Are the western welfare states still competitive?

Is there a contradiction between international competitiveness and the central principles of the welfare state? The following article examines both the negative and the positive ways in which welfare statism can affect a country’s ability to compete on international markets.     

澳大利亚个人理财业的发展与启示

20世纪80年代以来,个人理财业的迅速扩张使得澳大利亚个人理财业发生了根本的变化.与澳大利亚相比,中国个人理财业正处于早期形成阶段,加强理财的教育培训,构建合理的理财经营模式,进行严格的金融监管对个人理财业健康发展十分重要.     

The Telecommunications Act at three years: an economic evaluation of its implementation by the Federal Communications Commission

The competitive free-for-all that Congress envisioned in the 1996 Telecommunications Act has for the most part not appeared. The Act calls for two forms of regulatorily-assisted entry into local markets: lease of network elements and resale. The FCC has decreed that the charges for those elements and the resale discounts must emulate the costs of an ideally-efficient firm. This standard is in fact not efficient, and the FCC’s attempt to jump-start the entry of competitors in this way has short-circuited the competitive process itself and jeopardized achievement of the goals of the Act.     

Are Corporate Restructuring Events Driven by Common Factors? Implications for Takeover Prediction

Abstract:  The paper shows that variables commonly used in takeover prediction models also help to explain the likelihood of several other restructuring events, including divestitures, bankruptcies and significant employee layoffs. This finding helps to explain the larger misclassification errors in binomial takeover prediction models commonly used in prior research. The results show that modelling takeover prediction models in a binomial setting is likely to lead to misspecification in the parameter estimates and, further, result in erroneous conclusions about the determinants of takeover likelihood. The paper shows that controlling for other restructuring events by using a multinomial framework results in consistently lower misclassification errors in out-of-sample prediction tests, when compared to the benchmark of a typical binomial model.     

The Austrian Phillips Curve reconsidered

Zusammenfassung Den Ausgangspunkt für diese Arbeit bildet die manchmal behauptete Stabilität der österreichischen Phillipskurve. In dieser Arbeit wird nun zu zeigen versucht, daß diese Stabilität auf den Umstand zurückzuführen ist, daß bei den bisherigen Untersuchungen stets implizit angenommen wurde, die gleichgewichtige (natürliche) Arbeitslosenrate habe sich im Zeitablauf nicht verändert.Wird diese Annahme fallengelassen und ein trendmäßiges Sinken der gleichgewichtigen Arbeislosenrate zugelassen, so weist dann eine auf dieser Grundlage geschätzte Phillipskurve einen signifikanten Strukturbruch zwischen sechziger und siebziger Jahren auf; die Phillipskurve hat sich nun nach oben verschoben.Im zweiten Teil dieser Arbeit wird untersucht, ob die beobachteten Inflationszyklen mit der entsprechenden Standardtheorie vonGrossman (1974) nachvollziehbar sind. Dies kann mit Einschränkungen bejaht werden.

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I am grateful to H. Otruba, H. Duda, H. Klausinger, M. Winkler, R. Neck and A. Wörgötter for many valuable comments. I remain responsible for any error.     

Human capital formation,learning by doing and the government in the process of economic growth

We present an endogenous growth model with human capital and learning by doing. Human capital is not an input factor in the production process of final output but it affects the ability to build up knowledge capital as a by‐product of cumulated investment (learning by doing). Human capital is formed in the schooling sector that is financed by the government. The government may run into debt but obeys the inter‐temporal budget constraint. The article analyzes the structure of the model and studies the effects of different budgetary policies as regards the balanced growth rate, transition dynamics and with respect to welfare.     

Zur gegenwärtigen Krisenlage und inflationistischen Krisenbekämpfungspolitik

Ohne Zusammenfassung