How Do Debit Cards Affect Cash Demand? Survey Data Evidence

This paper analyzes how EFT-POS payments and ATM withdrawals affect cash demand. In particular, survey data about Austrian individuals are employed to estimate a purse cash demand equation, which takes account of sample selection effects. The results reveal that purse cash demand is significantly and sizably affected by debit card usage and that there are significant differences in cash demand for individuals with different debit card usage frequencies. In addition, the effect of EFT-POS payments on cash use at the point-of-sale is discussed on the basis of data from a consumer transaction survey.     

An Input–Output Analysis of the Nonprofit Sector in the USA and Germany

This paper presents an exploratory input–output analysis of the nonprofit sectors in former West Germany and the USA based on the conceptual and data structure provided by the System of National Accounts. When compared with the USA, the West German nonprofit sector catered more to government demands. A higher proportion of West German nonprofit services went to government and a smaller proportion went to households. In terms of the multiplier effect of nonprofit output, we find that an additional dollar of nonprofit services delivered to households and/or government induced indirectly an additional 83 cents of business output in the USA. By comparison, West Germany's nonprofit sector had a lower multiplier effect, with 43 Pfennig per DM1. We also find that businesses have a much larger stake in nonprofit production as intermediate suppliers when compared to their role as intermediate consumers. The economic position the nonprofit sector occupies in both countries is that of a producing sector, taking inputs from businesses and providing outputs for households and governments. This general structural characteristic suggests that the nonprofit sector is particularly sensitive to changes in government policies as well as to shifts in private household incomes, yet relatively insensitive to demand changes in other industries.     

Brauchen wir eine europäische Rating-Agentur?

L?sungsvorschlag Die Rating-Agenturen stehen weiterhin in der ?ffentlichen Kritik, weil ihnen vorgeworfen wird, die Finanzkrise durch falsche Bewertungen mitverursacht zu haben. Aktuell stehen verschiedene Reformvorschl?ge im Raum. Die Autoren schlagen einen Europ?ischen Rating-Fonds vor.     

Wer z?hlt die Toten, kennt die Orte

Results of news research generally show that, apart from the countries?? status, regionalism is the most dominant factor in foreign reporting. Such results are usually based on studies that exclude the effect the characteristics of events can have on news coverage. Therefore, the relevance of these results is limited because they do not allow comparing the influence of country characteristics and event characteristics. Our study takes a different path by attempting to isolate the effect of event characteristics from that of country characteristics. To this end we analyzed the coverage on earthquakes in three leading German news media. The results show: The effect of event characteristics heavily outweighs the effect of country characteristics. Nevertheless, the latter also proved to be relevant, especially for television, sometimes disassociated and sometimes interacting with event characteristics to manifest their effect.     

On the different “worlds” of intra-organizational knowledge management: Understanding idiosyncratic variation in MNC cross-site knowledge-sharing practices

This qualitative field study investigated cross-site knowledge sharing in a small sample of multinational corporations in three different MNC business contexts (global, multidomestic, transnational). The results disclose heterogeneous “worlds” of MNC knowledge sharing, ultimately raising the question as to whether the whole concept of MNC knowledge sharing covers a sufficiently unitary phenomenon to be meaningful. We derive a non-exhaustive typology of MNC knowledge-sharing practices: self-organizing knowledge sharing, technocratic knowledge sharing, and best practice knowledge sharing. Despite its limitations, this typology helps to elucidate a number of issues, including the latent conflict between two disparate theories of MNC knowledge sharing, namely “sender–receiver” and “social learning” theories (Noorderhaven & Harzing, 2009). More generally, we develop the term “knowledge contextualization” to highlight the way that firm-specific organizational features pre-define which knowledge is considered to be of special relevance for intra-organizational sharing.     

EU-Investitionsförderung für kleine und mittlere Unternehmen in Südeuropa: empfehlenswert?

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, has repeatedly pointed out that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face major constraints to access to credit and that removing these constraints could contribute to reducing unemployment. According to press reports, the new president of the EU Commission and even the European Central Bank are also considering low-cost loans for national banks if they provide credit for SMEs. It is argued theoretically and empirically that single-firm investment support does not address the causes of high unemployment and, due to the difficulty in monitoring, could result in great inefficiencies.     

Confidence Bands for Impulse Responses: Bonferroni vs. Wald

In impulse response analysis estimation uncertainty is typically displayed by constructing bands around estimated impulse response functions. If they are based on the joint asymptotic distribution possibly constructed with bootstrap methods in a frequentist framework, often individual confidence intervals are simply connected to obtain the bands. Such bands are known to be too narrow and have a joint coverage probability lower than the desired one. If instead the Wald statistic is used and the joint bootstrap distribution of the impulse response coefficient estimators is taken into account and mapped into the band, it is shown that such a band is typically rather conservative. It is argued that, by using the Bonferroni method, a band can often be obtained which is smaller than the Wald band.