Digitalisierung im Gesundheitswesen — zwischen Datenschutz und moderner Medizinversorgung

The digital transformation of the healthcare branch is important and unstoppable. The enormous possibility of digitalisation to redesign and enhance processes has been shown in other branches. Digital technologies offer the similarly large potential to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare services. However, in terms of digitalisation, the German health system lags behind other European countries. But given a lack of available evidence, the effects of the digitalisation of the healthcare system cannot be reliably evaluated. Digital access to patient data necessitates constructive error cultures in organisations in order to limit defensive medicine. And digital access to health information necessitates individual competence in searching and using this information for participatory decision-making. As with all technological progress, information security is very important in order to gain citizens’ confidence in a digital healthcare system. Thus, it is necessary to simultaneously pursue both enhanced privacy standards and state-of-the-art medical technology.     

How school context and personal factors relate to teachers’ attitudes toward teaching integrated STEM

Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is an emerging approach to improve students’ achievement and interest in STEM disciplines. However, the implementation of integrated STEM education depends strongly on teachers’ competence, which entails, among others, teachers’ attitudes. Nonetheless, not much is known about the factors that influence teachers’ attitudes toward teaching integrated STEM. Therefore this paper uses a survey method to get insight into the relationship between three groups of variables and teachers’ attitudes toward teaching integrated STEM: teacher background characteristics, personal attitudes and school context variables. The results of the multiple regression analyses reveal three variables that are positively linked with teachers’ attitudes: professional development, personal relevance of science and social context. Moreover two variables show a negative correlation: having more than 20 years of teaching experience and experience in mathematics. The results of this study provide valuable information about factors related to teachers’ attitudes toward teaching integrated STEM. Moreover, these results can be deployed by school administrators to guide them when implementing integrated STEM education in their school.     

On moment condition failure in German stock returns: an application of recent advances in extreme value statistics

This note reconsiders divergent results on the extremal behaviour of German stock returns that have been published recently. In particular, investigations of this issue have arrived at different conclusions regarding the finiteness of the second moment of the return distributions. Here we apply some newly developed, improved techniques for the estimation of the so-called tail index to the time series of returns on various German stocks. We find evidence indicating that in the vast majority of cases the tails are not fat enough to conform with an infinite-variance distribution. Conflicting results in previous studies are shown to be due to different a priori choices of the size of the tail region. First version received: Dec. 1998/Final version received: April 2000     

Did the Retreat of UK Trade Unionism Accelerate during the 1990–1993 Recession?

It is widely believed that recessions are periods of accelerated structural change, with major reorganizations or adjustments being made under intense pressure. These changes are made to ensure the survival of firms, exploit opportunities created by difficulties facing other firms, or take advantage of temporary falls in the opportunity cost of initiating and carrying out changes. This line of argument suggests that we should expect to see firms making major changes in their investments in human capital, and in their industrial relations practices. Our results are only partially consistent with this view. What seems to be clear from the data generated by our surveys is that firms are not reluctant to make changes in their bargaining strategies and industrial relations systems. This should be no surprise. Unlike investments in plant and equipment, these changes do not require much cash, and the opportunity cost of making them is much lower in recessions than in booms. However, the observed changes in union recognition have not occurred primarily in firms that were severely affected by the recession. Increases in pay decentralization and reorganization of work-force arrangements were no more likely to be initiated by distressed firms than by firms only moderately affected by the recession. It follows, then, that the retreat of UK unionism observed during the 1990–3 recession was, in the main, a continuation of existing secular trends. The mild acceleration in the pace of change revealed by our survey may be cyclical, but the trend is unlikely to be reversed as recovery gathers pace.     

Wavelet domain correlation between the futures prices of natural gas and oil

This paper studies the relationship between futures prices of natural gas and oil. Using wavelet analysis, our research reveals that, throughout the sampled period: (1) the prices of natural gas futures and oil futures have high covariance at high frequencies but not so much at low frequencies; (2) an increase in financialization of commodities commensurate with investors search for yield results in higher covariance between the futures prices of natural gas and oil; and (3) the volatility of neither time series consistently leads the other even at high frequencies.     

On the folk theorem with one-dimensional payoffs and different discount factors

Proving the folk theorem in a game with three or more players usually requires imposing restrictions on the dimensionality of the stage-game payoffs. Fudenberg and Maskin (1986) assume full dimensionality of payoffs, while Abreu et al. (1994) assume the weaker NEU condition (“nonequivalent utilities”). In this note, we consider a class of n-player games where each player receives the same stage-game payoff, either zero or one. The stage-game payoffs therefore constitute a one-dimensional set, violating NEU. We show that if all players have different discount factors, then for discount factors sufficiently close to one, any strictly individually rational payoff profile can be obtained as the outcome of a subgame-perfect equilibrium with public correlation.