XIII. Soziologie und Kultur,Politik und Geschichte

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The welfare state after the great recession

The economic crisis has given rise to significant challenges to the welfare state. Given that welfare expenses account for a large proportion of all state spending in the member countries of the European Union, reducing government spending means cutting welfare measures. Yet social protection, in particular unemployment insurance benefits and minimum income support, has significantly softened the impact of the crisis for millions of individuals. The global recession calls into question the financial viability of current programmes, and the crisis is being used by some as an opportunity to roll back the welfare state permanently. The present Forum discusses challenges to and opportunities for the welfare state after the crisis.     

Women over 40, foreigners of color,and other missing persons in globalizing mediascapes: understanding marketing images as mirrors of intersectionality

ABSTRACT

Media diversity studies regularly invoke the notion of marketing images as mirrors of racism and sexism. This article develops a higher-order concept of marketing images as “mirrors of intersectionality.” Drawing on a seven-dimensional study of coverperson diversity in a globalizing mediascape, the emergent concept highlights that marketing images reflect not just racism and sexism, but all categorical forms of marginalization, including ableism, ageism, colorism, fatism, and heterosexism, as well as intersectional forms of marginalization, such as sexist ageism and racist multiculturalism. Fueled by the legacies of history, aspirational marketing logics, and an industry-wide distribution of discriminatory work, marketing images help to perpetuate multiple, cumulative, and enduring advantages for privileged groups and disadvantages for marginalized groups. In this sense, marketing images, as mirrors of intersectionality, are complicit agents in the structuration of inequitable societies.     

Rogues and Deviants: a game-theoretic perspective on opportunism in strategic alliances

ABSTRACT

This research examines how relational factors, such as monitoring, relative alliance identity (RAI), and trust, influence opportunism and, consequently, alliance performance. The authors suggest that the strategic alliances literature would benefit from recognising that opportunism does not always originate from the firm (rogue opportunism), but can also originate from individual employees (deviant opportunism). Hypotheses are tested in a multi-method approach within a business simulation and a cross-sectional sample of alliance executives. The results demonstrate a U-shaped relationship between trust and opportunism; however, monitoring moderates the relationship such that at high levels of trust, opportunism is practically non-existent. Further, results indicate that employees’ identification with the alliance impedes opportunism. Additionally, both types of opportunistic behaviours negatively impact the performance of partner firms and alliances.     

Market imperfections and crowdfunding

Small Business Economics - This article is the first one that considers the choice between the different types of crowdfunding and traditional financing under different types of market...     

Budgetdefizite und Finanzierungsüberschüsse

In den Stabilit?ts- und Wachstumspakt ist die 3%-Defizitgrenze für den Staatshaushalt vor allem deshalb eingebaut worden, weil eine zu hohe Beanspruchung des gemeinsamen Kapitalmarktes der Eurozone verhindert werden sollte. Welche Erkenntnisse lassen sich zur tats?chlichen Inanspruchnahme des Kapitalmarktes aus den Finanzierungssalden der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung gewinnen? Wie ist bei solch einer Betrachtung das Argument der Generationengerechtigkeit zu beurteilen? Welche Folgen h?tte gegenw?rtig eine Haushaltskonsolidierung?     

The long-run dynamics of product and process innovations for a multi-product monopolist

This paper introduces the dynamical framework which combines product and process innovations. The model contributes to the theoretical literature on innovations in two ways. First, it permits for the simultaneous dynamics of both types of innovations which is rarely considered in the literature. Second, the products being generated by the innovations are heterogeneous in their investment characteristics. This allows for the formation of the dynamic interdependency between both types of innovations. As a result, the steady-state levels of process innovations for each product are different and influence the dynamics of product innovations in turn.     

Accounting for missing data in M-estimation: a general matching approach

This paper addresses M-estimation of conditional mean functions when observations are missing at random. The usual approach of correcting for missing data, when the missing data mechanism is ignorable, is inverse probability weighting (IPW). An alternative semiparametric M-estimator which involves local polynomial matching techniques is proposed and its asymptotic distribution is derived. Like IPW, the proposed estimation approach has a double robustness property for the estimation of unconditional means. Monte Carlo evidence suggests slightly better finite sample properties of the semiparametric M-estimator relatively to IPW. A version of the proposed estimator is applied to estimate the impact of noncognitive skills on wages in Germany for two different educational treatment regimes.     

Foreign currency debt, risk premia and macroeconomic volatility

This paper studies the relationships between foreign currency debt, macroeconomic volatility, and risk premia in a model of a small open emerging market economy. The external value of the local currency is counter-cyclical, so that foreign currency debt requires larger repayments than local currency debt in bad states of nature. The level of foreign currency-denominated debts, therefore, affects the volatility of aggregate demand and by extension of the exchange rate. Exchange rate volatility is in turn an important determinant of the risk premium on local currency debt. Finally, this risk premium is a major factor in the choice of local versus foreign currency for emerging market borrowers. The mutual endogeneity of foreign currency debt, risk premia, and macroeconomic volatility creates important feedback effects in the economy: small increases in international risk aversion may entail large amplification effects on macroeconomic volatility since domestic borrowers substitute towards cheaper but riskier foreign currency debt finance.