Foreign Companies Expand Research and Development in Germany

Original Papers

Foreign Companies Expand Research and Development in Germany     

The Asian crisis and the shaping of 'proper' economies

The latter half of the 1990s saw a new international agendadevelop: the ‘strengthening of the international financialsystem’ through the globalisation of standards and codesof ‘best practice’. The author calls for criticalreflection on this normalisation of ‘free market’capitalism and its global enforcement through a comprehensivesystem of economic standardisation and surveillance. To thisend, Michel Foucault's analysis of liberalism is shown to behighly relevant.     

THE DYNAMICS OF LABOUR'S INCOME SHARES AND THE WAGE CURVE–PHILLIPS CURVE CONTROVERSY

Based on a re-parameterised Blanchflower–Oswald model this paper uses long macro-data from the OECD countries to discriminate between the Philips curve and the wage curve and examines whether there are any differences in wage dynamics between Europe and the United States. The evidence gives support for the Phillips curve and shows that wage dynamics are no different between the United States and Europe.     

Liegt die Zukunft der Kommunikationswissenschaft in der Vergangenheit? Ein Plädoyer für Kontinuität statt Veränderung bei der Analyse von Digitalisierung

At present, social changes are summarized under the term digitalization. At first glance, this requires the development of new concepts, theories, and methods. This article takes a critical look at this assumption. Perceived changes can be understood as an opportunity to work out the constants of human communication. To clarify this argument, in the first part of the article we compare two perspectives: digitalization as changes in reality versus digitalization as a changed view of reality.Digitization is the conversion of continuous signals into discrete signals. While this technical process is more or less irrelevant for communication science, the related social process is of particular concern. However, to a large extent, what constitutes the social side of digitization is unclear. So far, digitalization can probably best be understood as a form of mediatization. Since mediatization is regarded as a social metaprocess, the concept of digitalization lacks empirical substance and the definition of the term remains vague.Due to the lack of meaning, we view digitalization as a change in the way we observe things. From this perspective, we explain the popularity of the concept of digitalization with the help of organizational theories. Following neo-institutionalist arguments, the digitalization discourse can be understood as an identity-forming communication flow. This is reflected in the positioning of the players in the texts that preceded this article. Representatives of standardized social research and interpretative social research present their conceptions of the discipline. Moreover, digitalization can be seen as a rationalized myth. Such myths reflect the expectations of the environment; they are adopted without considering their efficiency. The discipline adopts the attribute, digital, because it has a high positive connotation in the environment of communication science. Ultimately, digitalization appears to be a kind of heuristic for structuring the field with political implications, but not as a theoretically valid research category.Assuming that digitalization is a rationalized myth, consequences can be drawn for the development of theory and methods. We prove the benefit of this changed perspective by discussing the constitutive concepts of communication science. On the theoretical side, many studies have investigated on the topic of public communication. One topos of this research is the blurring of boundaries, e.?g. between public and private or public and interpersonal communication. Instead of highlighting the changes, we seek to determine what remains constant. Traditionally, the public has been associated with mass media and social outcomes. Upon closer inspection and when considering basic communication models, this connection has always been problematic. The blur is caused by definitions of the term and not by changes in the social world. To solve this problem, we propose a redefinition of publicness at the level of interpersonal communication.Methodologically, many approaches have been developed over the past years. For example, webometrics, digital methods and computational methods are promising fields of innovation. However, it is completely unclear how these methods relate to classical methods, such as surveys, content analyses, or observations. If web mining is about tracking user behaviors (digital traces) that were not created for scientific research (process-generated data), it can be seen as a kind of observation. For example, log file analysis is characterized as an observation method in classical methodological textbooks. But the same criterion also applies to websites. Websites are artifacts of human behavior that, for the most part, are not produced for scientific purposes. However, their analysis is usually seen as content analysis, not as observation.This comparison of methods demonstrates that even the distinction between classical methods is unclear. To solve this problem, we propose to better differentiate the different levels involved in the research process. Data collection can be understood as the transfer of empirical facts into data by observation. Data preparation would then be the transformation of data into datasets. Content analysis is a type of data preparation technique. Data analysis transforms data sets into substantial statements about the world. For example, statistics are used for this purpose. New methods can be better located in these known categories. Webometrics, digital methods and computational methods are examples of the automation of the research pipeline components, e.?g. as automated data collection or automated data preparation.We conclude that focusing on continuity offers an opportunity to improve proven concepts and methods instead of replacing them with vague terms. Therefore, we plead for observing continuity in the context of change and not using digitalization and its inherent metaphor of transformation as a lens for analyzing social change.     

Did Oral Interventions by the Indonesian Central Bank Support the Rupiah?

Most previous studies on the effectiveness of oral interventions (statements by officials in support of the exchange rate) focus on industrial countries. The present paper examines whether statements by Bank Indonesia officials (i.e. the central bank of Indonesia) during the period 2004–2007 have had any effect on the level and volatility of the rupiah–dollar exchange rate. Our exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models suggest that oral interventions have little impact on the level of the spot exchange rate, but increase the volatility of the spot exchange rate. Oral interventions indicating a stronger or weaker rupiah also have little influence on the level of the forward exchange rate while neutral statements lead to more volatility.     

Host country language ability and expatriate adjustment: the moderating effect of language difficulty

Research has shown that expatriates' host country language ability is positively associated with their adjustment. But does the advantage of expatriates' language ability depend on the difficulty of the host language? To examine this issue, data were collected from expatriates in two European countries, one with an easy, relatively simple language and the other with a difficult, highly complex language. Consistent with Goal-Setting Theory, results indicated a relative advantage of expatriates' language ability in terms of their adjustment in the host country with the difficult language as opposed to the host country with an easy language.     

Did industrialisation lead to segregation in cities of the nineteenth century? The case of Uppsala 1880–1900

ABSTRACT

How did industrialisation affect land use and residential patterns in cities of the nineteenth century? We use census data and GIS mapping techniques to analyse class segregation and changes to the spatial structure using the case of Uppsala, Sweden between 1880 and 1900. We find that there was a clear concentration of business activity in the central district and in proximity to the transportation hubs. Since these activities became more numerous but remained concentrated, they likely increased land values in the central areas of the city, inducing the lowest social classes to locate away from the centre. However, while these households were pushed out, it did not result in the type of class segregation we observe in many twentieth-century cities. Before the widespread use of transport technologies allowing populations to sprawl, city expansion in the type of middle-sized city that we study led instead to increased density and mixed uses in the central areas.     

The influence of government ideology on monetary policy: New cross‐country evidence based on dynamic heterogeneous panels

Using data of 23 OECD countries over the 1980–2005 period, we examine whether government ideology affects monetary policy, conditional on central bank independence. Unlike previous studies in this line of literature, we estimate central bank behavior using forward‐looking and real‐time data in Taylor rule models and use estimators that allow for heterogeneity across countries. Our models with heterogeneous slope coefficients for the full sample do not suggest partisan effects. We also do not find evidence that central bank behavior is conditioned by the interaction of the ideology of the incumbent government and the electoral calendar.     

Sudden Stops and Currency Crashes

This paper investigates which factors determine whether sudden stops in international capital flows are followed by a currency crash using data for 85 economies in the period 1980–2012. An event study approach is used for an 11‐year window around the crises for nine potential explanatory variables. In addition, the paper estimates discrete‐choice panel models. The results suggest that low trade openness, shallow financial markets, and current account imbalances increase the likelihood that a sudden stop will be followed by a currency crash. Moreover, it is established that the impact of these factors differs across different exchange rate regimes.     

Confidence sets in nonparametric calibration of exponential Lévy models

Confidence intervals and joint confidence sets are constructed for the nonparametric calibration of exponential Lévy models based on prices of European options. To this end, we show joint asymptotic normality in the spectral calibration method for the estimators of the volatility, the drift, the jump intensity and the Lévy density at finitely many points.