THE SEVENTH‐CENTURY ISLAMIC GOLD STANDARD

Monetary systems are catalysts for economic, social and political progress. The interdependence between monetary, economic and political order is illustrated by currency competition between the Byzantine and Muslim empires in the seventh century. The evolution of an Islamic gold standard demonstrates that Byzantine and Muslim ruling circles were conversant with the dynamics of currency competition. In keeping with the theory of currency competition, the creation of the Muslim gold standard marked the beginning of a rapid economic outperformance by the Islamic empire.     

The Measurement of Prices of Production: An Alternative Approach

This paper analyzes the theoretical and methodological issues related to the empirical measurement of prices of production and wage-profit curves. A number of shortcomings of the standard approach are discussed, focusing in particular on the neglect of capital stock matrices and on the empirically objectionable assumption of uniform profit rates. An alternative approach for the empirical analysis of wage-profit curves and prices of production is proposed and its main properties are investigated using a new dataset on the German economy (1991–99). It is suggested that a Leontief-Bródy approach (augmented by profit rate differentials) is more appropriate for the analysis of wage-profit curves and prices of production than the purely theoretically oriented Sraffa-von Neumann framework.     

AUDIT MARKET FAILURE

The auditing profession has called for the current regime of unlimited liability to be replaced with liability caps. The Department of Trade and Industry has tabled proposals to reform the structure of the market for audit services. These proposals fall short of meeting the demand for liability limitation but modify the current regime inasmuch as auditor liability, though uncapped, would be proportional to the damage caused by audit failure. This step is unlikely to remedy audit market failure. This article argues the distortion of market incentives in audit markets can be traced to government intervention and the remedy lies in replacing government intervention with competition.     

Culture, economic development, and national ethical attitudes

To understand the influence of culture on ethical attitudes, a variety of countries must be compared simultaneously to avoid confounding of cultural dimensions. This study uses data from the World Values Survey to develop a measure of ethical attitudes that shows partial measurement invariance across 44 countries. Regressing the resulting latent means on four cultural dimensions [Hofstede G. Culture's Consequences: comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations. 2nd ed. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 2001] and per capita gross domestic product (PCGDP) reveals effects that are not suggested by examining the predictors in isolation, and explains more variance than analysis of the raw means. However, the model does not account for ethical attitudes reported in Brazil, Japan, and the Philippines. In the remaining 41 countries, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and PCGDP are found to have negative influences on national ethical attitudes.     

State of the Art der betriebswirtschaftlichen Forschung: Etablierung des neuen Journals für Betriebswirtschaft

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Metals: resources or financial assets? A multivariate cross-sectional analysis

Metals are very important resources for industrial production, but recently they have attracted more and more attention from investors. While certainly industrial producers, consumers, and financial investors do have some influence on metal price development, the role of relevant price factors is not yet quite clear. Therefore, in this paper, we examine the explanatory power of various fundamental factors and characteristics known from financial markets, specifically on the expected returns in a unique data sample of 30 metals. We apply—to our knowledge for the first time in this context—the widely accepted method of characteristic-sorted portfolios, extended by the very recent method of two-way portfolio sorts as an alternative to classical multivariate regressions. This mostly nonparametric approach, combined with portfolio aggregation, provides very robust results. Our major finding is that the financial characteristics value and momentum have a very high predictive power for monthly returns of metal portfolios. Metal-specific fundamental factors like stocks, secondary production, apparent consumption, country concentration, mine production, or reserves perform depending on the interpretation moderately well or rather poorly, regarding some economically interpretable transformations and when using multivariate two-way sorts. Hence, from the perspective of expected returns, metals are predominantly assets, while fundamental metal-specific factors still play a non-negligible role. Thus, to a much lesser extent, metals can still be regarded as resources. Overall, the combination of financial characteristics and metal-specific fundamental factors yields the best results. With these robust results, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of metal prices and their underlying factors.     

Klimaschutz im Verkehrssektor — aktuelle Beispiele aus der Verkehrsforschung

Decarbonising the transport sector will be one of the biggest challenges in the future. Current innovations in the transport sector will be used to identify greenhouse gas emission reduction methods and the associated costs. Economists from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have compiled current research results from various DLR institutes which have revealed that a wide range of technological and organisational innovations for reducing climate-related emissions are available with varying market maturity. Increasing technological efficiency alone, however, is not enough to achieve the ambitious climate targets. Good policies are also essential to take things to the next level.     

Do bilateral investment treaties attract foreign direct investment? The role of international dispute settlement provisions

This paper studies the effects of the strength of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) on foreign direct investment (FDI) activity. We develop an index for the strength of international dispute settlement provisions included in BITs in order to examine the role the content of BITs plays in attracting FDI. To this end, we make use of data from UNCTAD's International Investment Agreement Mapping Project and measure the provision strength of 2,571 BITs. Using panel data of bilateral and total FDI inflows and inward FDI stocks, we study the effect of BITs on FDI. Our main finding indicates that stronger international dispute settlement provisions in BITs are indeed associated with positive effects on FDI activity.