Zur Qualität der Medienkontrolle: Ergebnisse einer Befragung deutscher Rundfunk- und Medienräte

This article presents the results of a survey among German media supervisors (members of supervising boards in public broadcasting stations and state media institutions). Given the increasing commercialization and internationalization of television, the supervising boards play a crucial part in assessing the quality of programs. From among 940 German supervisors, 364 took part in the survey, which covered the individual role conceptions of respondents as well as their attitudes towards quality criteria for television. Results suggest that both the supervisors’ amount of television use and the types of programs they prefer is clearly different from patterns in the population. This, along with the observation that supervisors often criticize what they saw privately, suggests (given the diversity of programs) that too much might be expected of them. Media supervisors do heed quality criteria in their work, but these probably do not correspond to other groups’ criteria, and especially not to the general population’s. To conclude, suggestions are discussed to improve the system of supervising programs by important social groups.     

Luft zum Atmen

Mehr Sicherheit im Umgang mit Trachealkanülen - Pflegende, die Patienten mit einer Trachealkanüle betreuen, müssen den Kanülenwechsel sicher beherrschen. Denn bei Komplikationen kann das Warten auf den Arzt katastrophale Folgen haben. Daher muss der Umgang mit den Kanülen zur Routine werden.     

Not all trade restrictions are created equally

There has been great focus in the recent trade theory literature on the introduction of firm heterogeneity into trade models. This introduction has highlighted the importance of the entry/exit decision of firms in response to changes in trade barriers. However, it is typical in many of these models to use iceberg transport costs as a general form of trade barriers that can be interchangeable with ad valorem tariffs. I show that this is not always an appropriate conclusion. Specifically, I illustrate that profit for an exporter is more elastic in response to tariffs than iceberg transport costs, which affects the entry/exit decision of firms. This has implications for welfare analysis and empirical specifications.     

Should multivariate early warning systems for banking crises pool across regions?

Most extant work on prediction of banking crises has utilised global samples, which are in turn dominated by observations from middle-income countries, and rely on a single estimator. However, economic and financial structures as well as the pattern of shocks may differ substantially across regions, while a range of specifications is desirable to check robustness. Accordingly, in this paper we test the implicit pooling assumption in earlier multivariate work on Early Warning Systems using both logit and binary recursive tree specifications separately for crises in Asia and Latin America, as well as the pooled sample. Results suggest markedly different crisis determinants across regions, implying global samples are inappropriate.