Wird die Konjunkturkomponente der Schuldenbremse ihrer Aufgabe noch gerecht?

Wirtschaftsdienst - In der Debatte um die Schuldenbremse geht es zumeist um eine Grundgesetzänderung. Dabei ist ein wesentlicher Teil der Schuldenbremse — die Konjunkturkomponente,...     

Consequences of Linguistic Distance for Economic Growth

This paper advances a new country‐level measure of ethno‐linguistic diversity, making use of Greenberg's definition of diversity by synthesizing information on the share of different ethno‐linguistic groups in a country's population and, more importantly, information on intergroup linguistic distances derived from a recently developed lexicostatistical approach. I show that this measure captures ethno‐linguistic diversity at lower levels of linguistic aggregation. However, unlike the commonly used phylogenetic language tree approach, I found that these distance‐weighted diversity measures continue to have a strong negative statistical association with economic growth that is not sensitive to the underlying resemblance function between ethno‐linguistic groups.     

Environmentally Sustainable Development through Stakeholder Engagement in Developed and Emerging Countries

This cross‐country study investigates the antecedents and outcomes of corporate environmental responsibility (CER) practices in developed and emerging countries. Based on stakeholder and institutional theory, we conducted an empirical study among firms in Germany, USA, India and China. We found support for a significant positive relationship between regulatory, market and social stakeholder influences, CER practices and business outcomes in the total and individual country samples. Regarding country differences, our data reveal significant similarities and differences between developed and emerging countries. Market stakeholder influences are stronger in developed countries, whereas regulatory and social stakeholder influences do not differ significantly between the two country groups. The relationship between CER practices and positive business outcomes is stronger in emerging than in developed countries. Implications for institutional theory and organizations are outlined. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Service Delivery Networks and Employment Relations at German Airports: Jeopardizing Industrial Peace on the Ground?

In this article, we ask how organizational restructuring towards a network form of service delivery challenges an established form of employment relations in Germany, that is labour–management collaboration. Building on a theoretical discussion of the marketization hypothesis, we develop a structuration perspective on the relationship between network restructuring and labour–management collaboration, which highlights the political economy of inter-firm networks. Empirically, we focus on two major airport authorities in Germany. Our findings show how these authorities at the core of service delivery networks face a strategic trade-off between short-term labour cost reductions and more adversarial employment relations. Apart from coinciding with a deterioration in working conditions for service workers, the handling of this trade-off depends on managers’ and worker representatives’ commitment to collaboration across the network. While unions and works councils initially continued with social partnership-type practices, the more adversarial management practices for enacting the network restructuring cause a fragmentation on the workers’ side and increase the conflict potential. We conclude that the agency of management and worker representatives in the enactment of inter-firm networks oscillates between more partnership-like and more conflictive practices, which turn the network restructuring into a political process with divergent outcomes for employment relations.     

Engaged,but with what? Objects of engagement in technology-aided B2B customer interactions

ABSTRACT

Using new technologies in customer interactions is a popular way of trying to increase customer engagement. It is, however, unknown how such efforts by marketers’ affect engagement, and particularly to what that engagement relates to. By analysing interview and observation data, the engagement manifestations of customers of a B2B company using virtual-reality technology were studied. The results show that customer engagement can be targeted at not only brands or firms but also the service the firm offers or the technology that enables the service. It is argued that the different objects of engagement can coexist and support each other but engagement with the firm is less susceptible to fluctuations. Marketers should be aware of what triggers customer engagement and what it is targeted at.     

The Headmaster Ritual: The Importance of Management for School Outcomes

We estimate the impact of individual principals on school outcomes by using panel data that allow us to track principals over time. We find that individual principals have a substantive impact on school policies, working conditions, and student outcomes. In particular, students who attend a school that has a one standard deviation better principal improve their achievement by between 0.05 and 0.1 standard deviations. Despite rich background information on principals, it is difficult to characterize successful management, suggesting that innate skills are central. We find that the scope for discretion is larger among voucher schools and in areas with school competition.     

Public Provision of Private Goods,Self‐Selection,and Income Tax Avoidance

Redistributive taxation should benefit those with low earnings capacity rather than those who choose a lower income to obtain tax savings. Several contributions have highlighted how public provision of work complements can discourage people from lowering labor supply to diminish taxable income. We show how tax avoidance, previously neglected, can alter the conclusions regarding public provision. Tax avoidance breaks the link between labor supply and reported income. An agent reducing his reported income to escape taxes might no longer forego a publicly provided labor complement, because he can now lower his income by avoiding more rather than working less.     

Combining Matching and Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Estimation: Theory and An Application to the Evaluation of Active Labour Market Policies

We show how instrumental variable and matching estimators can be combined in order to identify a broader array of treatment effects. Instrumental variable (IV) estimators are known to estimate effects only for the compliers, representing a subset of the entire population. By combining IV with matching, we can estimate the treatment effects for the always‐ and never‐takers as well. Since in many cases these groups are the (endogenous) outcome of some assignment process, such estimates also help in judging the implications of such a selection process. In our application to the effects of participation in active labour market programmes in Switzerland, we find large and lasting positive employment effects for the compliers, whereas the effects for the always‐ and never‐participants are small. In addition, the compliers have worse employment outcomes without treatment than those who participate in the programme with or without the intervention under investigation. This suggests that the earlier assignment policy of the caseworkers was inefficient in that the always‐participants were neither those unemployed who would experience the highest expected treatment effects nor those unemployed who had the largest need for assistance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.