Exchange Rate Volatility and International Trade

The purpose of this note is to show that a positive effect of exchange rate volatility on export production has a theoretical basis. The key to this claim is that, as the exchange rate volatility increases, so does the value of the real option to export to the world market. Higher volatility increases the potential gains from trade. This may explain part of the mixed empirical findings regarding the effects of exchange rate risk on international trade.     

Should Welfare Administration be Centralized or Decentralized? Evidence from a Policy Experiment

The 2005 reform of the German welfare system introduced two competing organizational models for welfare administration. In most districts, a centralized organization was established where local welfare agencies are bound to central directives. At the same time, 69 districts were allowed to opt for a decentralized organization. We evaluate the relative success of both types in terms of integrating welfare recipients into employment. Compared to centralized organization, decentralized organization has a negative effect on employment chances of males. For women, no significant effect is found. These findings are robust to the inclusion of aspects of internal organization common to both types of agencies.     

Arrow: A flexible architecture for an accounting and charging infrastructure in the Next Generation Internet

Current pricing and charging methods for the Internet are not based on actual usage of this service, which leads to unfairness and more important, it does not deliver the right signals through financial incentives to network providers to upgrade critical links of their networks. The development of new multimedia applications and the convergence to an integrated services network will foster the tremendous growth of the Internet even more. With the Next Generation Internet not only technical services like bandwidth reservation will be introduced, but also new applications will emerge within the Internet. Charging the Internet in a fashion that provides feedback to users and providers has been proposed since the early '90s, however, only a few implementations and real-world examples are known today. This is due to subsidizing the Internet in its early stages and due to a technical development that did not care much about charging. With the recent redesign of the Internet protocol suite and discussions on multiple service classes in the Internet, architectures for charging and accounting have to be revisited, too. Economic models for the Internet cannot be tested fully and validated in non-real-world environments, because of the unknown user behavior. With this uncertainty over what models and pricing schemes to choose, it is evident that a specific charging and accounting platform will never be accepted by the community. In this paper a novel and flexible architecture for charging and accounting is proposed that provides a wide range of mechanisms and lets researchers experiment in an environment as close as possible to the targeted system. As a first step, four different pricing schemes are described, qualitatively assessed on the proposed platform, and a prototypical implementation performed. One of the economic models that have been implemented on Arrow is based on different service classes including reservation and recalculates prices dynamically depending on the traffic situation. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Filling the Empty Shell. The Public Debate on CSR in Austria as a Paradigmatic Example of a Political Discourse

Instead of essentializing and defining what CSR “is”, we analyze CSR as a political discourse in which different actors struggle to fill the empty shell of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with a legitimate interpretation. In this paper we take the current debate on CSR in Austria as an example to demonstrate how this debate is shaped by changes in the greater socio-economic environment. We suggest that this debate might be paradigmatic for the development of CSR in the European/International context. We argue that the debate and the political moves concerning an implicit or an explicit concept of CSR are rooted in a more fundamental question: the societal (re-)embedding or disembedding of companies.     

EU enlargement and governance of the Common Agricultural Policy

The requirements for the implementation, administration and control of the application of the current CAP are much higher than they were 15 years ago. The governance problems caused in the present EU by today’s higher regulation density are already severe. The new member countries are even less well equipped than the present ones to deal with these problems. What political consequences should be drawn?     

Sortimentsmanagement in der Fashion-Branche — Was in zweistufigen Systemen von vertikal integrierten Unternehmen zu lernen ist

Das Sortimentsmanagement weist in der Fashion-Branche eine von anderen Konsumgüterbranchen abweichende Bedeutung auf. Der Artikel verdeutlicht die Eckpunkte vertikaler Sortimentssteuerung und formuliert daraus Anforderungen an Handel und Industrie in zweistufigen, klassischen Systemen, wobei für eine st?rkere schnittstellenübergreifende Vernetzung bei der Sortimentsbestimmung auf den Handelsfl?chen, im Einkauf des Handels bzw. im Verkauf der Industrie und bei der Steuerung der Best?nde pl?diert wird.     

„Infotainment“ in der Presse

This paper answers, by means of a content analysis of three regional daily papers, the question of whether political journalism in regional newspapers is more entertaining today than it was in 1980. On the level of articles, increased entertainment can consist of using specific design elements. On the thematic level, topics that are entertaining per se (e. g. human interest topics) can take the place of or occur in addition to political information. In all the papers that were examined, political articles possess a larger potential for entertainment today than they did in 1980. Additionally, the percentage of political information has decreased, while the number of articles on human interest topics has increased. Finally, this paper discusses how that result is to be evaluated from the point of view of the theory of democracy: “Infotainment” can be beneficial in some circumstances. Therefore, entertainment should not be disparaged in general; one needs to be careful when assessing it normatively.     

Controlling-Schwerpunkte prozessorientierter Unternehmen

Zur Beurteilung von Prozessen werden von Unternehmen unterschiedliche Kriterien herangezogen. Die beschriebene Untersuchung zeigt u.a., dass die Kundenzufriedenheit am h?ufigsten als Beurteilungskriterium verwendet wird. Oft gebraucht werden auch Prozesskosten und die Prozesszeit.