III. Weltwirtschaft und Wirtschaft einzlner Länderund und Gebiete

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

50 Jahre Baumol‘sche Kostenkrankheit

The year 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of William J. Baumol’s “Cost Disease”, which posits that services with low productivity growth become more expensive relative to goods while aggregate productivity growth slows down in the process of tertiarisation. The authors present the basic structure of Baumol’s model and discuss several attempts to refute the concept or to cope with its consequences. One of them is the important observation by Nicholas Oulton that business services — unlike personal services — can contribute to higher aggregate productivity growth. A major precondition is that the productivity growth of business services is positive. However, an empirical test shows that this is not the case in Germany and other major advanced economies. Some economic policy conclusions are drawn.     

Buchbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The optimal allocation of decision and exit rights in organizations

We show that in a bilateral relation with conflicting preferences and transferable utility it is unambiguously optimal to assign the authority over project decisions to the privately informed rather than the uninformed party. This holds irrespective of the degree of conflict and the distribution of private information. Under the optimal contract, the uninformed party is protected by an exit option, which it will exert when the decision maker has not chosen the promised decision. Exit terminates the relation and diminishes the project surplus. We show that the first‐best efficient solution can be obtained by such a contract.     

On the Virtues of Hiring Lemons

Recruiting high‐ability workers and implementing optimal efforts are among the key objectives of a firm's personnel policy. We show that, if the firm applies a tournament scheme—that is, a competitive career system—selection and incentive issues are strictly interrelated, thus leading to a fundamental conflict: if the firm is primarily interested in balanced worker competition, there will be a rationale for hiring low‐ability workers (‘lemons’). Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intrasectoral structural change and aggregate productivity development: robust stochastic nonparametric frontier function estimates

This paper investigates the sources of total factor productivity growth in the German manufacturing sector during 1981–1998. Decompositions of aggregate productivity growth are used to identify the effects of structural change and entry–exit on aggregate productivity growth. We find a substantial rise in productivity growth after the German reunification. The bulk of this rise can be attributed to structural change and entry–exit. Two methodological refinements are implemented. The first refinement is the application of robust stochastic nonparametric approaches to frontier function analysis, and the second is the calculation of bootstrap confidence intervals for the components of the productivity decompositions.     

Maastricht II: Reviewing European integration

According to the wishes of the signatory states, the Maastricht treaty, which only came into force in November 1993, is to be re-assessed at another inter-governmental conference in 1996. Which issues should the inter-governmental conference deal with? Which Maastricht I rules require revision, which require elaboration and which require consolidation?