Länger leben — Siechtum und Pflege ohne Grenzen?

At present, our society and its social security system are not prepared to cope with the challenges resulting from the continuous increase of life expectancy. The traditional concept of disease has to be modified for serving the special needs of the elderly. The optimistic compression of disease theory is an intriguing model, but lacks prove by available data. The anti-aging boom diverts the focus from the social and financial burden that will be unevitably caused by long-term care in the future. If there will not be an — up to now unforeseeable — breakthrough in research, particularly dementia will have an enormous impact on social cost which is often underestimated.     

Experiments in Environmental Economics and Some Close Relatives

Abstract.  It is not only the great number of papers written on environment economics that make it worth dealing with this special branch of experimental research, but the environmental problem in all its facets seems to serve as a catalyst for identifying some methodological problems of the experimental method. For this reason, we will not only try to give an overview of recent experiments in environmental economics but also add some thoughts on the methodological implications of this work. We identify three direct connecting factors for the experimental method and environmental economics. First, social dilemmas are, in many cases, at the core of environmental problems. Experiments are able to test theoretical hypotheses for individual behavior in such social dilemma situations. The second connecting factor comes from the field of applied experimental work and can be characterized as the testbedding of institutional arrangements for the solution of environmental problems. The last direct application of experimental methods to environmental economics concerns the individual evaluation of environmental resources.     

An African fertilizer crisis : Origin and economic effects in the Gambia

In 1985, fertilizer did not arrive in the Gambia in time for the cropping season, since a fertilizer grant was not being properly managed and coordinated. The costs of such policy failure are high. Fertilizer use was down by 64%. In this situation of scarcity, fertilizer use was even more skewed than before towards rich farmers. Output lost was about 10% of agriculture's GDP. Even in normal years in the Gambia, fertilizer use in millet and groundnuts is found far below optimal levels.     

Commonalities in the order book

This paper uses data from one of the most important European stock markets and shows that, in line with predictions from theoretical market microstructure, a small number of latent factors captures most of the variation in stock specific order books. We show that these order book commonalities are much stronger than liquidity commonality across stocks. The result that bid and ask side as well as the visible and hidden parts of the order book exhibit quite specific dynamics is interpreted as evidence that open order book markets attract a heterogeneous trader population in terms of asset valuations and impatience. Quantifying the informational content of the extracted factors with respect to the evolution of the asset price, we find that the factor information shares are highest (about 10%) for less frequently traded stocks. We also show that the informational content of hidden orders is limited.

On a class of law invariant convex risk measures

We consider the class of law invariant convex risk measures with robust representation r_h,p(X)=sup_fò₀¹ [AV@R_s(X)f(s)-f^p(s)h(s)] ds\rho_{h,p}(X)=\sup_{f}\int_{0}^{1} [AV@R_{s}(X)f(s)-f^{p}(s)h(s)]\,ds, where 1≤p<∞ and h is a positive and strictly decreasing function. The supremum is taken over the set of all Radon–Nikodym derivatives corresponding to the set of all probability measures on (0,1] which are absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the position X such that ρ _h,p (X) is real-valued and the supremum is attained. Using variational methods, an explicit formula for the maximizer is given. We exhibit two examples of such risk measures and compare them to the average value at risk.     

Distributional effects of imputed rents in five European countries

Most empirical distributional studies of well-being in developed countries rely on distributions of disposable income. From a theoretical point of view this practice is contentious since a household’s command over resources is determined not only by its spending power over commodities it can buy in the market but also on resources available to the household members through non-market mechanisms such as the in-kind provisions of the welfare state and the value of private non-cash incomes. In developed market economies the most important private non-cash income component is imputed rent from owner-occupied or subsidized accommodation. Employing a wider definition of imputed rent that also allows the analyst to capture income advantages among tenants living in rent-subsidized accommodations of various sorts (including rent-free or reduced-rent households), the present paper examines the differential effects of including imputed rents in the concept of resources in five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy and the UK). The results suggest that in almost all cases, the inclusion of imputed rents in the concept of resources leads to a decline in measured levels of inequality and poverty. The main beneficiaries are outright homeowners and households living in rent-free (or heavily subsidized) accommodation—most often older persons. The inclusion of imputed rents in the concept of resources does not lead to substantial changes in the ranking of the countries according to their level of inequality, despite widespread differences in the rates of home ownership and subsidization across the countries studied here.     

Career patterns of top management team members in five countries: an optimal matching analysis

This paper introduces optimal matching analysis (OMA) to the field of top management research. With this method, we develop six career patterns of top management team (TMT) members from five countries based on their international experience, organizational tenure and professional experience. The results provide strong support for the significance of these patterns, since each country (Denmark, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) shows one to four predominant career patterns of their managers and the occurrence of these patterns also differs significantly between the fields of activity within the TMT (chairperson, head of a division, primary activities and support activities).