Arzthaftung auf der Grundlage von Statistiken

The evidence-based medicine describes the effectiveness of medical therapies by statistical success rates. It’s results can serve as standards of healthcare in medical malpractice liability cases. In the following paper it is shown that these success rates depend on the subjective judging what success is. They further depend on the way how the won data are mathematically processed. The main problem however is that the success rates are of statistical nature. It is known from mathematical statistics that a statistic result does not give any information about the behaviour of a single and specific element, in case of medicine about the effect of a therapy on a concrete patient. In consequence competitive therapies cannot be compared on the basis of statistical information in a specific medical malpractice case. A doctor must therefore inform the patient prior to a therapy about this situation.     

Product-based cultural change: Is the village global?

We provide a model of product-based cultural change where trade integration leads to cultural convergence. A standard trade model of Dixit–Stiglitz monopolistic competition is coupled with a micro-founded model of cultural dynamics. We show that access to varieties that are attached to a global cultural type changes the incentives of parents to socialize their children and transmit their type. The resulting increase in agents of the global cultural type leads to a magnification of the initial shock. A striking feature of the model is that even temporary shocks to openness may have permanent effects through the changing distribution of preferences in the economy.     

Market liquidity as dynamic factors

We use recent results on the Generalized Dynamic Factor Model (GDFM) with block structure to provide a data-driven definition of unobservable market liquidity and to assess the complementarity of two observed liquidity measures: daily close relative spreads and daily traded volumes for a sample of 426 S&P500 constituents recorded over the years 2004-2006. The advantage of defining market liquidity as a dynamic factor is that, contrary to other definitions, it tackles time dependence and commonness at the same time, without making any restrictive assumptions. Both relative spread and volume in the dataset under study appear to be driven by the same one-dimensional common shocks, which therefore naturally qualify as the unobservable market liquidity shocks.     

Struktureller Wandel und Krisenbewältigung der deutschen Volkswirtschaft

Die Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise wirkt wie ein externer Schock auf die deutsche Konjunktur. Mit zwei makro?konomischen Simulationsmodellen weisen die Autoren nach, dass die Krise in Deutschland allein auf diesen Schock zurückzuführen ist. Die Exportabh?ngigkeit der Wirtschaft führt dazu, dass die Produktion zunehmend volatiler wird. Demgegenüber hat sich die Besch?ftigungsentwicklung stabilisiert und von der Konjunktur abgekoppelt — vor allem dank der staatlichen Hilfen.     

Transition as a process of large-scale institutional change

After several years of transition experience the theory is very poorly developed except in regard to macroeconomtc stabilization. Another key dimension of transition is institutional change to provide the organizational infrastructure for a market economy. Such issues are analysed here through a series of models focusing on: uncertainty of outcomes, complementarities and interactions between reforms, and political constraints. The choice between “big bang” and more gradualist strategies is studied under various conditions and the paper also examines specific incentive and allocative aspects of the transition from socialism to capitalism.     

Seeds of distrust: conflict in Uganda

We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on Uganda’s experience during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document large causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002–2005. We exploit two waves of survey data from Afrobarometer (Round 4 Afrobarometer Survey in Uganda, 2000, 2008), including information on socioeconomic characteristics at the individual level, and geo-referenced measures of fighting events from ACLED. Our identification strategy exploits variations in the both the spatial and ethnic intensity of fighting. We find that more intense fighting decreases generalized trust and increases ethnic identity. The effects are quantitatively large and robust to a number of control variables, alternative measures of violence, and different statistical techniques involving ethnic and spatial fixed effects and instrumental variables. Controlling for the intensity of violence during the conflict, we also document that post-conflict economic recovery is slower in ethnically fractionalized counties. Our findings are consistent with the existence of a self-reinforcing process between conflicts and ethnic cleavages.     

Die Messung der Datenqualität im Controlling

Ohne Zusammenfassung Dr. Mathias Klier dist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am o. g. Lehrstuhl. p]Germany