Wie möchten Sie im Alter leben?

Normalit?t versus Sicherheit - In den station?ren Einrichtungen der Altenhilfe wird vermehrt über das Konzept der Haus- und Wohngemeinschaften diskutiert. Ein Ansatz, der die Lebensqualit?t der Hilfe- und Pflegebedürftigen in den Vordergrund stellt. Doch was ist mit der Sicherheit?     

Going NUTS: The effect of EU Structural Funds on regional performance

The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states to allow them to catch up with the EU average. Under the Objective 1 scheme, NUTS2 regions with a per capita GDP level below 75% of the EU average qualify for structural funds transfers from the central EU budget. This rule gives rise to a regression-discontinuity design that exploits the discrete jump in the probability of EU transfer receipt at the 75% threshold for identification of causal effects of Objective 1 treatment on outcome such as economic growth of EU regions. We find positive per capita GDP growth effects of Objective 1 transfers, but no employment growth effects.     

Sudden Termination Auctions—An Experimental Study

The design of online markets has become a major issue due to the capability of operators to implement almost any set of market rules overnight. With this study we contribute to the literature of auction market design by presenting a theoretical and experimental analysis of sudden termination auctions. Our main focus is on the candle auction that has a positive termination probability at any time in the course of the auction. Candle auctions prove to be a much faster, but equally efficient alternative to standard hard close auctions.     

Intra- and international risk-sharing in the short run and the long run

We investigate empirically how industrialized countries and US states share consumption risk at horizons between 1 and 30 years. US federal states share about 50% of their permanent idiosyncratic risk through cross-state capital income flows. While insurance against transitory fluctuations in output is virtually complete, OECD countries do not share any of their permanent idiosyncratic risk. Our results suggest that purely transaction cost based theories cannot explain the home bias, since the potential welfare gains from insurance against permanent shocks would by far outweigh that of insuring against transitory variation. We conclude that permanent and transitory shocks constitute two qualitatively different kinds of risk and that various forms of endogenous market incompleteness may render permanent shocks a lot harder to insure, in particular at the international level.     

Studiengebühren: Ein Weg aus der Bildungskrise?

Das Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgerichts vom Januar 2005 hat die Tür zu Studiengebühren geöffnet. Damit ist eine notwendige Bedingung für eine fundamentale Hochschulreform erfüllt. Welche verteilungs– und bildungspolitischen Folgen hat die derzeitige Hochschulfinanzierung? Wie sind demgegenüber Studiengebühren zu bewerten? Wie ließe sich der Wettbewerb zwischen den Hochschulen verbessern?Prof. Dr. Charles B. Blankart, 62, lehrt Öffentliche Finanzen an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Er ist Mitglied des Wissenschaftlichen Beirats beim Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Arbeit und Mitglied des Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitskreises für Regulierungsfragen bei der Regulierungsbehörde für Telekommunikation und Post (WAR); Gerrit B. Koester, 31, Dipl.-Volkswirt, Dipl.-Pol., ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für öffentliche Finanzen der Humboldt-Universität; und Sascha G. Wolf, 29, Dipl.-Volkswirt, ist Mitarbeiter an demselben Institut sowie bei der Stiftung Marktwirtschaft.     

From hub to tourist destination – An explorative study of Singapore and Dubai's aviation-based transformation

The growth of air transport networks and deregulation have allowed small, low-populated places like Singapore and Dubai to become major international tourism destinations. Both have used tightly combined airline, airport and tourism strategies to help achieve this. Here we analyse developments in Singapore and Dubai by examining interactions between their airlines, airports, governments and tourism authorities, and how integrated management strategies leveraged their aviation traffic hubs to develop tourism destinations.     

Environmental Innovations and Firm Profitability: Unmasking the Porter Hypothesis

We examine impacts of different types of environmental innovations on firm profits. Following Porter’s (Sci Am 264(4):168, 1991) hypothesis that environmental regulation can improve firms’ competitiveness, we distinguish between regulation-induced and voluntary environmental innovations. We find that innovations which do not improve firms’ resource efficiency do not provide positive returns to profitability. However, innovations that increase a firm’s resource efficiency in terms of material or energy consumption per unit of output have a positive impact on profitability. This positive result holds for both regulation-induced and voluntary innovations, although the effect is greater for regulation-driven innovation. We conclude that the Porter hypothesis does not hold in general for its “strong” version, but depends on the type of environmental innovation. Our findings rest on firm-level data from the German part of the Community Innovation Survey 2008 (CIS 2008).