Housing and spatial orientation

Summary The paper focuses on location decisions of households as a problem of integrating them into a network of relations in space. Spatial activity patterns and social contacts are accounted for. The approaches developed reveal how residential location decisions shape land use and, on the other hand, how urban structure influences location decisions. The basic model dealing with a monocentric setting is extended to comprise more than one point of spatial orientation. Finally, it is applied to an urban structure characterized by subcentres. The results are in line with outcomes drawn from empirical works in the field of social area analysis.     

Der EU-Haushaltskompromiss vor dem Hintergrund der Gemeinsamen Agrarpolitik

Dem Kompromiss über die EU-Haushaltsplanung für die Jahre 2007 bis 2013 war eine kontroverse Debatte über den Umfang des „Briten-Rabatts“ und die Gemeinsame Agrarpolitik vorausgegangen. Welche Bedeutung hat die Agrarpolitik für die EU? Welche Mitgliedstaaten geh?ren im EU-Haushalt zu den Nettozahlern? Besteht ein Zusammenhang zwischen den Zahlungsstr?men aus dem EU-Haushalt und der Wohlstandsverteilung innerhalb der EU?     

The European Commission’s New Industrial Policy in an Integrating and Globalizing World

The European Commission has launched a new industrial policy for Europe in October 2005. While manufacturing industry remains a key building block of the European economy, it faces a number of challenges—as well as opportunities—in the form of rapid technological change; increasing trade and financial integration of the world economy; and the rise of new emerging market competitors. Whilst some sectors are performing strongly, the overall industrial structure of the EU economy makes it less than ideally positioned to face these challenges. The new industrial policy articulated by the Commission is to help the European economy adapt to the new circumstances. In contrast to old policies that sought to ‘pick winners’, the new approach starts from the screening of horizontal policies and framework conditions in terms of their implications for specific industrial sectors. Second, the Commission has integrated policy by bringing more closely together different policy dimensions of key relevance to various industries. Finally, the industrial policy attempts to achieve a greater consensus over policy, through the involvement at an early stage of key stakeholders and Member States in policy making.     

The behavior of intra-daily exchange rates

The behavior of exchange rates is examined as they evolve continuously over time. The data consist of Swiss franc/U.S. dollar rates for nine days during the years 1978–1980 as quoted by a major Swiss dealer operating on the interbank market. Since this market is highly organized, the observations are market prices at the same time. The distributions of relative changes in exchange rates measured over one minute are highly leptokurtic. The normal distribution is rather rapidly approached when the measurement interval is lengthened from one up to ten minutes. Time series analysis reveals that the natural logarithms of exchange rates are adequately described by a random walk, the same stochastic process as has been found for daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly observations. For short time intervals, significant autocorrelations sometimes occur at the first few lags, which are, however, not stable enough over time to form a basis for reliable forecasts.