Einkommensentstehung als Verteilungsfaktor

From the end of the Second World War onwards, a middle class emerged in Germany that was, by international standards, broadly based. The economic basis for this middle class was good pay and relatively low income differentiation, which was the result of collective agreement on a high coverage rate. Since the mid-1990s, however, the economic basis of middle-class prosperity and security has been crumbling. In the primary distribution, the share of households in the middle-income groups fell by almost ten percentage points, from 56.4 per cent to 48 per cent, between 1992 and 2013. The welfare state was no longer able to compensate fully for this unequal primary distribution. An increase in coverage by collective agreements, the re-regulation of atypical employment forms and the elimination of all incentives to take marginal, part-time jobs are the keys to strengthening the middle-income groups in Germany.     

R-estimation of the parameters of a multiple regression model with measurement errors

We consider the theory of R-estimation of the regression parameters of a multiple regression models with measurement errors. Using the standard linear rank statistics, R-estimators are defined and their asymptotic properties are studied as robust alternatives to the least squares estimator. This paper fills the gap of the rank theory for the estimation of regression parameters with measurement error models. Some simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the R-estimators.     

Women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa: An institutional theory analysis from a social marketing point of view

This paper takes an international marketing (IM) approach to the study of women entrepreneurs (WEs) in sub-Saharan Africa by examining factors in the environments in which WEs operate. The goal is to understand better how environmental barriers of many types impact the efforts of WEs. Using institutional theory-driven analysis, findings from a wide range of literature are integrated, with special attention to issues of the social legitimacy of women as entrepreneurs. Results of this study demonstrate that WEs in sub-Saharan Africa face a daunting array of challenges arising from the socio-cultural, economic, legal, political, and technological environments in which they live. Moreover, unfavourable conditions in local regulatory, normative, and cognitive systems place additional burdens on women who desire to become entrepreneurs or to expand an entrepreneurial business. In order to address these gender-specific problems, social marketing is recommended with the goals of (1) changing social beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that negatively affect Wes, and (2) improving conditions in institutional systems and market environments. Recommendations in the paper suggest how to bring about changes in attitudes towards women, work and their independent enterprise. In conclusion, directions for future scholarly research are identified.     

Assessing financial instability: The case of Brazil

In this paper we use the arbitrage pricing theory to infer the probability of financial institution failure for banks in Brazil. We build an index of financial stability for Brazilian banks. Empirical results seem to provide evidence that after the Russian crisis in 1998, systemic risk has increased in the country but this risk has decreased over time through 2002. Furthermore, for individual major banks the probability of failure has decreased monotonically after the Russian crisis with the adoption of a floating exchange rate regime, an inflation-targeting framework and the introduction of the new payment system.     

Off the cliff and back? Credit conditions and international trade during the global financial crisis

We study the collapse of international trade flows during the global financial crisis using detailed data on monthly US imports. We show that credit conditions were an important channel through which the crisis affected trade volumes, by exploiting the variation in the cost of capital across countries and over time, as well as the variation in financial vulnerability across sectors. Countries with higher interbank rates and thus tighter credit markets exported less to the US during the peak of the crisis. This effect was especially pronounced in sectors that require extensive external financing, have limited access to trade credit, or have few collateralizable assets. Exports of financially vulnerable industries were thus more sensitive to the cost of external capital than exports of less vulnerable industries, and this sensitivity rose during the financial crisis. The quantitative implications of our estimates for trade volumes highlight the large real effects of financial crises and the potential gains from policy intervention.     

The Erosion of the German Middle Class

Since the mid-1990s, income inequality has increased more sharply in Germany than in many other European countries, as the economic basis of middle-class prosperity and security has crumbled. The new minimum wage, an increase in coverage by collective agreements, the re-regulation of atypical employment forms and the elimination of incentives to take marginal, part-time jobs are the keys to strengthening the middle-income groups in Germany.     

Income Mobility and Income Inequality in Scottish Agriculture

The paper explores the distributional consequences of farm income mobility in Scotland, focusing on the extent to which farm income inequality is a chronic as opposed to a temporary phenomenon and on the nature of the dynamic processes driving changes in farm income inequality over time. The empirical results reveal that the majority of farm income inequality was long‐run or structural in nature, reflecting differences in both farm business size and farm‐specific factors such as land quality, managerial ability and business structures. Evidence of absolute convergence in farm incomes is explained by short‐run adjustments towards equilibrium or target incomes conditional upon prices, technology and farm business size, with farm business growth conditional upon survival found to have had no significant redistributive effect.     

Credit constraints, equity market liberalizations and international trade

This paper provides evidence that credit constraints are an important determinant of international trade flows. I exploit shocks to the availability of external finance and examine the impact of equity market liberalizations on the export behavior of 91 countries in the 1980-1997 period. I show that liberalizations increase exports disproportionately more in financially vulnerable sectors that require more outside finance or employ fewer collateralizable assets. This result is not driven by cross-country differences in factor endowments and is independent of simultaneous trade policy reforms. Moreover, it obtains with equal strength in the full panel of countries as well as in both panel and event-study analyses of countries which removed capital controls during the sample period. Finally, the effects of liberalizations are more pronounced in economies with initially less active stock markets, indicating that foreign equity flows may substitute for an underdeveloped domestic financial system. Similarly, opening equity markets has a greater impact in the presence of higher trade costs caused by restrictive trade policies.     

Wealth and Income Inequality in Europe

While it has long been apparent that global levels of wealth and income inequality have been steadily increasing since the 1970s, the issue received scant attention in Europe until the recent fi nancial crisis and the resulting Great Recession illuminated for the general public just how great the chasm between the very rich and everybody else had grown. This realisation was coupled with an increased focus on inequality among economists and other academics, leading to a fresh drive for policy ideas to remedy the alarming trend. This Forum comprises a diverse range of viewpoints on the recent history and dynamics of inequality within Europe, each striving to defi ne the root causes in the various countries being examined. The defi nition of these causes, of course, can inform the direction of policies aimed at alleviating the growing inequality in many European countries and thereby curtail one of the major political and social issues of our time.