Forschung und Innovation: Wo steht Deutschland?

Aufwendungen für Forschung und Entwicklung werden im Hinblick auf die internationale Wettbewerbsf?higkeit eines Wirtschafts- und Technologiestandorts als besonders bedeutsam eingesch?tzt. Wie l?sst sich der Zusammenhang zwischen Forschung und wirtschaftlicher Entwicklung empirisch nachweisen? Welchen Rang nimmt Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich der Forschungs- und Innovationsaktivit?ten ein? Welche Handlungsoptionen ergeben sich für die Wirtschaftspolitik?     

THE EVOLUTION OF COMPETITIVENESS IN HUNGARIAN AGRICULTURE: FROM TRANSITION TO ACCESSION

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

The supply of and demand for accounting information

The article analyzes the use of accounting information in Russia. We assess reporting behaviour in the lending process for a sample of Russian companies in the years 1999–2004 and postulate that Russian companies manage their earnings in order to avoid showing losses when applying for bank financing. Once a credit has been granted, companies are predicted to manage earnings because of the bank's monitoring activities. By means of univariate and multivariate analysis we are able to attribute the discontinuity around a zero target in the earnings distribution with firms’ response to the banks’ assessment of accounting performance. This implies that financing considerations affect the reporting incentives of Russian companies.     

Medien-Priming — Grundlagen, Befunde und Forschungstendenzen

Media priming is the process by which information from the media make disposable units of knowledge cognitively more easily accessible. This increases the chance that they be better applied to subsequent information from the environment than less accessible units. Research on cognitive media effects, though, does not seem to agree on what the bases of media priming are, what the state of knowledge is, and what remains to be studied. This article attempts to do away with these disagreements by (1) describing the (cognitive-)psychological bases of the concept of media priming, (2) by structuring the crucial empirical results with regard to these bases, and, starting with the traditions and also the deficiencies of recent research, by (3) presenting a program for future research.     

Tumorpatienten – die Rolle der Angehörigen

Zusammenfasung  Belastungen, Bew?ltigungen, Ressourcen — Angeh?rige von Patienten werden im medizinischen Behandlungsprozess nicht selten als „St?rfaktoren“ wahrgenommen, die durch ihre Gegenwart, ihre Fragen und Anliegen den Arbeitsalltag „behindern“. Nur allzu schnell wird übersehen, welche gro?e Bedeutung sie bei der Betreuung der Patienten haben und wie hilfreich und unterstützend sie auch für das Pflegepersonal sein k?nnen – das gilt auch und besonders in der Onkologie.     

Soziale Lage — Was sind die drängendsten Probleme?

Democracy seems to be at risk. People elect populists and autocrats, who offer simple solutions to social problems. Often, these problems are not even real ones but are only perceived as such. Economists have measures to determine which problems are fact-based, but they cannot draw a clear distinction between academic analysis and normative demand. If politics pursues a correction of a market outcome, any normative criteria other than efficiency have to be outlined explicitly. Nevertheless, some authors consider inequality one of the central contemporary social and economic challenges. Marcel Fratzscher emphasises that the solution is not found in more redistribution via taxes and transfers, but rather through greater equality of opportunity and social and educational mobility. Bert Rürup thinks that to stabilise the acceptance of the compulsory pension scheme, the dominance of the equivalence principle should be reduced. Further, the existence of different federal subsidy schemes should be replaced by a fixed federal contribution rate in alignment with the pension expenditures. In an international comparison, the fiscal burden for households with small and mid-level earned incomes is exceptionally high in Germany. In order to reduce this burden, Rürup suggests a contribution-free allowance for the social insurance contributions.     

Konsonanz 30 Jahre später

Consonant coverage is assumed to be an important prerequisite for media effects to occur. However, empirical evidence for this assumption is largely missing. Focusing on the issue of European integration, this study investigated, in 13 EU member states, whether consonant coverage affected EU citizens’ opinions on the issue. For each country and at the individual level of analysis, the study linked content analyses of the main evening news and the most prestigious newspaper with survey data. Consonant coverage influenced people’s opinions about European integration, while dissonant coverage made no impact. Both EU supporters and EU opponents were susceptible to the effects of consonant coverage, which tentatively suggests that consonant coverage may surmount selective mechanisms. In sum, the study is the first to provide evidence that consonant coverage may indeed enhance media effects.