Herausforderungen der geldpolitischen Kommunikation

Since many of the most important central banks have pushed their policy rates close to the zero lower bound and have also stretched their quantitative easing measures close to their limits, central bank communication is currently the most important policy tool to influence market expectations. But, if it is such an important tool, what should an optimal communication design look like? Which aspects are important and what are the limitations of this tool? The article revisits these questions in the light of the role of monetary policy in the recent financial crisis.     

The Rationality Behind Immigration Policy Preferences

Summary What drives stated policy preferences about the number of foreigners? Is it self-interest, as stressed by the political economy of immigration? Does social interaction affect this preference, or is the immigration policy preference completely in line with the preference for the aggregate population size? In this paper we distinguish each of these categories and show, for the case of the Netherlands, that each of these elements applies, although the effect of population size preference and self-interest are the most important elements. There is a clear divide across educational levels, as the less educated are more strongly opposed to immigration than the highly educated: the less educated are more likely to think there are too many foreigners. Experience with foreigners arising from social contact matters in positively appreciating immigrants, especially if people meet non-Western foreigners at work and school. Contact with foreigners while going out decreases peoples preference for immigrants. The ethnic concentration of the neighbourhood in which people live does not exert a noticeable effect on the evaluation of the number of foreigners present. The biggest effect on immigration policy preferences is, however, the aggregate population size preference of respondents.JEL classification F22, J15, J61Comments by Frans Willekens, Aat Liefbroer, and two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged.     

Broke,Ill, and Obese: Is There an Effect of Household Debt on Health?

We analyze the association between household indebtedness and different health outcomes using data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel from 1999 to 2009. We control for unobserved heterogeneity by applying fixed‐effects methods and furthermore use a subsample of constantly employed individuals plus lagged debt variables to reduce problems of reverse causality. We apply different measures of household indebtedness, such as the percentage shares of household income spent on consumer credit and home loan repayments (which indicate the severity of household indebtedness) and a binary variable of relative overindebtedness (which indicates a precarious debt situation). We find all debt measures to be strongly correlated with health satisfaction, mental health, and obesity. This relationship vanishes for obesity after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity while it stays significant with respect to worse physical and mental health.     

Big Data aus wettbewerblicher Sicht

Business models in the digital economy often rely on non-monetary payments from users, either in the form of attention for advertising or in the provision of personal data. Gathered data can be used to improve targeted advertising or develop new products and services. Besides these welfare gains, privacy issues may ensue, which can be mitigated by strict transparency provisions and welldefined property rights on data. Big data can furthermore establish barriers to entry if increasing returns to scale are present and thus lead to market concentration. However, the current competition policy framework seems mostly suitable to handle these issues.     

South Korean social enterprises and their networks: On their organizational linkages at the interstice between the third,public, and corporate sectors

Social enterprise and government interactions have become an increasingly prominent theme in the literature on social entrepreneurship, due in part to the pressures confronting the welfare state and the rise of precarious work. This analysis is motivated by the efforts of the government of South Korea to incubate social enterprises since 2007. The constant scaling of the South Korean government's monitored social enterprise certification scheme had led to the registration of approximately 3440 social enterprises as of May 2021. This study documents the interorganizational network behaviour of these enterprises relative to the public sector, corporate sector, and civil society and the social economy. A cluster analysis approach is utilized to analyse network data obtained from a self-administered survey of 103 government-certified social enterprises operating in South Korea. We find that a sizeable number of government-certified social enterprises have diversified networks, as opposed to public sector-centric networks, although such social enterprises are in the minority. This study references social innovation cluster theory to argue that the aforementioned scheme has attained a partial degree of success in facilitating the emergence of social enterprises with diversified networks.However, the majority remain quasi-governmental implementers of government contracts and, generally, do not engage in networking.