Nationalökonomie und sozialwissenschaftliche Integration

Ohne ZusammenfassungG. Fleischmann: Nationalökonomie und sozialwissenschaftliche Integration. Die Einheit der Gesellschaftswissenschaften. Studien in den Grenzbereichen der Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Bd. 5. Herausgegeben von Erik Boettcher u. a., 125 S., Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1966.     

Substitution and output effects in the neoclassical theory of the firm under imperfect competition

Since 1938, it has been established that the effect produced by a variation in an input price on the use of another input can be decomposed into a substitution effect and an output effect (or scale effect). Nevertheless, this distinction is still denied today by many authors. Here, one tries to establish in which manner imperfect competition in the product market alters the respective importance of substitution and output effects. Some implications are then derived about alternative manners of defining substitutability and complementarity between inputs.     

On two types of stability in the dynamic Leontief model

In this note we examine two types of stability which have been proposed for the dynamic Leontief model. We show how they are related and discuss the relevance of the concepts for empirical work.     

Policy dimensions of the second Outlook: The AAAS contribution

The contribution of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to assist NSF in addressing public policy dimensions in the second Outlook through the identification of vital issues, and the preparation and review of papers that explore those issues, is described. An ad hoc committee, constituted as a subcommittee of the AAAS Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, has served as an advisory body to the project. Two workshops and an “intersociety seminar” were conducted to synthesize the contributions of ten papers. Close and continuous collaboration between AAAS and NSF assured that the issues raised in the AAAS policy papers were being taken into account in preparation of the second Outlook. The extent to which analysis of those issues prove useful in federal policymaking is less certain.     

Repugnance for “menial jobs”

A man's sense of well-being and meaningfulness in work is not so much a matter of external circumstances—the kind of job he has—as it is of his deepdown belief that he is a worthy human being. If he lacks that, any job can seem dissatisfying and “menial.” Executives may suffer from this (or related behaviors) as much as assembly-line workers.     

Golden Parachute as a Compensation-Shifting Mechanism

We demonstrate how a golden parachute can be used to improvethe target shareholders' net return by partially shifting themanagerial compensation burden to the buyer through a higheracquisition price. Consistent with the empirical observations,we show that (1) the golden parachute will be contingent ona change-of-control rather than solely on the manager's layoff,(2) the golden parachute will be promised early, for example,at the time of the manager's employment, not just in the faceof a takeover or a merger, (3) the shareholders would want toextend its coverage to other employees, and (4) the size ofthe parachute can be much larger than the manager's annual compensation.We also examine the effect of a golden parachute on the managerialincentive scheme.     

Are family firms really superior performers?

Although international evidence suggests that families may be unhelpful to firm performance, recent analyses of U.S. public companies indicate that family firms outperform. This study probes these contrasting findings by investigating more fine-grained measures of family business in the U.S. Specifically, it makes a fundamental but neglected distinction between lone founder businesses in which no relatives of a founder are involved, and true family businesses that do include multiple family members as major owners or managers. The research also seeks to overcome issues of endogeneity and selection bias by examining both Fortune 1000 firms and a random sample of 100 much smaller public companies. The results show that findings are indeed highly sensitive both to the way in which family businesses are defined and to the nature of the sample. Fortune 1000 firms that include relatives as owners or managers never outperform in market valuation, even during the first generation. Only businesses with a lone founder outperform. Moreover neither lone founder nor family firms exhibited superior valuations within a randomly drawn sample of companies. Our results confirm the difficulty of attributing superior performance to a particular governance variable.     

Factor Endowments and Production in European Regions

This paper analyses patterns of production across 14 industries in 45 regions from 7 European countries since 1975. We estimate an equation from neoclassical trade theory that relates an industry’s share of a region’s GDP to factor endowments, relative prices and technology. The strict version of the Heckscher–Ohlin model that assumes identical relative prices and technology is rejected against more general alternatives. However, factor endowments play a statistically significant and quantitatively important role in explaining production patterns. Factor endowments are more successful at explaining patterns of production in aggregate industries (Agriculture, Manufacturing and Services) than in disaggregated industries within manufacturing. JEL no. F11, F14, R13