Die deutsche Bildungsmisere und der Bundesstaat

Wirtschaftsdienst - Die unbefriedigenden Zustände im Bildungswesen haben viel mit der föderalen Struktur des Landes zu tun. Grundsätzlich ist die Bildung Ländersache, aber in...     

资本主义将如何终结?

当今资本主义正处在二战结束以来最严峻的形势之中。经济增长率持续下降,国家整体负债程度持续上升,收入与财富分配的不平等持续加剧。本文认为,目前没有力量能够扭转经济增长、金融稳定和社会平等的恶化趋势并终结三者之间的相互强化。现在到了重新思考资本主义作为一种有始有终的历史现象的时候。资本主义终结将是资本主义由于其自身的原因而慢性衰败的过程。资本主义由于消灭了它的对立面而濒于灭亡。为了阐述这一观点,本文说明了当今发达资本主义所面临着五种系统性混乱:停滞、寡头再分配、掠夺公共资源、腐败和全球无政府状态。     

Bedingungen einer neuen ökologischen Industriepolitik

Wirtschaftsdienst - Zur Erreichung der globalen Klimaziele ist eine drastische Emissionsminderung in allen Sektoren wie Energiewirtschaft, Gebäude, Verkehr und Landwirtschaft notwendig. Zudem...     

Experimental evidence of limited attention at the gym

Experimental Economics - In a randomized field experiment, we show that a low-cost intervention, weekly email reminders, increases the weekly exercising frequency of gym members by 13%, with the...     

How to sell services more profitably

When products become commodities, manufacturing companies may seek to differentiate themselves with value-added services--a potentially profitable strategy. Unfortunately, companies often stumble in the effort. Reinartz and Ulaga conducted in-depth studies of 18 leading companies in a broad variety of product markets to learn what distinguished the successes from the rest. They discovered four steps to developing a profitable services capability. RECOGNIZE THAT YOU ALREADY HAVE A SERVICE COMPANY: You can identify and charge for simple services--as Merck did when it stopped quietly absorbing shipping costs. Switching services from free to fee clarifies their value for managers as well as for customers. INDUSTRIALIZE THE BACK OFFICE: To prevent delivery costs from eating up service-offering margins, build flexible service platforms, closely monitor process costs, and exploit new technologies that enable process innovations. The Swedish bearings manufacturer SKF provided off-site access to an online monitoring tool that could warn of potential failure in customers' machines. CREATE A SERVICE-SAVVY SALES FORCE: Services require longer sales cycles and, often, decisions from high up in a customer's hierarchy; what's more, product salespeople may be inimical to change. Schneider-Electric did a major overhaul of its sales organization and trained its people to switch from cost-plus pricing to value-based pricing. FOCUS ON CUSTOMERS' PROCESSES AND THE OPPORTUNITIES THEY AFFORD FOR NEW SERVICE OFFERINGS: You may need to acquire new capabilities to take advantage of those opportunities: The industrial coatings specialist PPG had to learn how painting robots function after it offered to take over Fiat's Torino paint shop. Services can both lock in customers and help acquire new accounts. They should be developed with care and attention.     

Equal sacrifice and fair burden-sharing in a public goods economy

Applying a willingness-to-pay approach known from contingent valuation in environmental economics, we develop an ordinally based measure for the size of individual sacrifice that is connected with an agent’s contribution to a public good. We construct a selection mechanism that picks the unique efficient solution among all allocations that have an equal sacrifice as defined in this way. We show that the solution thus obtained corresponds to Moulin’s egalitarian equivalent allocation, conforms to both the ability-to-pay and the benefit principles, and has much in common with the Lindahl equilibrium.      

Capitalizing Research & Development: Signaling or Earnings Management?

This paper analyzes the capitalization of Research & Development (R&D) expenditures under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Discretionary R&D capitalization can be exercised by managers to signal private information on future economic benefits to the market. It can, however, also serve as opportunistic earnings management. We analyze a unique, hand-collected sample of highly R&D intensive German IFRS firms during 1998–2012. We find that market values are not associated with capitalized R&D for the overall sample, indicating that earnings management may be a concern. We identify firm-years for which R&D capitalization is possibly used for pushing their earnings above a specific threshold (e.g. analysts' forecasted earnings, prior year's earnings). Our results show that both the decision to capitalize and how much to capitalize are strongly associated with benchmark beating. Consistently, we find that market values are negatively associated with capitalized R&D for firms who are likely to use capitalization for benchmark beating (about one third of the overall sample). On the other hand, the market values R&D capitalization positively for well-performing firms, for which capitalizing does not matter to beat an earnings benchmark (about half of the overall sample). This finding is robust to controls for endogeneity, various deflators, and different measures for earnings management.     

对盈余管理的再认识

盈余管理普遍存在,主要原因是企业管理层有强烈的追求与预先制定的盈余目标相一致的动机以及盈余结果的不确定性。会计政策和会计事项处理方法的可选择性导致没有绝对"真实"的盈余数据,只有相对合理的盈余结果。盈余管理具有合法性,在会计准则(或制度)允许的范围内进行正当的盈余管理是合乎道德的行为,目的是为使企业价值最大化,帮助报告使用者更好地理解公司业绩。盈余管理又具有秘密性,而这种秘密行为为社会所迫;消除盈余管理是不现实的。