A field experiment investigating age discrimination in four European labour markets

In a field experiment investigating age discrimination, pairs of men, aged 27 and 47, inquired about employment as waiters in towns across England, France, Germany and Spain. Statistically significant discrimination against the older waiter was found in all four countries, but it was considerably higher in France and Spain than in England and Germany.     

Der Begriff Lügenpresse in deutschen Tageszeitungen

In Germany, we currently see on-going changes in politics and society. More and more people seem to lose faith not only in politics, but also in the mainstream media. Since autumn 2014, the distrust in and suspicion of the news media has reached a new level: the group “Pegida” (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) coined the term Lügenpresse (lying press) to illustrate their growing distrust in news media. The term lying press emerged for the first time in 1914 and was regularly used for war propaganda to defame foreign media. In general, the term is not only used by followers of a certain political direction, but in the context of different, especially antidemocratic, political movements (e.?g., during the National Socialist era or during the GDR era in Germany). Since the beginning of the 2000s, however, the concept has been increasingly referred to by right-wing groups (see Heine 2015; Klarmann 2013). Nevertheless, this is not only an issue in Germany, since Pegida has support in other European countries, such as Great Britain and the Netherlands.News media become part of their own coverage as soon as they refer to these developments. Self-discussion or self-coverage can be described as journalistic communication about journalism and means that the media themselves become the object of reporting. Hence, when media use the term lying press, they inevitably refer to themselves. The present study deals with how the media refer to the term lying press and how they reflect upon it. The main question we deal with in our study is how detailed the concept is reflected on and how the media deal with the associated reproach of deliberate misinformation.Drawing on the concept of framing, a content analysis is employed in order to analyze how newspapers report on the term, how they relate it to themselves and how they deal with its implications. The framing approach deals with the emergence, dissemination and alteration of interpretive frames, which are placed on an issue and determine the point of view on this topic. According to Matthes (2014), frames can be understood as a tool to highlight certain information or aspects of a topic while neglecting others. The framing approach deals with the genesis, alteration and effects of frames, which are located at various points in the communication process. In this study, we focus on media frames in the daily newspaper coverage. We rely upon the definition according to Entman (1993) which has been most frequently operationalized so far.We postulate several research questions that deal with the concept of self-coverage and framing. We are, for example, interested in verifying the sections of newspapers in which the term is referred to and if there are differences in how strongly the term is reflected upon. Furthermore, our research interest focuses on how the term is framed, which frames are dominant in the news media and if the frames change over time. We investigated the coverage of the five most widely circulated daily newspapers (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Bild, die Welt, and die tageszeitung) in Germany from October 2014 to October 2015. We discovered 304 articles with 338 statements referring to the term lying press. With a cluster analysis, we extracted four frames.Overall, the term lying press is more strongly reflected on in media sections than in political reporting. In political sections the term is often only mentioned without further contextualization. The four extracted clusters, which can be interpreted as media frames, are termed as follows: demanding author frame, reserved expert frame, external accusation frame, and unreflected author frame.In political sections of newspapers, the two rather undifferentiated frames (external accusation frame with 35% and unreflected author frame with 36%) are dominant. The reserved expert frame (35%) and the unreflected author frame (43%) are the two dominant frames in media sections. Nevertheless, the two most common frames (external accusation frame and unreflected author frame) do not use the term lying press in a critical and reflective way (combined percentage of 60%). The selection of the term as “non-word” of the year did not significantly change the frequency with which the four frames are used within the media.Our results show that the term lying press is used in different ways – but in most cases, there is only little or no elaboration. Frequently, the term is only mentioned without a deeper discussion and classification of the term and its meaning. It sometimes even seems that newspapers use the term ironically as a synonym for themselves instead of the terms media or press. However, the associated trivialization of a term carrying such negative connotations is problematic and could help to establish lying press as an unreflected designation for the media. The media might miss the opportunity to both react decisively to the accusations and to illustrate how important they are in a democratic society. The term must be placed in its historical context and should not be permitted as a flat-rate defamation. Whether the underlying criticism is justified or not, the media should discuss the term and, if possible, invalidate it. In this context, the media must perform their function of practicing criticism – also against themselves. Limitations and future research are discussed at the end of the paper.     

Credit Booms Gone Bust: Replication of Schularick and Taylor (AER 2012)

This paper replicates the results in Schularick and Taylor (American Economic Review 2012; 102 (2): 1029–1061; ST hereafter). Specifically, I replicate ST's results in the ‘narrow’ sense by reproducing their calculations in the open source econometrics package gretl. (Gretl is an acronym for Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time‐series Laboratory. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux at www.gretl.sourceforge.net .) I also demonstrate the robustness of ST's findings to different estimation methods. I obtain qualitatively similar results to ST via Bayesian estimation of both static and dynamic panel probit models. Finally, I show that the marginal effects of credit growth on the probability of a financial crisis vary considerably across the countries in the dataset. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tradespace exploration of in-space communications network architectures

Making architectural decisions in long lifecycle systems is challenging because the time between system definition and end of operations can span multiple decades, resulting in shifts in stakeholder needs and major advances in technologies. Space-based communications using relay satellite constellations is one such example, requiring substantial up-front planning to define capabilities and size capacity due to the large investment of time and resources. Additionally, there are numerous viable system architectures. In this paper, we build on existing methods to develop a graph-based decision method to assess and explore architectural flexibility in the future evolution of long lifecycle systems. The tradespace graph defines edges between similar architectures, quantifies the switching cost between architectures, using graphs to analyse the potential system evolution pathways. In a test case on NASA communication satellites, we find that hosting government communications payloads, in particular optical payloads, on commercial satellites could reduce cost and increase flexibility of the NASA network.     

Energiewende: Alles eine Frage der Partizipation? Governance-Herausforderungen zwischen Zentralität und Dezentralität

The interaction of centralised and decentralised elements is not only a challenge for the technical und functional implementation of the energy transition, but also for the political and social assignment of developing adequate governance strategies for future energy systems. While “participation” is of capital importance for all governance approaches mediating centralising and decentralising trends, it is far from clear, how participation is to be realized in order to promote energy transition and avoiding pitfalls and flaws of participative decision making processes. Against the backdrop of a multi-dimensional understanding of “participation” comprising procedural, factual, legitimatory and meta-reflective functions, the paper considers the tense relations of participation and efficiency, legitimacy and professionalized expertise, thereby identifying structural challenges for participation in democratic societies. Finally, some suggestions are made, how the governance of the energy transition can be shaped in the future.     

OVERBIDDING AND HETEROGENEOUS BEHAVIOR IN CONTEST EXPERIMENTS: A COMMENT ON THE ENDOWMENT EFFECT

We revisit the meta-analysis of Sheremeta on overbidding in contest experiments and focus on the effect of endowment on overbidding. Sheremeta assumes, and finds evidence of, an increasing linear relationship between endowment and overbidding, Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE) predicts an increasing concave relationship, while Baik and colleagues find an inverted U-shaped relationship in their analysis of a single experiment. We use the same data as in Sheremeta, but employ a different econometric model which leads to support for both QRE and the inverted U-shaped relationship. Following Baik and colleagues, we posit that the inverted-U relationship may be interpreted in terms of a wealth effect.     

A Welcome Revolution in Innovation

This review considers a major new book on von Hippel’s concept of user innovation. Von Hippel’s work has led to a welcome revolution in the economics of innovation. When producers are the innovators, there is an important difference in the interests of innovators and users. This can lead to dysfunctional innovation, especially in mature markets that are monopolised. In contrast, when users innovate, there are no such problems, as the innovator and the user are the same. User innovation can help enhance the power of innovation in wealth creation, and this edited collection helps to establish user innovation as a fully fledged field of the economics of innovation.     

Sustainability of A Pay‐as‐you‐Go Pension System in A Small Open Economy with Ageing,Human Capital and Endogenous Fertility

The aim of the article is to theoretically investigate if a pay‐as‐you‐go (PAYG) pension system is sustainable in the presence of a declining population and increasing longevity of the retired generation. For this purpose, we use an overlapping generation model with endogenous fertility, endogenous longevity and human capital accumulation in a small open economy. We find that pensions will always increase as long as it is beneficial for parents to invest in human capital. Furthermore, we get the result that the ratio between pension benefits and the consumption of the young generation will strive to a positive limit value, and that a pure PAYG pension system will not run into any solvency problem due to a decreasing fertility rate or ageing.