Foreign Ownership and the Extensive Margins of Exports: Evidence for Manufacturing Enterprises in Germany

We examine how foreign ownership of a firm affects the variety of goods that the firm exports and the number of countries it trades with. We construct a simple theoretical model of how foreign ownership may affect these extensive margins of exports and take this model to data from Germany, one of the leading actors on the world market for goods. In line with theoretical predictions we find that foreign‐owned firms do export more goods to more countries after controlling for firm size, productivity and industry affiliation. These differences between foreign‐owned firms and domestically controlled firms are highly statistically significant, and they are large from an economic point of view, with foreign‐owned firms exporting up to 39 per cent more goods to up to 31 per cent more countries.     

Exchange‐rate Misalignments in Duopoly: The Case of Airbus and Boeing

We examine the effect of exchange‐rate misalignments on competition in the market for large commercial aircraft. This market is a duopoly where players compete in dollar‐denominated prices while one of them, Airbus, incurs a large fraction of its costs in euro. We estimate price elasticities for big aircraft, and construct a simulation model to investigate how companies adjust their prices to deal with the effects of a temporary misalignment and how this affects profit margins and volumes. We conclude that, due to the duopolistic nature of the aircraft market, Airbus will pass only a small part of the exchange‐rate fluctuations on to customers. Moreover, due to features specific to the aircraft industry, such as customer switching costs and learning‐by‐doing, even a temporary departure of the exchange rate from its long‐run equilibrium level may have permanent effects on the industry.     

Ageing and the Conflict of Interest Between Generations

The ageing of the population imposes a considerable burden on long-term public finances in most industrialized countries. Generational accounting has been used across the world to assess the generational imbalance associated with current public policies. In this study, we incorporate Dutch generational accounts in an open economy overlapping generations model to assess the sustainability gap in current Dutch public finances. Our central estimate of the gap is 4.5% of gdp, but the paper also shows the sensitivity of this result. We explore a variety of policy reforms to reduce the sustainability gap, thereby presenting the impact on the intergenerational distribution of the net benefit from government.     

Nachrichten und ihre kommunikative Qualität

German literature on the history of journalism in agreement relates as a certainty that the inverted pyramid in news writing was established as a professional standard during the American Civil War (1861–1865), along with, and because of, the use of the electric telegraph for transmitting news and its propensity, in its early days, to fail at times. Besides this technological thesis, three others are discussed: one related to political science, the other to cultural studies, and the third to economics. All four theses trace the diffusion of the «hard» news style, founded on the principle of relevance, back to factors that affected journalism from the outside. In contrast to this, a longitudinal study of innovative 19^th century New York daily newspapers shows that the principle of «lead and body» did not prevail before the eighties of the century, and its establishment occurred in an effort to make newspapers more readable and more attractive for readers by editing the copy received. The introduction of «inside editing» was not in the least based on economic calculations of cost and benefit. This provides a starting point for explaining the spread of the public sphere and the development of professional journalism by the dynamic of the capitalist market economy, rather than considering journalistic ethos and commercial calculation as opposites. In any case, the origin of the professional news style of the inverted pyramid is to be found in the striving for communicative quality in the journalists’ product. That it can be traced back to the telegraph’s propensity to malfunction is a myth, eagerly retailed but not at all substantiated.     

Kenneth Starck Gastprofessor in Dortmund

Ohne Zusammenfassung