Reinventing the Countryside: German Second-home Owners in Southern Sweden

During the 1990s, second-home tourism experienced renewed interest in the industrialised world. German tourists, who discovered the nearby Swedish countryside, contributed to the new second-home tourism patterns. During a five-year period from 1991 to 1996 the number of German second-home owners in Sweden increased from 1500 to more than 5500. This paper focuses on German second-home owners and their lives in the Swedish countryside. The main objective of the paper is to analyze the German second-home owners' experiences of encounters with the Swedish countryside and its inhabitants. The analysis is based on an interview survey with 91 German second-home owners in Småland, an important region for German second-home ownership in Sweden. It is argued that the German second-home owners employ a conservative and local strategy regarding their lives in the countryside. However, contrary to their expectations, they meet a post-productive countryside and thus fail to integrate. Instead, they create a parallel society and become engaged in preserving the countryside.     

Inflation,price dispersion and market integration through the lens of a monetary search model

Monetary search theory implies that the real effects of inflation via its impact on price dispersion depend on the level of search costs and, thus, on the level of market integration. For less integrated markets, the inflation–price dispersion nexus is predicted to be asymmetrically V-shaped which results in an optimal inflation rate above zero. For highly integrated markets with low search costs, however, the impact of inflation on price dispersion should only be small. Using price data of the European Union member states, this paper tests and confirms these predictions of monetary search theory.     

Currency risk cover — an enquiry among German firms

Intereconomics - The attitude of German exporters and importers to currency risks under a system of floating exchange rates has, for the first time, been the subject of an empirical study by the...     

Medición de la brecha salarial entre jóvenes con contrato indefinido o temporal. Tres países europeos en perspectiva

Se analizan las diferencias salariales entre trabajadores permanentes y temporales de 25 a 40 años de edad con datos de la Encuesta europea sobre la renta y las condiciones de vida (EU‐SILC) sobre Alemania, Francia e Italia de 2010. Mediante una regresión con función de influencia recentrada y una técnica de reponderación, los autores investigan la contribución de las características personales y del puesto de trabajo a la brecha en toda la distribución salarial. Los resultados indican que el componente no explicado sigue siendo muy grande en Italia en toda la distribución y se debilita en Francia en el tramo superior, mientras que en Alemania no es significativo.     

The Millennium Peak in Club Convergence: A New Look at Distributional Changes in The Wealth of Nations

This paper proposes an easy‐to‐use nonparametric indicator for club convergence, or convergence within clusters of countries: it measures whether the modes of the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita distribution become more pronounced over time. Relying on changes in the critical bandwidth for unimodality, the indicator is a dynamic extension of concepts from often‐used multimodality tests. Its evolution suggests the new empirical result of a ‘millennium peak’ in club convergence in the worldwide GDP per capita distribution. The club convergence movements of the 1980s and 1990s, when groups of poor and rich countries converged to two separate points, was followed by a de‐clubbing movement after the turn of the millennium. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY PRICES IN A SUBMARKET OF SOUTH AFRICA: SEPARATING REAL RETURNS FROM ATTRIBUTE GROWTH

The South African residential housing market experienced high growth in the previous decade, in line with international trends. Traditional methods of documenting this trajectory use the average prices of only properties that are sold in given periods and regions. A critical assumption of these approaches is that houses remain homogenous across time and space. This paper constructs a micro‐level hedonic price index to account for changing attributes of heterogenous houses. It illustrates that returns may have been overstated, and that much of the growth recorded in this market is driven by attribute inflation, particularly in the high price segment.