Supplier development and the relationship life-cycle

The mainstream view holds that over time buyer–supplier relationships evolve through a number of phases. As a consequence, supplier development as a buyer–supplier relationship management practice should also be adapted to the life-cycle phase. Supplier development activities matching the buyer–supplier relationship life-cycle phase will lead to more favorable performance improvements. However, prior studies have neglected the relationship life-cycle perspective. This empirical study shows how the length of the buyer–supplier relationship can be used to improve the explanatory power of models investigating the performance outcomes of supplier development activities. The results show that supplier development is more effective in mature as opposed to initial and declining life-cycles phases.     

Downward wage rigidity and business cycle asymmetries

The growth rates of wages, unemployment and output of a number of OECD countries have a strongly skewed distribution. In this paper we analyze to what extent downward wage rigidities can explain these empirical business cycle asymmetries. To this aim, we introduce asymmetric wage adjustment costs in a New-Keynesian DSGE model with search and matching frictions in the labor market. Increasing wages is less costly than cutting them. It follows that wages increase relatively fast and thus limit vacancy posting and employment creation, but they decline more slowly, leading to a strong reduction in vacancies and employment. The presence of downward wage rigidities strongly improves the fit of the model to the observed skewness of labor market variables and the relative length of expansions and contractions in the output and the employment cycles. The asymmetry also explains the differing transmission of positive and negative monetary policy shocks from wages to inflation.     

Soziale Lage — Was sind die drängendsten Probleme?

Democracy seems to be at risk. People elect populists and autocrats, who offer simple solutions to social problems. Often, these problems are not even real ones but are only perceived as such. Economists have measures to determine which problems are fact-based, but they cannot draw a clear distinction between academic analysis and normative demand. If politics pursues a correction of a market outcome, any normative criteria other than efficiency have to be outlined explicitly. Nevertheless, some authors consider inequality one of the central contemporary social and economic challenges. Marcel Fratzscher emphasises that the solution is not found in more redistribution via taxes and transfers, but rather through greater equality of opportunity and social and educational mobility. Bert Rürup thinks that to stabilise the acceptance of the compulsory pension scheme, the dominance of the equivalence principle should be reduced. Further, the existence of different federal subsidy schemes should be replaced by a fixed federal contribution rate in alignment with the pension expenditures. In an international comparison, the fiscal burden for households with small and mid-level earned incomes is exceptionally high in Germany. In order to reduce this burden, Rürup suggests a contribution-free allowance for the social insurance contributions.     

Assessing the contribution of public capital to private production: Evidence from the German manufacturing sector

Using time-series cross-section data from the manufacturing sector of the 11 West German 'Bundesländer' (Federal States) from 1970 to 1996, I examine the impact of public capital on private production. My econometric analysis explicitly takes into account four of the most frequent specification issues in the context of time-series crosssection data analysis: serial correlation, groupwise heteroscedasticity, cross-sectional correlation and non-stationarity of data. For all approaches and tested specifications, I find that public capital is a significant input for production in the manufacturing sector. Moreover, I find that differences in public capital endowment can explain long-term differences in productivity across the Bundesländer. One tentative conclusion that can be drawn from this finding is that differences in public capital endowment might also explain a part of the still-existing productivity gap between manufacturing in East and West Germany. However, I emphasise that the existence of positive effects of public capital on private production is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for concluding that public investments should be boosted in the future.     

Factors Influencing NCQA Accreditation Decisions of HMOs

This paper describes how National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) accreditation of a managed care plan can be used as a signal of plan quality. A model is then developed examining the factors affecting the probability that a plan will be accredited. Larger and older plans are more likely to be accredited. For-profit plans are also more likely to be accredited. Competition in the marketplace from other accredited plans increases the probability of a plan being accredited. The results indicate that plans that have lower costs of accrediting as proxied by size and age are more likely to be accredited.