Structural changes in EC trade intensities

The European Economic Community has now been in existence for about 20 years. Five years have elapsed since it was enlarged. What progress have the member countries made in the integration of their foreign trade? What would be the repercussions of a southward extension of the EC to take in Greece, Portugal and Spain?     

The Relative Dynamics of Investment and the Current Account in the G7-Economies

This paper contributes to the empirics of the intertemporal approach to the current account. We use a cointegrated VAR framework to identify permanent and transitory components of country-specific and global shocks. Our approach allows us to investigate empirically the sensitivity to persistence implied by many forward-looking models and our results shed new light on the excess volatility of investment encountered by Glick and Rogoff (1995). In G7 data, we find the relative current-account and investment response to be in line with the intertemporal approach.     

Der Einfluss der Medien auf Richter und Staatsanwälte

The goals of criminal proceedings are to establish the pertinent facts of a case and to assess these facts in light of valid laws. Based on an online-survey of 447 judges and 271 prosecuting attorneys, it is analyzed how media reports influence the course and outcome of criminal prosecution. The survey inquired about the use of media reports on trials in which the interviewees were involved, perceived shortcomings of media reports, intensity of experienced criticism by media reports, emotional reactions to criticism, perceived influence of media reports on lay people and experts in the courtroom, adaption of one’s own behaviour to expectations of the public, and perceived influence of media reports on sentences. Based on these data, a structural equation model indicates a significant influence of the use of media coverage on sentences. A weaker path leads from media use directly to sentences, a stronger one from media use to emotions and from there to sentences. The findings are discussed in light of juridical theories of the role of the public in criminal proceedings.     

The Economics of Career Concerns, Part II: Application to Missions and Accountability of Government Agencies

The paper uses a simple multitask career concern model in order to analyse the incentives of government agencies' officials. Incentives are impaired by the agency pursuing multiple missions. A lack of focus is even more problematic in the case of fuzzy missions, that is when outsiders are uncertain about the exact nature of the missions actually pursued by the agency. Consequently agencies pursuing multiple missions receive less autonomy.
The paper further shows that professionalization creates a sense of mission for the agency, and that the specialization of officials raises their incentives. Last, the paper compares its predictions with the stylized facts on Government bureaucracies.     

商业银行反周期资本缓冲的方法选择

本文提供了设计反周期资本缓冲的一些经验教训和方法选择,主要贡献在于分析了用于指引资本缓冲建立和释放的条件变量。不同反周期资本措施的主要区别在于条件变量是银行特定的还是系统性的,前种方法对特定构成要素的数量要求巨大,相比之下系统性的方法更具优势。作为资本缓冲增加进度和规模信号的最佳变量未必是指引资本缓冲释放时机和程度的最佳变量。信贷/GDP比率是指引建立阶段开始的最好变量,总损失的某种衡量,与信贷条件指标一起,可以很好地发出释放资本的信号。不过,现阶段设计完全以规则为基础的机制不太可能,不同程度的主观判断不可避免。此外,本文还认为,减少最低资本要求的敏感性是可靠的反周期缓冲措施的重要组成部分。在本次金融危机发生之后,反周期资本管理正逐渐引起国内银行业及相关部门的重视,本刊征得作者同意,翻译并发表此文,以期为相关部门资本监管和风险管理提供借鉴。作者及所在机构对译文免责。     

SOCIAL DEPRIVATION OF IMMIGRANTS IN GERMANY

This paper investigates the extent to which immigrants in Germany are socially deprived compared to German natives. We demonstrate that when using a conventional definition of the social deprivation index typically applied in the literature, immigrants do not necessarily appear to be socially deprived. We propose a weighting scheme that weights components of social deprivation by their subjective contribution to an overall measure of life satisfaction. Using this weighting scheme to calculate an index of social deprivation, we find that immigrants experience a significant degree of social deprivation, confirming much of the economic literature examining the economic assimilation of immigrants in Germany. This result is driven by particularly high weights being attributed to employment. Also the size of the groups “in need” is smaller when using the innovative weighting scheme, allowing a more precise targeting of economic policy.     

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Seat allocation distributions and seat biases of stationary apportionment methods for proportional representation

In a proportional representation system, apportionment methods are used to round the vote proportion of a party to an integer number of seats in parliament. Assuming uniformly distributed vote proportions, we derive the seat allocation distributions for stationary divisor methods. An important characteristic of apportionment methods are seat biases, that is, expected differences between actual seat numbers and ideal shares of seats, when the parties are ordered from largest to smallest. We obtain seat bias formulas for the stationary divisor methods and for the quota method of greatest remainders.Acknowledgement. We thank Friedrich Pukelsheim for many fruitful discussions.Received March 2004     

Entrepreneurial inception: The role of imprinting in entrepreneurial action

Recent research highlights that founders' early decisions and the environmental conditions at founding each imprint upon a new venture in ways that affect growth and survival. However, we know much less about how the entrepreneur is imprinted and how the outcome of this imprinting process influences the entrepreneur and the venture. Through semi-structured interviews and content analysis, our study examines entrepreneurs' formative experiences during sensitive periods of transition, which we refer to as sources of imprint. We illustrate how these sources of imprint impact entrepreneurial decision making and explain how they guide entrepreneurs' decisions as they progress through their entrepreneurial careers. In doing so, we improve our understanding of how entrepreneurs navigate the entrepreneurial process.