Structural aspects of social capital: tests for cross-national equivalence in Europe

In this contribution we start from the emerging consensus on the widely disputed phenomenon of social capital. We propose to focus on structural aspects of social capital: formal (contacts within formal organizations) and informal (contacts outside of formal organizations). First, we address methodological questions on the cross-national equivalence of these social capital measurements. Second, we re-visit substantive questions on the patterns of relationships in different European countries. In particular, we inquire to which degree formal and informal social capital can substitute each other, as well as being complementary. We take advantage of recent Eurobaromer data (2004) containing a wide range of valid measurements on both structural aspects of social capital. We find strong evidence for cross-national equivalent measurements regarding formal social capital, employing probabilistic scalogram analyses. For informal social capital, we find strong evidence for configural and metric invariance as well as evidence for partial scalar invariance, employing multi group confirmatory factor analyses. We have to reject the substantive hypothesis on substitution of formal and informal social capital for all countries under consideration, except for Romania. We corroborate the hypothesis on complementarity of formal and informal social capital.     

Sunspot equilibria and the transfer paradox

Summary. We show that for international economies with two countries, in which agents have additively separable utility functions, the existence of sunspot equilibria is equivalent to the occurrence of the transfer paradox. This equivalence enables us to provide some new insights on the relation of the existence of sunspot equilibria and the multiplicity of spot market equilibria.Received: 1 October 2003, Revised: 1 April 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C62, D52, F3, F20, 012.Correspondence to: Thorsten HensWe would like to thank Anke Gerber for carefully checking and improving our arguments. Moreover, we are grateful to Piero Gottardi for his encouragement and his comments, to Andreu Mas-Colell and Mike Jerison for very fruitful discussions and to Klaus Schenk-Hoppé for his support in using . All remaining errors are ours.     

Entwickelt sich ein neues Weltwährungssystem?

Die gro?en Leistungsbilanzdefizite der USA und die spiegelbildlich angeh?uften W?hrungsreserven in US-Dollar haben Kritik an der Schlüsselw?hrung und Vorschl?ge für eine ?nderung der derzeitigen Weltw?hrungsordnung hervorgerufen. Sowohl global als auch regional sind mehr oder weniger Erfolg versprechende Bemühungen um W?hrungsunionen zu verzeichnen. Der Aufsatz ist Werner Ehrlicher gewidmet, der sich in den 80er Jahren mit den „treibenden Kr?ften und Synthesen der W?hrungspolitik“ auseinandergesetzt hat.     

European integration and international co-operation in exchange rate policy

The debate about monetary integration within Europe often distracts attention from the Community's external relations.¹ In the field of monetary and exchange rate policy, however, thought is being given to ways in which countries could co-operate more efficiently at the world level.² How should these ideas be assessed, and what are their chances of success?