I. Allgemeine Wirstchaftslehre

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Im Controlling stehen die Zeichen auf Empirie und Internationalisierung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Crime and punishment: the role of student body characteristics in schools’ disciplinary behaviours

Discretion in schools’ discipline choices can provide an efficient and effective misconduct management structure, but could lead to discipline based on unrelated factors. Consequently, schools’ disciplinary decisions can significantly limit students’ access to education by removing students from familiar learning environments. We investigate schools’ disciplinary decisions for serious misconducts and show that punishments are more severe in schools that do not report misconducts to local law enforcement agencies. Moreover, we show that schools that report fewer misconducts to law enforcement impose more severe punishments when the student body is characterized as having a higher proportion of minority students, lower socioeconomic status students and a higher proportion of students who are below the 15th percentile of standardized test scores. These results suggest that between-school punishment differentials are associated with student body traits.     

Making Social Investment Happen for the Eurozone

Half a decade after the euro crisis, the European Union is in dire need of a growth strategy that is economically viable, politically legitimate and seen as socially fair. The United Kingdom’s fateful choice for Brexit has given new urgency to this imperative. While it is deplorable to lose a strong political force behind the internal market, Britain’s decision to leave the EU does create a window of opportunity for taking the Union’s “social market economy” ambitions, as laid down in Articles 2 and 3 of the Lisbon Treaty, more seriously than before.     

The Obama effect

Many observers argued that Barack Obama’s candidacy in the U.S. presidential election of 2008 benefited from the financial crisis and recessionary economic conditions which voters blamed on the Republican administration. However, an empirical examination of stock price and public opinion data indicates that improvements in Obama’s electoral prospects led stock price declines and that gains by Obama were more likely to be followed by falling stock prices than by rising prices. This evidence suggests that the poor performance of the stock market in the days leading up to Obama’s victory was partly caused by, rather than causing, Obama’s success.

Compatibility,interoperability, and market power in upgrade markets

We examine the market power of a seller who repeatedly offers upgraded versions of a product. In the case of pure monopoly, the seller also controls compatibility across versions. In the case of an entrant who offers an upgrade, the incumbent seller also controls subsequent interoperability across versions. We argue that control of compatibility and interoperability does not allow an incumbent seller to charge a price premium relative to when such control is absent and, consequently, neither is a necessary source of market power.     

THE SAVING RATE IN JAPAN: WHY IT HAS FALLEN AND WHY IT WILL REMAIN LOW*

Japan is in the midst of a demographic transition that is larger and more rapid than other OECD countries. We are interested in understanding the role of lower fertility rates and aging for the evolution of Japan's national saving rate. We use a computable general equilibrium model to analyze the response of the saving rate to changes in demographics and total factor productivity. In our model demographic factors account for 2–3 percentage points of the 9% decline in the saving rate between 1990 and 2000 and persistently depress the saving rate in future years.     

Confidence Sets for the Break Date in Cointegrating Regressions

In this paper, we propose constructing confidence sets for a break date in cointegrating regressions by inverting a test for the break location, which is obtained by maximizing the weighted average of power. It is found that the limiting distribution of the test depends on the number of I(1) regressors whose coefficients sustain structural change and the number of I(1) regressors whose coefficients are fixed throughout the sample. By Monte Carlo simulations, we then show that compared with a confidence interval developed by using the existing method based on the limiting distribution of the break point estimator under the assumption of the shrinking shift, the confidence set proposed in the present paper has a more accurate coverage rate, while the length of the confidence set is comparable. By using the method developed in this paper, we then investigate the cointegrating regressions of Russian macroeconomic variables with oil prices with a break.