Reform des Gemeindesteuersystems—Zurück zur kommunalen Selbstverwaltung

Das heutige kommunale Steuersystem weist insgesamt keine ausreichende Ergiebigkeit auf und hat sich aufgrund wiederholter Eingriffe des Gesetzgebers seit vielen Jahren nicht mehr wachstumsproportional entwickelt. Wie sollte das Gemeindesteuersystem reformiert werden?     

Korruption in Deutschland: Reformmaßnahmen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Zur korrekten Erfassung der staatlichen Verschuldung

Die Haushaltsdefizite und die Staatsverschuldung haben in Deutschland ein hohes Niveau erreicht. Wird aber die staatliche Verschuldung überhaupt korrekt erfasst und bildet die Kameralistik die tatsächlichen Belastungen richtig ab? Lässt sich mit Hilfe der doppelten Buchführung mehr Klarheit gewinnen?     

Die Ablehnung der Softwarepatentrichtlinie: Ein zweifelhafter Erfolg!

Anfang Juli 2005 hat das Europ?ische Parlament die Softwarepatentrichtlinie zurückgewiesen. Nach welchen Regeln werden computerimplementierte Erfindungen derzeit behandelt? Welche Folgen hat die Ablehnung der Richtlinie für die zukünftige Behandlung von Software-Entwicklungen?     

Wer profitiert von der weiteren Erhöhung der Tabaksteuer?

Zum 1. September 2005 wird die dritte Stufe der Tabaksteuererhöhung in Kraft treten nach vorangegangenen Erhöhungen im März und Dezember 2004. Wie wirken sich diese Maßnahmen auf die Steuereinnahmen aus? Wie lässt sich eine Besteuerung des Tabakkonsums ökonomisch rechtfertigen? Wer profitiert von der weiteren Erhöhung der Tabaksteuer?     

The economic costs of weeds on productive land in New Zealand

Here we review published research on the costs of weeds to New Zealand’s pastoral, arable and forestry sectors, and propose an alternative dynamic approach for future research. The studies reviewed had little in common methodologically, often contained guesswork, or were outdated. Their aggregation resulted in a conservative estimate of the cost of weeds to New Zealand’s agricultural economy of $1658 million (2014 NZD). To address deficiencies in previously used methodologies, a dynamic approach is developed and applied to a case study on giant buttercup in dairy pastures. This approach accounts for probable temporal changes in both the geographic extent of the weed and in producer prices and indicates annuitized costs (over the period 2012–2030) of $166 million, $259 million and $592 million for rates of spread of 144, 60 and 20 years for giant buttercup to invade all dairy regions in New Zealand. Comparing the aggregate cost of all weeds to the three productive sectors estimated from the historical data with these ‘dynamic’ estimates for the one species in dairy pasture, indicates that the historical data provide a substantial underestimate of the true aggregate cost of weeds to New Zealand’s agricultural economy.     

Conservative solutions for progress: on solution types when combining QCA with in-depth Process-Tracing

Quality & Quantity - What is the most appropriate QCA solution type when engaging in a multimethod design that includes QCA and in-depth process-tracing (PT)? While either the intermediate or...     

PURCHASING POWER PARITY IN AFRICAN COUNTRIES: EVIDENCE FROM PANEL SURADF TEST

This study reexamines the validity of long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis using a battery of panel unit root tests for 11 developing countries in Africa over the period 1980-2007. Based on the conventional panel unit root tests, we found evidence that the monthly real exchange rates in these countries were mean reverting. By contrast, the series-specific unit root test proposed by Breuer et al. (SURADF) reveals that only six of the 11 RERs series were stationary using the US dollar as reference currency. Additionally, our results reveal that there is stronger evidence of the parity condition with the Rand-based rates than in the other currency-based rates like the US dollar or Euro. We conclude that PPP holds in some, but not all, of the African countries according to the SURADF tests.     

International Financial Reporting Standards in an Emerging Economy: Lessons from Romania

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are a reference point for the modernisation of accounting models in emerging economies. Previous literature documents a diverse IFRS experience, especially among emerging economies. The IFRS implementation strategy and local institutional characteristics shape the way in which the standards are used in practice. We use the Romanian case to illustrate the effect of various contextual factors, some historical, on the process and outcomes of IFRS implementation. We show that IFRS implementation can follow a different pattern in emerging economies.     

The anatomy of returns from moving average trading rules in the Russian stock market

This paper examines the profitability of index trading strategies that are based on dual moving average crossover (DMAC) rules in the Russian stock market over the 2003–2012 period. It contributes to the existing technical analysis (TA) literature by comparing for the first time in emerging markets the relative performance of individual stocks’ trading portfolios with that of trading strategies for the index that consists of the same stocks (i.e., the most liquid stocks of the Moscow Exchange). The results show that the best trading strategies of the in-sample period can outperform buy-and-hold strategy during the subsequent out-of-sample period, although with low statistical significance. In addition, we document the benefits of using DMAC combinations that are much longer than those employed in previous TA literature. Moreover, the decomposition of the full-sample-period performance into separate bull- and bear-period performances shows that the outperformance of the best past index trading strategies over is mostly attributable to the fact that they managed to stay mostly out of the stock market during a dramatic crash caused by the global financial crisis.