Nachhaltigkeit in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft

The scientific advisory board of the federal ministry of economic affairs and climate protection conducted a symposium on sustainability at its 500th meeting. The UN’s sustainable development goals play an increasingly important role in economic policy and regulation. This article gives a survey of the trade-offs and implementation problems that were discussed at the symposium, in particular the operationalisation of sustainability in welfare economics, the implementation of sustainability goals in economic law, the relationship between competition policy and sustainability, the impact of sustainability concerns on monetary policy, and finally, supply chain regulation and sustainability objectives.

     

Patterns of Welfare Dependence before and after a Reform: Evidence from First Generation Immigrants and Natives in Germany

This paper studies the patterns of welfare dependence among first generation immigrants and natives in Germany before and after a substantial recent reform of the welfare system. Using data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel Study, the analysis presents life cycle trajectories of transfer receipt for immigrants and natives and studies the correlation between contextual factors and transfer receipt. We find no statistically significant differences in the probability of transfer receipt between immigrants and natives once socioeconomic characteristics are taken into account. Being a single parent, labor market status, and human capital are most closely correlated with the incidence of transfer receipt for both natives and immigrants. Interestingly, recent welfare reforms did not reverse prior patterns of welfare dependence.     

Gender Barriers to the Female Mentor – Male Protégé Relationship

This paper explores gender barriers to the formation of the female mentor – male protégé relationship. The authors consider both physiological as well as social gender as a way to help understand the scarcity of these relationships. A number of gender-related factors are considered, including organizational demographics, relational demography, sexual liaisons, gender stereotypes, gender behaviors, and power dynamics. The paper concludes with directions for future research that will help provide further insights into the development and success of the female mentor – male protégé relationship.     

Rational Poverty or Poor Rationality? The Take‐up of Social Assistance Benefits

In several countries social assistance dependence has been increasing since the 1980s. After surveying the theoretical and empirical take-up literature, this study presents estimates of recent rates of non take-up of social assistance benefits. Once methodological shortcomings of prior estimations are corrected, the results show that take-up has fallen recently and thus cannot explain the rising welfare receipt. Following theoretical predictions, the probability that a rational individual takes up social assistance increases with the expected benefit amount and duration, and falls with application cost and stigma. More than half of all households eligible for transfers under the German social assistance program did not claim their benefits.     

Influence of partner diversity on collaborative public R&D project outcomes: A study of application and commercialization of nanotechnologies in the Netherlands

Several studies have indicated the importance of public R&D in the transfer and commercialization of nanotechnology. So far, few have focused on university–industry interaction and collaboration performance. In this study, we investigate the impact of technological diversity and value chain complementarity of partners on public nanotechnology R&D projects' performance. We enriched a database on the commercial outcomes of technology research projects from the Dutch Technology Foundation STW. To test our hypotheses, we selected 169 nanotechnology research projects from the database, which started in a five-year period from 1998 until 2003. Project performance was measured five years after completion of the project. Technological diversity has a U-shaped effect on the projects' commercial performance. Findings show a strong positive impact of value chain complementarity of partners on both application development and commercial performance of the projects.. The framework introduced in this study allows an evaluation of the effects of technological diversity and value chain complementarity on application development and the commercial performance of public R&D projects.