How many educated workers for your economy? European targets,optimal public spending,and labor market impact

This paper studies optimal taxation schemes for education in a search-matching model where the labor market is divided between a high-skill and a low-skill sector. Two public policy targets - maximizing the total employment level and optimizing the social surplus - are studied according to three different public taxation strategies. We calibrate our model using evidence from thirteen European countries, and compare our results with the target from the Europe 2020 Agenda for achievement in higher education. We show that, with current labor market characteristics, the target set by governments seems compatible with the social surplus maximization objective for some countries, while being too high for other countries. For all countries, maximizing employment would imply higher educational spending than that required for the social surplus to reach its maximum.     

Fluctuating levels of personal role engagement within the working day: A multilevel study

In this diary study, we examined a theoretical model in which the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, availability, and safety serve as mechanisms through which the work context during discrete situations within the workday influences “state” engagement. We further theorised that a person's “trait” level of engagement would exert cross‐level effects on the state level relationships. Multilevel analyses based on a sample of 124 individuals in six organisations and 1,446 situational observations revealed that meaningfulness and availability (but not safety) mediated the relationships between perceptions of the work context and state engagement. High levels of trait engagement strengthened the within‐person relation between availability and state engagement, yet weakened the within‐person relation between meaningfulness and state engagement, suggesting two different processes may be at play. Overall, the findings advance our understanding of engagement as a multilevel and temporally dynamic psychological phenomenon and promote a contextually based HRM approach to facilitating engagement.     

On Measurement of Economic Growth

This article continues the discussion raised in the pages of the journal on the methodological problems of justifying economic policy [1]. Problems of measuring the inflationary component of economic growth and in product competitiveness in the internal market and external markets are considered. A procedure to measure economic growth, taking into account the balance of interests of the current and future generations, is proposed.     

Aufdeckung von Versicherungsbetrug bei Kfz-Schäden mit Hilfe des Benford-Tests

The German Insurance Association estimates a yearly amount of damage of € 1.5?bn to German motor vehicle insurance companies because of systematic fraud by insurance holders. It is supposed that about 10% of submitted claim applications contain manipulated data, therefore insurance companies are forced to complete a detailed and cost intensive case-by-case review of each single application. An alternative method to detect fraud in empiric data is the method of digital analysis based on Benford’s law. The Benford method uses a mathematical law of specific logarithmic distribution attributes of first digits. According to this approach, the data of a Benford set confirm with the expected digit distribution, if the data is not manipulated, whereas fraudulent interventions lead to a deviation from Benford’s law. Hence, until now there has not been any investigation whether the Benford method can also be applied on insurance data. The present article analyses a dataset consisting of more than 120,000 damage claim applications to answer this question as well as to identify the impact of specific characteristics on the probability of fraud contained in claim applications, such as the repair of the vehicle in a franchised or an independent workshop, the vehicle brand or the examination by insurance companies experts. Indeed it could be shown that Benford’s Law is only applicable on second digits of insurance data, but delivers very strong results here: All results of the considered characteristics could be verified by plausible arguments. For this reason insurance companies can benefit from making use of the Benford method to identify those claim applications with a high probability of fraud, which should then be reviewed in more detail so that resources can be allocated in a much more cost efficient way.     

An experimental analysis of tax avoidance policies

Policies to reduce aggressive tax avoidance are increasingly being implemented or discussed in many countries around the world. Tax authorities hope that such policies will generate new tax revenue by increasing overall tax compliance. We present an experimental design to investigate the effect of a stylized anti-avoidance tax policy on tax compliance behavior. We highlight that anti-avoidance tax policies that reduce tax avoidance can also induce an increase in tax evasion (“substitution effect”), which limits the additional tax revenue these policies will generate. We show that the degree of substitution depends crucially on behavioral factors such as tax morale. Policymakers therefore also need to consider behavioral features while designing such policies and estimating their potential effects.     

Exploring the learning problems and resource usage of undergraduate industrial design students in design studio courses

Design is a powerful weapon for modern companies so it is important to have excellent designers in the industry. The purpose of this study is to explore the learning problems and the resources that students use to overcome problems in undergraduate industrial design studio courses. A survey with open-type questions was conducted to collect data. Participants in this study were 189 undergraduate industrial design students from three universities, and two coding schema were formulated for analysing the data. The results demonstrated that the most difficult design tasks included concept generation, design presentation, and design research. The learning resources used to solve the learning problems included four categories: people, object, method, and environment. This information will increase the understanding of the learning process of students and provide a reference for teaching and the setting of learning resources in industrial design education.     

Does Interindustry and Intraindustry Information Help Predict Financial Distress?

This study investigates whether and how the accounting ratios of peer firms within the same industry (the industry peers) or firms within the industry of their customers (the downstream peers) help improve the predictability of sample firm financial distress. We document that the Z‐score factors of the companies with high correlation in stock returns help predict financial distress. The results show that accounting‐based ratios of the industry peers and the downstream peers enhance the accuracy of early warnings of financial distress, especially when prior returns of peer firms are highly correlated with the sample firm.     

The Multiplicity of Performance Management Systems: Heterogeneity in Multinational Corporations and Management Sense‐Making

This field study examines the workings of multiple performance measurement systems (PMSs) used within and between a division and Headquarters (HQ) of a large European corporation. We explore how multiple PMSs arose within the multinational corporation. We first provide a first‐order analysis which explains how managers make sense of the multiplicity and show how an organization's PMSs may be subject to competing processes for control that result in varied systems, all seemingly functioning, but with different rationales and effects. We then provide a second‐order analysis based on a sense‐making perspective that highlights the importance of retrospective understandings of the organization's history and the importance of various legitimacy expectations to different parts of the multinational. Finally, we emphasize the role of social skill in sense‐making that enables the persistence of multiple systems and the absence of overt tensions and conflict within organizations.     

Government spending multipliers in contraction and expansion

This paper investigates the impact of government spending on output and the size of the spending multiplier during periods of output contraction and expansion. It also investigates the impact of spending when the economy hits the nominal zero lower bound. It uses a panel of 21 advanced countries over the period of 1979–2011, applying a TSLS estimation technique. We find a spending multiplier of close to 1 during expansion and values of up to 3 during contractions. However, our results do not indicate a difference in the impact of spending during nominal zero lower bound periods.