Ersatz für die Grundsteuer: eine einfache,effiziente, kostengünstige und gerechte Lösung

The highest constitutional court in Germany recently declared that property tax is not in conformity with the constitution. A revision of the property tax laws needs to be undertaken but there is no consensus about a favourable solution yet. One of the main obstacles to a consensus is tackling the new assessments of over 35 million households and the ensuing wave of millions of lawsuits. This paper proposes avoiding those costs by slightly increasing the tax rates of the value added tax and income tax and giving the increased revenues to the municipalities as a substitute for the property tax. This procedure has at least two advantages: (1) It can take up and reflect the distributional effects of the property tax. (2) It is simple, efficient, economic and fair.     

„Politische Kommunikation“: Kern und Rand des Begriffsverständnisses in der Fachgemeinschaft

Terms and concepts are both premises and results of research. Controversies about the basic concepts of a discipline prompt scientific advancement. The aim of this paper is not to put forward an authoritative definition of “political communication,” but—based on prototype semantics—rather to work out what the core of the understanding of this concept is within the scientific community, and what the margin. This is also a test for a method of analyzing the understanding of concepts in general. The basis is a dimensional analysis of the concept of “political communication,” in which a four-dimensional basic structure established by deduction was tested by means of a content analysis of textbook definitions. This leads to a tool for a factorial survey to empirically analyze students’ and lecturers’ understanding of this concept (n = 161). The findings were: At the heart of the understanding of the concept are communication participants deeply involved in the political system in a context of mass media communication. Differences in content and consequences of communication have no influence on the understanding of the concept, and the differences between students and lecturers are small. Comparisons between countries and longitudinal studies are possible on this basis.     

The making of the German minimum wage: a case study of institutional change

In the more recent dualistic theories, Germany is cited as an example of a less solidaristic equilibrium, in which ‘producer coalitions’ between core workforces supposedly unaffected by deregulation and their employers prevented the introduction of a minimum wage. The present article shows that such an equilibrium never existed. Core workforces are being threatened by the outsourcing of jobs to the low‐wage sector. This threat created the breeding ground for a joint campaign by manufacturing and service unions for a minimum wage, which made it possible to amalgamate the unions' considerable resources at company level, their strength being derived from the German system of codetermination. Under pressure from the manufacturing unions in particular, the arrangements for the minimum wage follow, as far as possible, the traditions of free collective bargaining. As a result, the social partners in Germany have a considerably stronger influence on the minimum wage than those in the UK.     

Leisure Opportunities and Fatigue in Employees: A Large Cross-Sectional Study

The aim of the present study was to investigate the association between perceived leisure availability and fatigue in working individuals and the extent it mediates the known association between work hours and fatigue. A sample of 7,154 working individuals (ages 20–59) was drawn from the Austrian Health Survey 2006–07. The associations were determined using stepwise logistic regression analysis. Individuals perceiving few opportunities for leisure activities had a 2.7 greater likelihood of having prolonged fatigue (95% CI = 2.05–3.29) than those with sufficient leisure, after controlling for relevant confounders. Furthermore, the positive association between weekly hours of work and fatigue was mediated to a greater part by leisure opportunities, indicating that working long hours leads to fatigue by limiting leisure opportunities. The results of this study suggest that the perceived availability of leisure is a source of health and well-being in working individuals.     

Value-at-risk forecasts under scrutiny—the German experience

We present an analysis of the VaR forecasts and the P&L series of all 12 German banks that used internal models for regulatory purposes throughout the period from the beginning of 2001 to the end of 2004. One task of a supervisor is to estimate the ‘recalibration factor’, i.e. by how much a bank over- or underestimates its VaR. The Basel traffic light approach to backtesting, which maps the count of exceptions in the trailing year to a multiplicative penalty factor, can be viewed as a way to estimate the ‘recalibration factor’. We introduce techniques that provide a much more powerful inference on the recalibration factor than the Basel approach based on the count of exceptions. The notions ‘return on VaR (RoVaR)’ and ‘well-behaved forecast system’ are keys to linking the problem at hand to the established literature on the evaluation of density forecasts. We perform extensive bootstrapping analyses allowing (1) an assessment of the accuracy of our estimates of the recalibration factor and (2) a comparison of the estimation error of different scale and quantile estimators. Certain robust estimators turn out to outperform the more popular estimators used in the literature. Empirical results for the non-public data are compared to the corresponding results for hypothetical portfolios based on publicly available market data. While these comparisons have to be interpreted with care since the banks' P&L data tend to be more contaminated with errors than the major market indices, they shed light on the similarities and differences between banks' RoVaRs and market index returns.     

‘GUNS OR BUTTER?’ REVISITED: ROBUSTNESS AND NONLINEARITY ISSUES IN THE DEFENSE–GROWTH NEXUS

The relationship between military expenditure and growth is studied taking into account potential nonlinearities and robustness issues in the specification of the econometric models used. Using cross‐country growth regressions and the widely used Feder–Ram model, the partial correlation between defense spending and economic growth appears robust and significantly negative only for countries with a relatively low military expenditure ratio. While the externality effect appears positive in this subgroup of countries, the overall effect turns negative due to the size effect of the military sector.     

Regionalwährungen in Deutschland

Die Emission von Regionalwährungen in Deutschland weist gegenwärtig eine erstaunliche Dynamik auf. Handelt es sich dabei um Gutscheine oder Geld? Wie bedeutend sind diese neuen Zahlungsmittel? Lässt sich dieses Phänomen in ein Gesamtkonzept (in-)offizieller Geldformen integrieren?Dr. Gerhard Rösl, 34, ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Zentralbereich Volkswirtschaft der Deutschen Bundesbank in Frankfurt am Main. Er bringt seine persönliche Auffassung zum Ausdruck.