Mittelstand und EU-Osterweiterung

Viele Umfragen deuten auf eine massive Abwanderung des deutschen Mittelstands in die neuen EU-Beitrittsl?nder hin. Inwieweit kann dieser Exodus empirisch untermauert werden? In welchen Aktivit?ten engagieren sich die deutschen mittelst?ndischen Unternehmen in den Beitrittsl?ndern? Welche Chancen und Risiken erwarten sie von der Osterweiterung?     

Financial opening in developing countries

Many developing countries are currently considering liberalisation of external capital flows. While the ultimate objective of financial opening is to raise efficiency and growth, the reform process must be carefully designed to achieve these results. A recent conference has discussed the policy choices.     

An Anatomy Of Racial and Ethnic Trends in Male Earnings in the U.S

Progress in narrowing black–white earnings differences has been far from continuous, with some of the apparent progress resulting from labor force withdrawal among lower‐skilled African Americans. This paper documents racial and ethnic differences in male earnings from 1950 through 2010 using data from the decennial census and American Community Surveys. Emphasis is given to annual rather than weekly or hourly earnings. We take a quantile approach, providing evidence on medians and other percentiles of the distribution. Treatment of imputed earnings greatly affects measured outcomes. Hispanic men have exhibited earnings growth similar to white men over several decades. Black men have been left behind economically due in large part to increased joblessness, a process exacerbated by weak labor market conditions. By 2010, joblessness had risen to over 40 percent and the median black–white earnings gap was the largest in at least 60 years.     

Germany: ‘élite precaution’ alongside continued public opposition

Germany is the EU member state with the most difficult situation (besides Austria) for marketing genetically modified (GM) crops and food. At the same time, it shows the least administrative effort to respond to the reasons for this situation – public suspicion and protest. Regulators advocate specific precaution-related measures, including marketstage monitoring; these measures, however, do not relate to the primary demands of critics and opponents. The administration’s claim to prioritize scientific evidence over politics constructs the administration and the public as two separate worlds without real mediation. This conflicts with the ever-growing demands for public participation. Participation in a broader sense, however, is not dependent on formal opportunities. In this conflict, NGOs bring up issues of democracy, transparency and precaution through public mobilization. This strategy results in an anticipated consumer boycott and thereby a commercial blockage of GM products. These dynamics can be analysed as ‘reflexive modernization’, which implies greater public aversion to externally imposed risks. The politico-administrative system responds with a legalistic–scientistic approach in order to increase safety but without participatory measures to overcome predictive uncertainty and value conflicts. Environmental and consumer protest has led the technology providers to revise their political strategies in the biotechnology conflict. Thus, in Germany reflexive modernization takes place without reflexive politics.     

Ageing, productivity and wages in Austria: sector level evidence

In this paper we analyse the link between the age structure of the labour force and average labour productivity as well as average wage across industrial sectors. While this intermediate economic level has been under-explored up to now, we will argue that it provides valuable insights in several respects. Our analysis is based on a panel data set ranging over 6 years (2002–2007). It covers the sectors of mining, manufacturing and market oriented services in the Austrian economy. Our results exhibit a positive correlation of the share of older employees and productivity, whereas we cannot find any evidence for a significant relationship of the share of younger employees and productivity. Moreover, the estimated age-wage pattern does not hint at an over-payment of older employees.     

Goodness-of-fit tests for discrete models based on the integrated distribution function

This paper presents a new widely applicable omnibus test for discrete distributions which is based on the difference between the integrated distribution function Ψ(t)=∫_t ^∞ (1−F(x))dx and its empirical counterpart. A bootstrap version of the test for common lattice models has accurate error rates even for small samples and exhibits high power with respect to competitive procedures over a large range of alternatives. Received: July 1998     

Demand for education, and its estimation

Since education produces major externalities and has important merit want characteristics, the estimation of a demand schedule is extremely difficult. Demand estimation for higher education is made somewhat easier because of the great importance of the associated costs and the relevant private substitutes, i.e. private colleges and universities. Therefore higher education is a good candidate for the application of the individual (economic) preference approach, which is based on the assumption that individuals are aware of their need for education about as they are aware of their needs for products provided by the open market.

The estimation of demand for primary and secondary education can rely only to a minor extent on the individual (economic) preference approach. The voter's behavior approach analysis is likely to be more directly applicable. Study of the behavior of voters and the behavior of legislators and members of school boards can shed light on the demand for education. Analytic insight can be gained also by the “voting with one's feet”, and the “calculus of consent” methods.

Finally, benefit-cost analysis can be applied in situations where education gives an extremely weak demand signal. In education we often are less interested in overall benefit-cost estimates than in the benefit-cost positions in which different important interest groups find themselves with regard to education. Such analysis requires the identification of significant interest groups, bargaining strategies, and bargaining patterns, as well as of ways in which education decision makers respond to group pressures.