Zur Nachhaltigkeit der Generationenverträge: Eine Diagnose der Kranken- und Pflegeversicherung

Employing the generational accounting approach, this paper analyses the stance of fiscal policy in Germany. We find that fiscal policy is presently not sustainable, which is mainly due to pay-as-you-go financed social insurance systems. In order to illustrate the relative impact, we isolate the Public Health Insurance and the Public Long Term Care Insurance. Our findings suggest that without radical reforms the implicit debt burden for future generations might reach a magnitude of more than two times the annual GDP and contribution rates to both schemes will explode during the next three decades.     

Eastern European Public Opinion on Economic Issues:

Abstract Survey data on Eastern Europe is investigated with respect to two major questions: How do people view the creation of a market economy and how do they assess the speed of economic transformation and privatization. These questions are analyzed by looking at the development over 1990 to 1992 and by performing regressions with a number of demographic variables as regressors. Some findings are that the opposition to the creation of a market economy is increasing over time, that in Hungary and Poland people are quite satisfied with the speed of transformation as compared to Czechs and Slovaks, that the Polish are divided over the speed of privatization, and that the relationship between the speed of transformation and privatization is not considered to be very tight by the respondents.     

Rising wage inequality,the decline of collective bargaining,and the gender wage gap

This paper investigates the increase in wage inequality, the decline in collective bargaining, and the evolution of the gender wage gap in West Germany between 2001 and 2006. Based on detailed linked employer–employee data, we show that wage inequality is rising strongly — driven not only by real wage increases at the top of the wage distribution, but also by real wage losses below the median. Coverage by collective wage bargaining plummets by 16.5 (19.1) percentage points for male (female) employees. Despite these changes, the gender wage gap remains almost constant, with some small gains for women at the bottom and at the top of the wage distribution. A sequential decomposition analysis using quantile regression shows that all workplace related effects (firm effects and bargaining effects) and coefficients for personal characteristics contribute strongly to the rise in wage inequality. Among these, the firm coefficients effect dominates, which is almost exclusively driven by wage differences within and between different industries. Labor demand or firm wage policy related effects contribute to an increase in the gender wage gap. Personal characteristics tend to reduce wage inequality for both males and females, as well as the gender wage gap.     

Federal Reserve Communications and Emerging Equity Markets

Work on the impact of U.S. monetary policy on emerging financial markets mostly focuses on official target rate announcements; empirical evidence using data on informal communication channels, such as speeches, is scant. Employing a unique data set covering formal and informal communication channels in a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model framework, we provide comprehensive evidence on the effects of U.S. monetary policy on 17 emerging equity market returns over the period 1998–2009. We find, first, that both monetary policy actions and communications have a significant impact on market returns. Second, target rate change surprises are an important driver of emerging market returns. However, informal communications—particularly when taking into account their higher frequency—have a larger (cumulative) influence on returns than do target rate surprises. Third, during the recent financial crisis, central bank communication played an even more pronounced role. Finally, American emerging markets react more to communications than do non‐American markets.     

Daily pricing of emerging market sovereign CDS before and during the global financial crisis

In this paper, we study the determinants of daily spreads for emerging market sovereign credit default swaps (CDSs) over the period April 2002–December 2011. Using GARCH models, we find, first, that daily CDS spreads for emerging market sovereigns are more related to global and regional risk premia than to country-specific risk factors. This result is particularly evident during the second subsample (August 2007–December 2011), where neither macroeconomic variables nor country ratings significantly explain CDS spread changes. Second, measures of US bond, equity, and CDX High Yield returns, as well as emerging market credit returns, are the most dominant drivers of CDS spread changes. Finally, our analysis suggests that CDS spreads are more strongly influenced by international spillover effects during periods of market stress than during normal times.     

Contextual priming of visual information in advertisements

Can the program context significantly influence the perception of an ad? Past advertising research has demonstrated contextual priming effects on the verbal part of an ad. Using public service and clothing advertisements, the present two experiments provide evidence for priming effects on visual components. Moreover, in extensive debriefing sessions, participants reported that they were not consciously aware of the influence of the contextual prime-suggesting the presence of implicit memory effects. Future research should focus on advertisements containing both verbal and visual information to better understand context influences on advertisements. 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.