Gesundheitsfonds — effizientere Steuerung des Gesundheitssystems?

In 2009 the German central health fund was implemented. It was the result of a political compromise. One political party intended to equalise the risk structure among 130 different health care funds, and the other wanted to intensify competition and to improve efficiency among the different health insurances. The fund is flanked by a health-based risk adjustment and is aimed at sustainably ensuring the funding of the statutory health insurance system. It also constitutes the basis for competition among statutory health care funds, securing quality and efficiency in health care provision. To cover additional expenditures, health insurers had to charge flatrate premiums. A new law, which will come into effect in January 2015, will oblige health insurers to charge income related contributions. It is not clear how this will change competition among insurers. The federal government will not need to finance subsidies to low income individuals anymore. Income redistribution will only take place within the public health insurance system, exempting the privately insured and public servants from supporting low income individuals. The authors claim that the health care fund will not succeed in its aim of securing a sustainable financial basis for the statutory health insurance system. Most of the authors argue that there is no evidence of greater efficiency thus far, and they offer proposals on how to achieve improved performance.     

Sponsorship effect metric: assessing the financial value of sponsoring by comparisons to television advertising

Since sponsoring is an increasingly important marketing communication medium, it is important for managers to know whether their sponsorships are giving a good financial return relative to other communication alternatives. Although several “rules of thumb” are commonly used in the industry for converting sponsorship exposure time into television advertising equivalent values, this research is the first to empirically test them by means of two experiments employing realistic stimuli and representative samples. Across 6 stimuli brands, study 1 finds that an average of 127 s of sponsor logo exposure achieves the same effects as a 30 s TV ad, but variance around this figure is high and depends on a variety of factors such as communication goal, sponsor fit, type of exposure, and whether the sponsor is a known brand. Study 2 finds that combining sponsoring with television advertising does increase the effects of sponsoring, although effects vary widely depending on the context, but even in the best case the increase is not supportive of the high levels of advertising suggested by many industry experts. Overall, the findings will allow managers to more confidently assess the financial value of their sponsorship investments.     

The Front and the Line: The Paradox of South American Frontiers Applied to the Bolivian Case

The article examines possibilities to study security in a globalized world. It argues that in order to do so it will remain a futile exercise to opt for one of the many competing conceptualizations of security, but that rather the very variety of these conceptualizations can be read as reflecting an all‐pervasiveness of risks as a structural feature of contemporary world society. Following Ulrich Beck, the paper first introduces the idea of a world risk society emerging in a process of ‘reflective modernization’. It then shows how various recent reconceptualizations of security at least partly express this very process and are thus linked, in spite of substantial differences amongst themselves. Finally, turning again to some issues raised by contemporary theories of society, it argues that in fact security might be a hollow reference point in analytical as well as in practical terms and. invites to consider whether multifaceted strategies of insurance have not come to replace attempts to achieve security in a globalized world.     

International financial integration and national price levels: The role of the exchange rate regime

This paper proposes a new perspective on systematic deviations from purchasing power parity. Panel evidence for OECD countries shows that international financial integration increases the national price level under managed exchange rate regimes and lowers the price level under floating exchange rates. An open economy sticky-price model reproduces these findings by relating them to the possibility of insurance against consumption losses in internationally integrated financial markets. The utilization of insurance is reflected by relative price adjustments which manifest themselves in changes of the national price level. The direction of relative price adjustments, however, depends on the extent to which insurance is used under different exchange rate regimes: under a peg, financial integration raises the national price level; under a float, however, financial integration lowers the national price level.     

Leverage Dynamics and the Burden of Debt

In addition to leverage, the debt service burden of households and firms is an important link between financial and real developments at the aggregate level. Using US data from 1985 to 2017, we find that the debt service burden has sizeable negative effects on expenditure. Its interplay with leverage also explains several data puzzles, including the lack of above-trend output growth during credit booms and the severity of ensuing recessions, without appealing to large shocks or nonlinearities. Estimating the model with data up to 2005, it predicts credit and expenditure paths that closely match actual developments before and during the Great Recession.     

Academic freedom,private‐sector focus,and the process of innovation

We develop a model that clarifies the respective advantages and disadvantages of academic and private‐sector research. Rather than relying on lack of appropriability or spillovers to generate a rationale for academic research, we emphasize control‐rights considerations, and argue that the fundamental tradeoff between academia and the private sector is one of creative control versus focus. By serving as a precommitment mechanism that allows scientists to freely pursue their own interests, academia can be indispensable for early‐stage research. At the same time, the private sector's ability to direct scientists toward higher‐payoff activities makes it more attractive for later‐stage research.     

Recovering the real-world density and liquidity premia from option data

In this paper, we develop a methodology for simultaneous recovery of the real-world probability density and liquidity premia from observed S&P 500 index option prices. Assuming the existence of a numéraire portfolio for the US equity market, fair prices of derivatives under the benchmark approach can be obtained directly under the real-world measure. Under this modelling framework, there exists a direct link between observed call option prices on the index and the real-world density for the underlying index. We use a novel method for the estimation of option-implied volatility surfaces of high quality, which enables the subsequent analysis. We show that the real-world density that we recover is consistent with the observed realized dynamics of the underlying index. This admits the identification of liquidity premia embedded in option price data. We identify and estimate two separate liquidity premia embedded in S&P 500 index options that are consistent with previous findings in the literature.     

The integrated impact of credit and interest rate risk on banks: A dynamic framework and stress testing application

Credit and interest rate risk are the two most important risks faced by commercial banks in their banking book. In this paper we derive a consistent and comprehensive framework to measure the integrated impact of both risks. By taking account of the repricing characteristics of assets, liabilities and off balance sheet items, we assess the integrated impact of credit and interest rate risk on banks’ economic value and capital adequacy. We then stress test a hypothetical but realistic bank using our framework and show that it is fundamental to measure the impact of credit and interest rate risk jointly.     

Measurement of labour quality growth caused by unobservable characteristics

The standard economy-wide indices of labour quality (or human capital) largely ignore the role of unobservable worker characteristics. In this article, we develop a methodology for identifying the contributions of both observable and unobservable worker characteristics in the presence of the incidental parameter problem. Based on data for Switzerland over the period 1991 to 2006, we find that a large part of growth in labour quality is caused by shifts in the distribution of unobservable worker characteristics. The overall index differs little from the standard indices, but contributions to growth attributed to education and age are corrected downwards.