Interregional trade and economic integration: A partial equilibrium analysis

The classical comparative static analysis of economic integration is extended to a spatial world by the theory of partial spatial price equilibrium. It is made operational by gravity-like specifications of the demand functions and is applied to a quantitative study of regional effects of the EEC and EFTA formation in Scandinavia and the FRG. Aggregated effects of integration on regional output are presented, based on a hypothetical pre-integration versus post-integration comparison for 1970. It is shown that, contrary to the common views, European economic integration has not been generally detrimental to geographically peripheral areas.     

Entwicklungsfördernde Pflege Frühgeborener

Zusammenfasung  Pflege nach dem Heidelberger Modell — Die Versorgung des Frühgeborenen auf der Intensivstation hat gro?en Einfluss auf seine weitere Entwicklung. Pflegekr?fte müssen das Kind vor überforderung schützen und ihm gleichzeitig entwicklungsf?rdernde Reize anbieten. Doch auch die Eltern ben?tigen die Unterstützung des neonatologischen Teams.     

Understanding Insurance Customer Dishonesty: Outline of a Moral-Sociological Approach

Most consumer morality studies focus on consumer immorality, i.e. different types and degrees of consumer dishonesty or deviance. This paper follows this tradition, by looking at insurance customer dishonesty. For looking at insurance customer dishonesty in a wider perspective, the paper drafts a sociology of insurance customer morality, including outlines of micro-level, meso-level and macro-level moral sociologies of insurance fraud, as well as a discussion of moral heterogeneity and a critical understanding of deviance. As a next step a few empirical rsearch questions are formulated and illustrated with data from a Norwegian-German pilot study. Johannes Brinkmann has a Ph.D. in sociology and is a professor of business ethics at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo. Most of his recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, Teaching Business Ethics and Business Ethics A European Review. He has also published a number of books, two of them related to business ethics (in Norwegian, 1993 and 2001). Patrick Lentz is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Marketing, Dortmund University. Paper presented at the 11th Annual International Business Ethics Conference in Chicago, October 21–23, 2004     

The fight against money laundering

During the past few years a new consciousness has emerged with regard to the question of money laundering, and new laws and mechanisms to combat it have been developed. The Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering was established at the 15th World Economic Summit in Paris in July 1989. What activities have been developed so far by this and other international initiatives? What further steps must be taken?     

The Appraisal of Ordinary Shares by Investment Analysts in the UK and Germany

This paper reports the findings of a two-country survey of the approaches to and information used by investment analysts. It examines the changes in the ordinary share appraisal approaches adopted by UK analysts over the past decade, and investigates the differences between British and German analysts in share appraisal methods, goals and information sources. The principal findings are that (i) deregulation and the introduction of new technology to the UK market has had little impact on the equity appraisal approach employed by analysts other than the greater reliance placed on personal contact with companies, and (ii) UK analysts are no more ‘short-termist’ than their German counterparts in assessing ordinary shares.     

Fiscal news and macroeconomic volatility

This paper analyzes the contribution of anticipated capital and labor tax shocks to business cycle volatility in an estimated New Keynesian business cycle model. While fiscal policy accounts for about 15% of output variance at business cycle frequencies, this mostly derives from anticipated government spending shocks. Tax shocks, both anticipated and unanticipated, contribute little to the fluctuations of real variables. However, anticipated capital tax shocks do explain a sizable part of inflation fluctuations, accounting for up to 12% of its variance. In line with earlier studies, news shocks in total account for about 50% of output variance. Further decomposing this news effect, we find permanent total factor productivity news shocks to be most important. When looking at the federal level instead of total government, the importance of anticipated tax and spending shocks significantly increases, suggesting that fiscal policy at the subnational level typically counteracts the effects of federal fiscal policy shocks.