Alle Sozialabgaben steuerlich berücksichtigen statt Solidaritätszuschlag abschaffen

The abolition of the German solidarity surcharge would favour higher incomes much more than lower incomes. Tax deductibility of all social contributions, however, would concentrate relief on average incomes, which are heavily loaded by social contributions. In addition, a monthly social security allowance of €150 could be introduced gradually in a budget-neutral manner.     

A Proposal for the Efficient Taxation of All Business Income in the EU

There is a growing awareness in many EU member states that business taxation solely on the basis of “taxable profits” enables, in particular, multinational companies to avoid paying taxes, with negative consequences both for tax revenue and—in the longer run—also for the stability of the economy. The following article proposes the taxation of all compensation of capital—not only profit for equity, but also interest for outside capital and licence fees for outside rights—at the site of production.     

Index der wahrgenommenen Inflation oder EU-Verbraucherumfragen?

Nach der Euro-Umstellung Anfang 2002 entwickelte sich das Preisempfinden deutlich anders als der gemessene Verbraucherpreisindex. Inwieweit wird auch heute noch die Preisentwicklung von den Konsumenten übersch?tzt? Wie zuverl?ssig misst der von Hans Wolfgang Brachinger entwickelte „Index der wahrgenommenen Inflation“ dieses Ph?nomen? Zu welchen Ergebnissen kommen die von der EU-Kommission beauftragten Verbraucherumfragen? Die Verfasser geben ihre pers?nliche Auffassung wieder, die nicht unbedingt mit derjenigen der Deutschen Bundesbank übereinstimmen muss.     

Regionalisation versus regionalism— Problems of change in the world economy

The distinct trends towards regionalisation in the world economy that could be observed in recent years should not be interpreted merely as the formation of economic blocs or “fortresses”. This would amount to adopting a biased, backward-looking approach that sees only the sombre experiences of the thirties and forties and does not take sufficient account of the different challenges of the post-war period.     

Hedonic pricing and the spatial structure of housing data – an application to Berlin

Housing prices are largely determined by physical location. By applying the outsample prediction accuracy of rental prices as evaluation criteria, we examine whether the choice of the hedonic model additionally depends on the spatial structure of housing data, i.e. accounting for locational effects by either district fixed effects or spatial econometric modelling. Our results show that a generalised spatio-temporal model outperforms a district fixed effects model only if the spatial density – the weighted mean distance to nearest neighbours – is relatively small. Moreover, we use the required density thresholds to deduce a pseudo indifference curve, thereby showing that the ratio of the weighted spatial distance-to-the mean district diameter increases with the mean sample size per district. This emphasises the role of data structure and district choices for model selection. Differences in data can thereby serve as an explanation for contradictory findings in literature, whether spatial econometric methods or simple district fixed effects are used.     

Federalism and decentralization—a critical survey of frequently used indicators

The economic effects of federalism are unclear: some papers find that federalism has strong positive effects on a number of economically relevant variables, others find negative effects. The results often crucially hinge on the proxies for federalism used. In this paper, we critically survey the existing indicators for both federalism and fiscal decentralization. We argue that federalism is a constitutional institution, whereas decentralization is the outcome of a policy choice, and that the two ought to be systematically distinguished because decentralization can also occur in nonfederally structured states. We further argue that institutional details are very important with regard to federalism and that dummy variables usually capture only very specific aspects of these institutional details. We use factor analysis to test whether the latent variables behind the observed indicators support these assumptions. More than two important factors are derived, implying that a more fine-grained differentiation beyond simply “‘federalism” and “decentralization” might be in order. The correlations of the most important proxies for various aspects of federalism and decentralization with a number of quasi-exogenous variables, as well as with institutional variables, are usually rather modest.     

携手应对社会保障和审核可靠性的挑战

第四届中欧企业社会责任圆桌会议提供了一个很好的机会,让大家可以讨论中国企业社会责任方面的重要议题。除了我们在这次会议讨论的主题,我想要强调,这个会议本身就是讨论中国快速发展的企业社会责任历程中重要的组成部分。这个以企业社会责任为主题的圆桌会议早于2007年之前已经开始召开了,在过去几年中相继举办。     

Humorous coping scales and their fit to a stress and coping framework

The focus of this study is on the fit between the item content of scales measuring humorous coping and basic concepts of stress and coping theory. To investigate this fit 81 items from seven currently available humorous coping scales have been subjected to a facet analysis, using the tool of a mapping sentence. Three facets derived from stress and coping theory were part of this mapping sentence: external demands, humorous responses and coping aims. Because of the claim that humorous coping may be related to physical health dimensions, special attention has been paid to two health-related coping aims: cognitive reappraisal and response-focused coping responses. Five raters categorized the facets and their respective categories. Some humorous coping scales showed an underrepresentation of “external demands” and “humorous responses” and only a few scales covered the “aims” facet adequately. Reliability and agreement parameters varied considerably among scales, both on facet level and on category level. The Waterloo University Humor Inventory (WUHI) was a positive exception to this pattern. Findings are discussed in the light of specific characteristics of the scales included. Possible improvements of humorous coping measurement in health-related research are proposed, as well as adaptations to the rating procedures.