Kulturradio in Deutschland 2010: Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme

Cultural radio in Germany has undergone a radical change since the turn of the millennium. The public debate on cultural radio programmes is characterized by the voices of different agents and stakeholders. In this essay I try to reconstruct and connect the different perspectives and levels of change. The inspection focuses firstly on the public service cultural radio’s dilemma of legitimation between audience rating and educational mandate. Secondly the paper describes the symbolic fight for the power of definition of legitimate culture between the economy and cultural authorities. The analysis also addresses radio’s position in the contemporary media repertoire, cultural radio programmes in Germany in general, and the differentiation between public services and private cultural radio programmes. Finally the following factors of change will be identified: (a) the change of radio’s social function in the media repertoire, (b) the media system as general framework, (c) the power of legitimation, (d) the understanding of culture, (e) technological progress, and at last (f) the cultural radio programmes themselves.     

Das adaptierte deutsche Arbeitsbeziehungsmodell im Vergleich

Zusammenfassung  Das deutsche Modell der Beziehungen zwischen Arbeitgebern und Arbeitnehmern innerhalb eines Unternehmens — vor allem die betriebliche Mitbestimmung — stand lange Zeit in der Kritik, w?hrend das anglo-amerikanische Modell als überlegen angesehen wurde. Welches Arbeitsbeziehungsmodell w?hlen deutsche und amerikanische Unternehmen in einem in Hinblick auf die Ausgestaltung der Arbeitsbeziehungen freizügigen Umfeld, wie es in Gro?britannien herrscht? Wie wirkt sich die Wahl des Modells auf Arbeitsproduktivit?t und Profi tabilit?t der Tochterunternehmen aus? Prof. Dr. Arne Heise, 48, lehrt Volkswirtschaftslehre an der Universit?t Hamburg und an der Izmir Economics University, Türkei; Prof. Dr. Heinz Tüselmann, 49, lehrt International Business an der Manchester Metropolitan University; Prof. Dr. Frank McDonald, 58, lehrt International Business an der University of Bradford; und Matthew Allen, 38, ist Lecturer an der Manchester Business School. Prof. Dr. Arne Heise, 48, lehrt Volkswirtschaftslehre an der Universit?t Hamburg und an der Izmir Economics University, Türkei; Prof. Dr. Heinz Tüselmann, 49, lehrt International Business an der Manchester Metropolitan University; Prof. Dr. Frank McDonald, 58, lehrt International Business an der University of Bradford; und Matthew Allen, 38, ist Lecturer an der Manchester Business School. Dieser Aufsatz fasst die Ergebnisse eines von der Hans-B?ckler-Stiftung gef?rderten Projektes „Employee Relations and Firm Performance: A Comparison of German and US Multinational Companies in the United Kingdom“ zusammen.     

The demand for relational goods: empirical evidence from the European Social Survey

How are happiness and the demand for relational goods and status goods related? Using cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey, this relationship is investigated for European countries. The main result is that the demand for relational goods is not reduced by high opportunity costs of time. Rather, both wage rate and income are positively related to the frequency of social contacts. In contrast to financial means, while status is more important for happiness in richer European countries than in poorer ones, social status is not decisive for the frequency of meeting friends regardless of the home country’s economic well-being. Thus, while no crowding out of relational contacts by status could be observed, relational goods are even boosted by material well-being.     

Private patent protection in the theory of Schumpeterian growth

We develop a Schumpeterian growth model with privately optimal intellectual property rights (IPRs) enforcement and investigate the implications for intellectual property and R&D policies. In our setting, successful innovators undertake costly rent protection activities (RPAs) to enforce their patents. RPAs deter innovators who seek to discover higher quality products and thereby replace the patent holder. RPAs also deter imitators who seek to capture a portion of the monopoly market by imitating the patent holder's product. We investigate the role of private IPR protection by considering the impact of subsidies to RPAs on economic growth and welfare. We find that a larger RPA subsidy raises the innovation rate if and only if the ease of imitation is above a certain level. With regards to welfare, we find that depending on the parameters it may be optimal to tax or subsidize RPAs. Thus a prohibitively high taxation of RPAs is not necessarily optimal. We also show that the presence of imitation strengthens the case for subsidizing R&D.     

Quantifying the CO2 Permit Price Sensitivity

Equilibrium models have been widely used in the literature with the aim of showing theoretical properties of emissions trading schemes. This paper applies equilibrium models to empirically study permit prices and to quantify the permit price sensitivity. In particular, we demonstrate that emission trading schemes both with and without banking are inherently prone to price jumps.