies and the Department for Policy and Management at Cornell University, in particular Jonas Pontusson, Richard Burkhauser and Dean Lillard, for their hospitality and support. We are also grateful for comments by Bernd Fitzenberger, Joachim Winter, Christoph M. Schmidt, an anonymous referee and seminar participants in Essex, Heidelberg and Mannheim. Last but not least, we thank Nick Cox for providing us with updated versions of his Stata programs for drawing quantile plots.First version received: May 2003/Final version received: December: 2003     

Technical change and market structure

This paper investigates the ceteris-paribus effects of labor reducing technical progress on industry-wide employment under different market regimes. We distinguish between a contestable market, a monopoly, and a market with bounded supplier power. Under a constant wage rate, employment will not decrease only if the elasticity of demand on a contestable market exceeds one. The same thing holds for markets with bounded supplier power. Under a monopoly, price elasticity must even be more than three. Ceteris paribus we thus have to expect a higher probability of employment reduction under a monopoly than under other market regimes. Raising wages proportional to productivity leads to an employment reduction on stagnating markets with supplier power. Here a raise in wages without layoffs is only possible if the growth in demand is at least as high as the growth in productivity.The author is indebted to Alfred E. Ott, Sabine Böckem, Rolf Wiegert and Ulf Schiller for valuable comments. Of course, I take responsibility for all remaining errors.     

供应链的交易成本分析及供产双方的博弈

本文通过传统供应链中供应商和制造商的讨价还价模型分析,论证了交易双方的交易成本不同,造成供应商和制造商之间的相互依赖关系不同,从而双方的机会主义行为倾向也不同.制造商可以通过与高质量的供应商建立长期的诚信的战略合作伙伴关系,以减少为讨价还价消耗的交易成本,同时也减少了双方机会主义行为所造成的损害.     

New technological path creation: evidence from the British and German wind energy industries

The canonical economic literature on path dependence provides only a limited explanation of why and how new technological pathways are created initially. The motivation of this paper is to address this gap in the literature and argue that evolutionary economics theories of path dependence need to be linked with sociological explanations of how new technological pathways are created in the first instance by knowledgeable inventors and innovators. These arguments are developed by the authors in a hybrid socio-economic theory of new path creation. In this paper these theoretical arguments are illustrated empirically by a comparative analysis of the introduction and diffusion of new wind power technologies in Britain and Germany. The empirical analysis focuses on the key research question of why the introduction of these new technologies started earlier and has diffused sooner in Germany than in Britain.