Europeanizing the labour market: Employee mobility and company recruiting methods

With the completion of the single European market steps are to be made towards eliminating remaining impediments to the free movement of labour between Community countries such as an inadequate flow of information or the non-recognition of educational or training qualifications. How do companies respond to the extension of national labour markets by a European component?     

Biases in the allocation of foreign aid: Some new evidence

The purpose of the paper is to examine the pattern of bilateral and multilateral foreign aid allocations during the 1970s. Cross-section and pooled regressions for a set of roughly 90 countries where aid allocations have been relatively free of gross political overtones confirm the well-known bias in per capita aid flows against populous countries, butdo not provide evidence of a middle income bias. Instead, regressions on 1976–1978 aid flows and per capita incomes of recipient countries seem to suggest a low income bias, i.e. low income countries received more aid per capita than middle income countries. Yet, there was asample of extremely poor countries which remained neglected in foreign aid allocations.     

Permanent prices,expected price changes,and the demand for money

This paper investigates the empirical validity of the distinction between measured and permanent prices for cash balance decisions. The use of permanent prices has been advocated by Friedman over twenty five years ago, but the idea has received little attention in the literature. Using Canadian quarterly data, we find that the permanent price hypothesis yields meaningful estimates of the demand for money, but it does not appear to contribute significantly to our understanding of cash balance decisions. A number of assumptions about the relationship between the elasticities of income, price, and price change expectations are tested as well.     

Kartellrecht und GKV

Protagonists of the social health insurance (GKV) often consider competition law as being a disturbing factor for the realisation of the solidarity principle. As a consequence, there have taken place ideological struggles over the applicability of competition rules to health insur-ance funds for years. The paper deals with the four current main battle zones, i.?e., the general applicability of EC competition law to social health insurance funds, the relevance of Sect. 69 of the Social Security Code V (SGB V) as amended, the merger control of health insurance funds and the applicability of procurement law to contracts between health insurance funds and their health care providers. The focus is on the issue whether health insurance funds could be classified as undertakings within the meaning of competition law. The paper shows that the social health insurance and the private health insurance (PKV) converge more and more due to legal intrusions. It follows that exclusions from competition law are less and less legitimate. This is especially true for the offer of comprehensive health insurance including elective rates to voluntarily insured parties.     

Market orientation: Review, refinement, and roadmap

Over the past ten years, significant progress has been made in the market orientation area. Scholarly attention has focused on the definition, measurement, and impact of a market orientation. Attention has also focused on organizational drivers of market orientation and its enhancement. Despite progress, several research challenges remain and rich opportunities exist for further work in the area. This paper critically reviews the state-of-the-art and offers a roadmap for future work in the area. The review primarily focuses on (1) the meaning of market orientation, (2) its relationship with several emerging topics/themes in the literature (e.g., market information processing, organizational learning, knowledge use, industry foresight and driving markets), (3) the quality of market-oriented behaviors, (4) impact of market orientation, and (5) issues in enhancing market orientation. We conclude with a conceptual synthesis and methodological suggestions.