Fit für den Arbeitsmarkt der Zukunft?

Zusammenfasung  Fehlzeitenentwicklung im Berufsfeld Pflege — Die zunehmende ?konomisierung der Krankenhauslandschaft und die bekannten demografischen Ver?nderungen in der Gesellschaft lassen den Bedarf an Pflegeleistung steigen, bedeuten für Pflegende sich wandelnde Arbeitsbedingungen und für Krankenh?user ver?nderte Altersstrukturen der Mitarbeiter. Literatur unter Kontext auf www.heilberufe-online.de     

Using virtual environments and agent models in multi-criteria decision-making

Decision-making is often a complex task. There may be multiple criteria to be satisfied. The consequences of the available options will have different spatial and temporal distributions affecting different population groups and different generations. Decisions are also frequently made in a social context where perceptions can be as important as facts. In this complex environment, research into decision-making has two aspects: (a) understanding the decision process and (b) assisting the decision process. This paper is based on the premise that these are closely linked and that tools are possible which both help us to understand and provide support to decision-makers. A frequently requirement is determination of the trade-offs involved in complex decision situations. These are difficult to establish. Common approaches have used both stated preference and revealed preference techniques. The latter provides a better reflection of real decisions, primarily in market conditions, but does not have the level of experimental control available in hypothetical choice situations. Experimental economics has recently emerged to try to bridge this gap by providing for control of variables within a decision context made real by salient inducements. After review of these options, and the associated literature, we propose a series of linked developments in visualisation and modelling which will support: definition of non-dominated choice sets; interactive choice experiments which encompass spatial and temporal disaggregation; agent-based models to provide social context; and, visualisation to provide a greater sense of immersion in the decision context supported by more intuitive information. We have begun the integration of the necessary software into a virtual decision environment but this paper is focused on conceptual development.     

Economics in the Backyard: How Much Convergence is there between China and her Special Regions?

This paper tests the hypothesis that the links and dependency relationships between China and her special regions have changed over the past 20 years with the industrialisation of China, and the emergence of Taiwan as a source of investment and sophisticated manufactures, and Hong Kong as financial centre and supplier of services. Has this changed the size and direction of spillovers in the region, and has it curtailed or eliminated American economic leadership? We use time‐varying spectral methods to decompose the links between six advanced Asian economies and the US. We find: (a) the links with the US have been weakening, while those within a bloc based on China have strengthened; (b) that this is not new – it has been happening since the 1980s, but has now been reversed by the surge in trade; (c) that Taiwan is more integrated with, and dependent on, the Chinese economy, while Hong Kong continues her separate development based on specialisation and comparative advantage; (d) that the links with the US are rather complex, with the US able to shape the cycles elsewhere through her control of monetary conditions, but the China zone able to control the size of their cycles; and (e) there appears to be no real evidence that pegged exchange rates encourage convergence; in fact the reverse may be true.     

FX volatility forecasts and the informational content of market data for volatility

The paper examines the medium-term forecasting ability of several alternative models of currency volatility. The data period covers more than eight years of daily observations, January 1991 to March 1999, for the spot exchange rate, 1- and 3-month volatility of the DEM/JPY, GBP/DEM, GBP/USD, USD/CHF, USD/DEM and USD/JPY. Comparing with the results of ‘pure’ time series models, the reported work investigates whether market implied volatility data can add value in terms of medium-term forecasting accuracy. This is done using data directly available from the marketplace in order to avoid the potential biases arising from ‘backing out’ volatility from a specific option pricing model. On the basis of the over 34 000 out-of-sample forecasts produced, evidence tends to indicate that, although no single volatility model emerges as an overall winner in terms of forecasting accuracy, the ‘mixed’ models incorporating market data for currency volatility perform best most of the time.