Deutsche Leistungsbilanzüberschüsse in der Kritik

Germany runs large current account surpluses. Recently the surplus has been higher than seven per cent of GDP. This has provoked many different criticisms. First, some argue that the euro is the main problem. Second, German wages and prices have been criticised for being too low. Third, according to some critics, German domestic demand should be higher. Fourth, current account surpluses have been assumed to be unsustainable. The article discusses all those arguments and analyses their validity.     

Aiding Decision Making to Reduce the Impacts of Climate Change

Utilizing theory and empirical insights from psychology and behavioural economics, this paper examines individuals’ cognitive and motivational barriers to adopting climate change adaptation and mitigation measures that increase consumer welfare. We explore various strategies that take into account the simplified decision-making processes used by individuals and resulting biases. We make these points by working through two examples: (1) investments in energy efficiency products and new technology and (2) adaptation measures to reduce property damage from future floods and hurricanes. In both cases there is a reluctance to undertake these measures due to high and certain upfront costs, delayed and probabilistic benefits, and behavioural biases related to this asymmetry. The use of choice architecture through framing and the use of default options coupled with short-term incentives and long-term contracts can encourage greater investment in these measures.     

Same but Different: Chinese-American and Mainland Chinese Consumers’ Perceptions of and Behavior in a Service Failure Situation

Going beyond the traditional East/West consumer differentiation in studying service failure, this article examined the impact of acculturation, together with ethnicity of service staff and origin of a hotel brand on consumers’ perceptions and behavioral responses. The research drew on four focus groups conducted in Beijing with 34 participants, followed by an experiment for which data were collected from 451 Chinese-Americans and 464 Mainland Chinese. Results showed significant differences in perceptions and behavioral responses following a service failure between Chinese-Americans and Mainland Chinese, and among Chinese-Americans with different acculturation strategies. Implications of study findings and directions for future research are discussed.     

Motivation and involvement in adventure tourism activities: a Chinese tourists' perspective

ABSTRACT

This research aims to explore Chinese tourists' motivations and involvement in adventure tourism activities, as well as if and how personality and location affect their motivation and involvement. Using a survey that collected 252 responses, this research suggests that stimulus-avoidance and intelligence seeking are the two most important motivational forces. Results indicate that respondents would prefer overseas locations for these activities due to perceptions of greater safety and security, better service, and higher-quality facilities. Respondents who rated themselves as “open” or “closed” in personality differ regarding motivations and involvement. Practical implications are discussed, and recommendations for future research are provided.     

Service Failure and Recovery in a Strategic Airline Alliance Context: Interplay of Locus of Service Failure and Social Identity

ABSTRACT

There has been a dramatic increase in the past decade in the number of strategic alliances and business networks. Yet, despite these trends in the business environment, the individual firm-customer dyad has remained the contextual focus of most services marketing research (Gittell, 2002 Gittell, J. H. 2002. Relationships between service providers and their impact on customers. Journal of Service Research, 4(4): 299–311. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Using a scenario study, this research investigates the effects of service failures in a strategic airline alliance setting, with a particular focus on locus of service failure and strength of social identification, on three alliance entities—a consumer's home carrier, the alliance partner airline, and the alliance. Study findings suggest that consumers' evaluations are more stable (less extreme) when the home carrier causes the service failure. In contrast, when a lesser known entity (partner airline) causes the service failure, consumers are more willing to rate that entity harshly. Furthermore, compared to weak identifiers, strong identifiers were not only more positive in their evaluation of the home carrier but also in their evaluation of the alliance, pointing to a halo effect, whereby positive evaluations of the home carrier are transferred to the alliance. Implications of study results are discussed and directions for future research provided.     

Processes for stocks capturing their statistical properties from one day to one year

A realistic ARCH process is set up so as to duplicate, for all practical purposes, the properties of stock time series from 1 day to 1 year. The process includes heteroskedasticity with long memory, leverage, fat-tail innovations, relative return, price granularity, and holidays. Its adequacy to describe empirical data is controlled over a broad panel of statistics, including (robust L-statistics) skew, (robust) kurtosis, shape factor for the volatility distribution, and lagged correlations between combinations of return and volatility. These statistics are computed for returns and volatilities with characteristic time intervals ranging from 1 day to 1 year. This wide cross-check between stock time series and simulations ensures that the most important features of the data are correctly captured by the process up to 1 year. The by-products of the statistical analyses and estimations are (1) a positive skew, (2) a cross-sectional relation between kurtosis and heteroskedasticity, (3) a very similar cross-sectional distribution for the statistics evaluated over the empirical data set or for the process with one set of parameters and (4) the heteroskedasticity is very close to an integrated volatility process.     

Mean-variance cointegration and the expectations hypothesis

The present paper sheds further light on a well-known (alleged) violation of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure (EHT): the frequent finding of unit roots in interest rate spreads. We show that the EHT implies (i) that the nonstationarity stems from the holding premium, which is hence (ii) cointegrated with the spread. In a stochastic discount factor framework, we model the premium as being driven by the integrated variance of excess returns. Introducing the concept of mean-variance cointegration, we actually find cointegration relations between the conditional first and second moment of US bond data.     

The within-distribution business cycle dynamics of German firms

In this article, we analyse stylized facts for Germany's business cycle at the firm level. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank's balance sheet statistics covering, on average, 55 000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we estimate transition probabilities of a firm in a certain real sales growth regime switching to another regime in the next period, e.g. whether a firm that has witnessed a high growth rate is likely to stay in a regime of high growth or is bound to switch to a regime of low growth in the subsequent period. We find that these probabilities depend on the business cycle position.