A new perspective on the exporter productivity premium: online trade

We use a unique firm-level data set including 9000 companies from 26 European Union countries covering four different sectors to take a close look at the relationship between online exports and productivity. The online exporter productivity premium is estimated using different techniques (ordinary least squares, quantile regressions and robust estimation). Results consistently indicate that the estimated online exporter productivity premium is statistically different from zero, positive and significant from an economic point of view. European online exporters, according to these results, are approximately 2% more productive than non-online exporters. Productivity differences between firms could be related to variables that are not included in the empirical model. More research would be needed to address this issue in the future.     

Analysis of the Efficacy of Public Spending on Research and Development in State Programs

This paper presents an approach to assessing the efficacy of public spending on research and development in state programs. At present, there is a need to develop a unified approach to the analysis and evaluation of the efficacy of such spending from the perspective of participants in state programs (federal executive bodies). The proposed approach does not allow evaluating the efficacy of public spending on the development of research areas assigned to the authors.     

Kommunikationstheorien auf dem Prüfstand

In 2016, German corporations invested 33.5 billion euros in on-the-job-trainings. Communication trainings, especially those for executives, play an important part in on-the-job-trainings and adult education. This study examines how basics of communication and media studies are used in the praxis of communication trainings. We ask which theories of interpersonal communication are being used in communication trainings for executives and for what reasons trainers choose specific theories. The answer can help us understand how executives view communication processes and which criteria make a theory praticable in the eyes of practitioners.First, we define communication trainings as part of on-the-job training and give an overview of research regarding the use of theories in trainings. Research shows that theories play an important role in communication trainings, but that the trainings lack theoretical depths and complexity. The existing research stems mostly from linguistics; the perspective of communication and media studies is missing. In addition, none of the existing studies considers criteria for a practicable theory.In a second step, the canon of theories of interpersonal communication in communication and media studies is identified via a content analysis of seven textbooks and encyclopedias. Overall, these books present 38 theories of interpersonal communication, but only eight theories are presented in three or more books. These eight theories, among them Symbolic Interactionism (Mead), the Theory of Social Systems (Luhmann) and the Four-Ears-Model (Schulz von Thun), build the canon of theories of interpersonal communication in this study.This canon is the basis for the main part of our study. Sixteen communication trainers were interviewed, using the method of qualitative expert interview. The trainers answered questions regarding their professional background, typical courses of training, their goals in trainings, the role of theories in trainings, requirements of the executives being trained and the exchange between colleagues in the occupational field.Results show that trainers use about 15 to 20% of the training time to convey theoretical basics. The Four-Ears-Model by Schulz von Thun dominates the examined trainings. Scientists regard this communication-psychological model as being rather popular scientific. Still, every interviewed trainer uses it. This finding shows that most trainers regard communicational misunderstandings as a result of the four-dimensional character of a message (Who is the sender? Why is he talking to me like that? What are the facts about? What shall I do, think, feel based on the message?). The Communication Axioms by Watzlawick are used as the second most common approach.Apart from theories of interpersonal communication, the trainers mentioned several psychological methods and approaches with therapeutic traits, like Transaction Analysis (Berne) or Active Listening (Rogers).The explorative findings suggest that the trainers chose the theories they use—especially the Four-Ears-Model and Communication Axioms—because it is easy to interlock these theories and the praxis of communication trainings, because they are comprehensible and easy to use in examples, and because they show the relativity of communication processes. Moreover, trainers use theories to explain human behavior and the sources for misunderstandings.These criteria alone do not explain the trainers’ theory choices, though. It became clear in the interviews that factors of socialization, like advanced training for the trainers, play a major role in influencing their training content. Trainers teach the theories which they themselves learned in further education programs becoming a trainer, and they barely look out for new and/or alternative theories.We recommend that communication trainers look for other theories in communication and media studies, like the Symbolic Interactionism. This theory complies with the trainers’ criteria for good theories. Communication and media scholars on the other hand should work together with educational institutions and advanced training to improve the transfer of their theories into the praxis of communication trainings.     

Analyse der Marktaussichten von Biogasanlagen

Without guaranteed compensation, granted by the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (Erneuerbare Energien Gesetz/EEG), biogas plants compete with all other plant types on the market for electrical energy. However, exchange-based electricity products do not currently permit an economically viable operation of biogas plants owing to their cost situation.     

Navigating worlds of information: STEM literacy practices of experienced makers

Making as a design-centered learning activity has recently received significant attention in education. We use literacies—how individuals use representations to learn—to explore the STEM literacy practices of experienced designers and makers. Describing makers’ representational practices in STEM contexts can inform the design of literacy supports for young makers that can encourage their use of representations to connect STEM disciplines and design practices. We interviewed experienced makers to describe one literacy practice central to design: identifying, organizing, and integrating information. Makers enacted this practice within specific making processes—e.g., designing—with the purpose of sourcing and navigating information related to their chosen problems. The research supports efforts to bridge learning while making with learning in schools by positioning STEM literacies as central practices involved in the processes of designing and making.     

Preventives Versus Treatments Redux: Tighter Bounds on Distortions in Innovation Incentives with an Application to the Global Demand for HIV Pharmaceuticals

Kremer and Snyder (Q J Econ 130:1167–1239, 2015) show that demand curves for a preventive and treatment may have different shapes though they target the same disease, biasing the pharmaceutical manufacturer toward developing the lucrative rather than the socially desirable product. This paper tightens the theoretical bounds on the potential deadweight loss from such biases. Using a calibration of the global demand for HIV pharmaceuticals, we demonstrate the dramatically sharper analysis achievable with the new bounds, allowing us to pinpoint potential deadweight loss at 62% of the global gain from curing HIV. We use the calibration to perform policy counterfactuals, assessing welfare effects of government policies such as a subsidy, reference pricing, and price-discrimination ban. The fit of our calibration is good: we find that a hypothetical drug monopolist would price an HIV drug so high that only 4% of the infected population worldwide would purchase, matching actual drug prices and quantities in the early 2000s before subsidies in low-income countries ramped up.     

Can investors time their exposure to private equity?

Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursuing realistic, investable strategies that time capital commitments to private equity. This occurs, in part, because investors can only time their commitments to funds; they cannot time when commitments are called or when investments are exited. There is a high degree of time-series correlation in net cash flows even across commitment strategies that allocate capital in a very different manner over time.     

International trade of GMO-related agricultural products

This paper examines the international trade of a variety of genetically modified (GM) food products over a 27-year period (1984–2011) with data from the United Nations using the tools of social network analysis. The results indicate that each of the different crops have a distinctive pattern of trade that has changed over time due to a number of different factors. Also, trade in agricultural commodities became more diversified over time, dominated less by the United States and other nations central in the trade networks and trade in the individual GM crops was stable over time. Countries maintained their trading partners for specific crops, despite the adoption of the genetically modified varieties. The economic implications of these results are discussed for specific countries.     

Multi-level and mixed-level <Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis>-circulant supersaturated designs

Supersaturated designs (SSDs) constitute an important class of fractional factorial designs that could be extremely useful in factor screening experiments. Most of the existing studies have focused on balanced designs. This paper provides a new lower bound for the \(E(f_{NOD})\)-optimality measure of SSDs with general run sizes. This bound is a generalization of existing bounds since it is applicable to both balanced and unbalanced designs. Optimal multi and mixed-level, balanced and nearly balanced SSDs are constructed by applying a k-circulant type methodology. Necessary and sufficient conditions are introduced for the generator vectors, in order to pre-ensure the optimality of the constructed k-circulant SSDs. The provided lower bounds were used to measure the efficiency of the generated designs. The presented methodology leads to a number of new families of improved SSDs, providing tools for directly constructing optimal or nearly-optimal k-circulant designs by just checking the corresponding generator vector.