Socioeconomic differences in public acceptability and car use adaptation towards urban road pricing

Urban road pricing is regarded as an effective instrument to reduce traffic congestion and environmental-related problems in metropolitan areas. Whereas the overall impact of urban road pricing on car use adaptation and public acceptability is known, there are only inconsistent results concerning the socioeconomic differences in the response towards road pricing. However, this knowledge is necessary for the development of urban road pricing packages. This paper uses a segmentation approach to identify groups of car users with a similar background in relevant socioeconomic variables and compares their responses towards road pricing. Three groups are identified: young families, suburban families, and singles and couples. These groups indeed differ in their car use adaptation towards urban road pricing as well as in their preferred revenues use. While all three groups significantly reduced their private car use, the young families reduced their car use most, followed by the group of singles and couples. Complementary measures are discussed that are believed to facilitate car use adaptation of each group in response towards urban road pricing.     

Zur Wirksamkeit der Regulierung interner Kontrollsysteme – empirische Ergebnisse der Wirkung des KonTraG

Zusammenfassung Seit der Verabschiedung des KonTraG 1998 gibt es in Deutschland eine gesetzliche Vorschrift zur Erweiterung des internen Kontrollsystems um Aspekte des Risikomanagements. Die Erweiterungen der Verlautbarungen des IDW zeigen, dass damit auch ein ge?ndertes Verst?ndnis und eine intensivere Auseinandersetzung mit internen Kontrollsystemen seitens der Wirtschaftsprüfer und Unternehmen einhergehen. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht, inwieweit das KonTraG und die damit verbundene Ausweitung und Versch?rfung der Prüfungspraxis Einfluss auf Best?tigungsvermerke von Unternehmen, die nach dem HGB bilanzieren, haben. Darüber hinaus werden zus?tzliche, in der einschl?gigen Literatur best?tigte, Einflussfaktoren auf die Qualit?t von internen Kontrollsystemen sowie auf die Art der Best?tigungsvermerke als Kontrollvariablen einbezogen. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf einen positiven Effekt des KonTraG hin und zeigen mit Hilfe der Difference-in-Difference Methodologie nach der Berücksichtigung von St?rvariablen eine signifikante Zunahme von beschr?nkten Best?tigungsvermerken nach Einführung des KonTraG.

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Summary Since the issuance of KonTraG in 1998 Germany has regulatory requirements to supplement internal control systems with a risk management component. The extensions of IDW’s standards indicate also the need for an altered understanding and a more intense analysis with internal control systems by auditors and companies. This research tries to investigate to what degree the KonTraG and the related expansion and intensification of the audit affect HGB following companies’ audit opinions. Furthermore, we control for other confounding factors affecting the quality of internal control systems and internal audit opinions as indicated in prior literature. The results imply a positive effect of KonTraG and show, based on a difference-in-difference approach including potentially confounding variables, a significant increase in qualified audit opinions post-KonTraG.

     

Stochastic Growth and Factor Income Risk

Abstract. This paper examines the effects of aggregate factor income risk in a tractable version of the stochastic Romer endogenous growth model. Labor supply is endogenous. The presence of labor income risk unambiguously increases savings and growth due to precautionary motives. Households not only underaccumulate but also work less along the balanced growth path of the competitive economy when compared with the Pareto-efficient allocation. The paper also discusses distributive disturbances for the case of inelastic labor supply. Here, growth effects are negative for empirically plausible correlations of the underlying shocks.     

A comparison of monthly global indicators for forecasting growth

This paper evaluates the predictive content of a set of alternative monthly indicators of global economic activity for nowcasting and forecasting quarterly world real GDP growth using mixed-frequency models. It shows that a recently proposed indicator that covers multiple dimensions of the global economy consistently produces substantial improvements in forecasting accuracy, while other monthly measures have more mixed success. Specifically, the best-performing model yields impressive gains with MSPE reductions of up to 34% at short horizons and up to 13% at long horizons relative to an autoregressive benchmark. The global economic conditions indicator also contains valuable information for assessing the current and future state of the economy for a set of individual countries and groups of countries. This indicator is used to track the evolution of the nowcasts for the U.S., the OECD area, and the world economy during the COVID-19 pandemic and the main factors that drive the nowcasts are quantified.