UN overestimates the level of development in central and East Europe

Conclusion With the HDI, the UNDP has attempted to construct a new development indicator which conveys the human development of a country by means of a Single National index number. This deserves recognition as a long overdue step towards the removal of Gross Product as the main indicator of development, putting as it does the development and employment of human abilities and resources in the centre of development efforts. The questionable results generated by the HDI show, however, that the index in its current form has many faults. It is time for the UNDP to change the HDI so that it better reflects differences in development between individual countries. Except for a few developing countries, which could see these results as a welcome reason for demanding increasing development aid at the expense of the transformation countries, nobody benefits if the UNDP certifies the Central and East European countries as having a level of development which they are still far from reaching.     

I. Allgemeine wirstchaftslehre

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

II. Allgemeine und angewandte Statistik

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Price uncertainty,future markets and correlation

This paper examines the optimal trade and hedging decisions of a competitive exporting firm which faces concurrently hedgeable exchange rate risk and non‐hedgeable inflation risk. The macroeconomic interaction between exchange rate and domestic inflation rate risk is described by a state variable. The (strong) correlation is pivotal in determining the optimal risk management. It is shown how optimal hedging strategies are affected by state‐dependent preferences of the firm. The optimal hedge policy is to minimize the variation of marginal utility of final wealth across states of nature instead of minimizing the variance of final wealth.     

Employment Effects of Acquisitions: Evidence from Acquired European Firms

This paper examines the employment effects of acquisitions for acquired European firms, taking non-random selection of acquisition targets explicitly into account. Following the empirical firm growth literature and theories put forward in the mergers and acquisition (M&A) literature, we control for convergence dynamics in firm size and distinguish between different types of acquisitions. Empirically, we estimate an endogenous treatment model using accounting data for a newly created sample of acquired and non-acquired European firms. Our results reveal positive employment effects for different types of acquisitions indicating that M&As likely induce efficiency gains.