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- Wirtschaftswissenschaften (2060) (remove)
The organisation of legislative chambers and the consequences of parliamentary procedures have been among the most prominent research questions in legislative studies. Even though democratic elections not only lead to the formation of a government but also result in an opposition, the literature has mostly neglected oppositions and their role in legislative chambers. This paper proposes to fill this gap by looking at the legislative organisation from the perspective of opposition players. The paper focuses on the potential influence of opposition players in the policy-making process and presents data on more than 50 legislative chambers. The paper shows considerable variance of the formal power granted to opposition players. Furthermore, the degree of institutionalisation of opposition rights is connected to electoral systems and not necessarily correlated with other institutional characteristics such as regime type or the size of legislative chambers.
The “output-orientation” is omnipresent in teacher education. In order to evaluate teachers' and students' performances, a wide range of different quantitative questionnaires exist worldwide. One important goal of teaching evaluation is to increase the quality of teaching and learning. The author argues, that standard evaluations which are typically made at the end of the semester are problematic due to two reasons. The first one is that some of the questions are too general and don`t offer concrete ideas as to what kind of actions can be taken to make the courses better. The second problem is that the evaluation is mostly made when the course is already over. Because of this criticism, Apelojg invented the Felix-App which offers the possibility to give feedback in real-time by asking for the emotions and needs that occur during different learning situations. The idea is very simple: positive emotions and satisfied needs are helpful for the learning process. Negative emotions and unsatisfied needs have negative effects on the learning process. First descriptive results show, that “managing emotions” during classes can have positive effects on both motivation and emotions.
Digital software platforms allow third parties to develop applications and thus extend their functionality. Platform owners provide platform boundary resources that allow for application development. For developers, platform integration, understood as the employment of platform resources, helps to realize application functionality effectively. Simultaneously, it requires integration effort and increases dependencies. Developers are interested to know whether integration contributes to success in hypercompetitive platform settings. While aspects of platform participation have been studied, research on a comprehensive notion of integration and related implications are missing. By proposing a platform integration model, this study supports a better understanding of integration. Concerning dynamics related to integration, effects were tested using information from over 82,000 Apple AppStore applications. Regression model analysis reveals that application success and customer satisfaction is positively influenced by platform integration. To achieve superior results, developers should address multiple aspects of integration, such as devices, data, the operating system, the marketplace as well as other applications, and provide updates. Finally, the study highlights the importance for all platform participants and their possibilities to employ integration as a strategic instrument.
Purpose:
While industrial marketers have long bundled their products and services to sell them as packages, to what extent should negotiators also rely on packaging their offers? Clearly, negotiating at a package level can tax the cognitive capacity of the involved parties at some point. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the impact of the number and type of issues that should be negotiated simultaneously to leverage the package strategy efficiently and effectively in multi-issue buyer-seller negotiations.
Design/methodology/approach:
The authors conducted and analyzed negotiation simulations with 676 students from 2 public universities.
Findings:
The authors’ results suggest that negotiating three out of six issues simultaneously is the least efficient but most effective strategy in multi-issue buyer-seller negotiations. Moreover, they found that bundling distributive and integrative issues is more efficient and effective than only bundling distributive or integrative negotiation issues in a package offer.
Originality/value:
Past research has examined the impact of negotiating a package as compared to each issue separately; however, little empirical attention has been directed toward understanding how to apply a package strategy in complex multi-issue negotiations.
This survey provides an overview of topics related to the history of economics that have been discussed within the last two years in journal articles. The survey format has been started by History of Economic Ideas last year with the survey by Giulia Bianchi (2016) and is aimed to increase the visibility of research in the history of economics. The emphasis of our survey is on the big three journals in the history of economics: the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought and History of Political Economy. We also included additional journals that frequently publish articles related to the history of economics. These include, in alphabetical order, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Contributions to Political Economy, Economic Thought, the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, History of Economic Thought and Policy, the History of Economics Review, the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Economic Methodology, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, OE conomia, Oxford Economic Papers and Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology.
International organizations (IOs) try to incorporate policy-specific best practices and country-specific knowledge to increase well-informed decision-making. However, the relative contribution of the two kinds of knowledge to organizational performance is insufficiently understood. The article addresses this gap by focusing on the role of staff in World Bank performance. It posits that country-specific knowledge, sectoral knowledge, and their combination positively contribute to World Bank projects. The argument is tested drawing on a novel database on the tenure, nationality, and educational background of World Bank Task Team Leaders. Three findings stand out. First, country-specific knowledge seems to matter on average, while sectoral knowledge does not. Second, there is some evidence that staff that combine both kinds of knowledge are empowered to make more positive contributions to performance. Third, the diversity and relevance of experience, not length of tenure, are associated with more success. The findings contribute to discussions on international bureaucracies by highlighting how differences between the knowledge of individual staff shape their decision-making and performance. IOs could better tap into the existing resources in their bureaucracies to enhance their performance by rotating staff less frequently between duty stations.
COVID-19 has demonstrated the importance of data for scientific policy advice. Mechanisms by which data is generated, shared, and ultimately lead to policy responses are crucial for enhancing transparency and legitimacy of decisions. At the same time, the volume, complexity and volatility of data are growing. Against this background, mechanisms, actors, and problems of data-driven scientific policy advice are analysed. The study reveals role conflicts, ambiguities, and tensions in the interaction between scientific advisors and policy-makers. The assumption of a technocratic model, promoted by well-established structures and functioning processes of data-driven government, cannot be confirmed. Reality largely corresponds to the pragmatic model, in parts also the decisionist model, albeit with dysfunctional characteristics.
Experiment Unterricht
(2014)
DieFelix-App
(2020)
Emotionen besitzen eine große Bedeutung bei Lernprozessen. Nach der „Control-Value“-Theorie wird davon ausgegangen, dass positive Emotionen sich positiv, nega tive Emotionen sich hingegen negativ auf den Lernprozess auswirken können. Die Felix-App greift solche Effekte auf, um das Befinden und die Bedürfnisse von Lehrenden und Lernenden in Echtzeit zu erfassen und direkt in Form anschaulicher Grafiken zurück-zumelden. Der theoretische Hintergrund und Best-Practice-Beispiele werden erläutert.
Editorial Board
(2017)
Seit dem Schuljahr 2020/21 gilt in Nordrhein-Westfalen ein neuer Kernlehrplan für die Realschule, Gesamtschule und Sekundarschule. Dafür haben wir gemeinsam mit Fachkräften aus dem Bundesland die #-Schulbuchreihen entwickelt.
Mit #Politik Wirtschaft – Nordrhein-Westfalen bieten wir Ihnen innovative und aktuelle Produkte für einen modernen Politik- und Wirtschaftsunterricht. Neben dem neuen Lehrplan sind die Vorgaben des Medienkompetenzrahmens und die besonderen Herausforderungen heterogener Lerngruppen berücksichtigt.
Wir bieten Ihnen einen problemorientierten und schülernahen Unterricht. Die Rubrik ”Gemeinsam aktiv“ ermöglicht ein selbstgesteuertes Lernen. Die Schülerinnen und Schüler erarbeiten sich projektartig größere Einheiten eines Kapitels. Sie können Ihren Unterricht einfach und schnell besonders vielfältig und spannend gestalten.
Durch Fallbeispiele werden die Schülerinnen und Schüler direkt angesprochen. Eine kreative Vielfalt aus Bild-, Grafik- und Textmaterial, aktivierende Aufgaben, Methoden-und Grundwissenseiten und ein Kompetenzcheck zum Abschluss der Großkapitel vervollständigen das Angebot.
Zu jeder Unterrichtseinheit wird passgenau zum Schulbuch unterschiedliches Differenzierungsmaterial (Texte in einfacher Sprache, Vorstrukturierung von Aufgaben u.v.m.) erstellt. Dieses steht Ihnen in unserem digitalen Lehrermaterial click & teach zur Verfügung und kann von Ihnen nach individuellen Bedürfnissen für einzelne digitale Schulbücher click & study freigeschaltet werden.
Haushaltsbuch 2.0
(2020)
Die Lernenden analysieren die finanzielle Situation einer/eines Auszubildenden mithilfe einer digitalen Variante eines Haushaltsbuches. Sie lernen, planvoll mit finanziellen Ressourcen im Haushalt umzugehen, und kennen das Instrument "Haushaltsbuch" zu besseren Ressourcenplanung. Sie erkennen Zukunftsbedürfnisse und Risiken einer (ersten) Haushaltsgründung.
Wissenschaftlicher Nachwuchs ist bedeutsam für den Erhalt und Ausbau jeder Disziplin. Aktuell gibt es nur wenige empirische Erkenntnisse zur Situation in der haushaltsbezogenen Bildung. Im Beitrag werden ausgewählte Aspekte zur Situation der Nachwuchsförderung skizziert und Anknüpfungspunkte für die haushaltsbezogene Bildung vor dem Hintergrund erster Erfahrungen aus der 2019 gegründeten Nachwuchsgruppe HaBiFo-NEO diskutiert.
We collect a network dataset of tenured economics faculty in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. We rank the 100 institutions included with a minimum violation ranking. This ranking is positively and significantly correlated with the Times Higher Education ranking of economics institutions. According to the network ranking, individuals on average go down about 23 ranks from their doctoral institution to their employing institution. While the share of females in our dataset is only 15%, we do not observe a significant gender hiring gap (a difference in rank changes between male and female faculty). We conduct a robustness check with the Handelsblatt and the Times Higher Education ranking. According to these rankings, individuals on average go down only about two ranks. We do not observe a significant gender hiring gap using these two rankings (although the dataset underlying this analysis is small and these estimates are likely to be noisy). Finally, we discuss the limitations of the network ranking in our context.
Aim Hospitals noticeably struggle with maintaining hundreds of IT systems and applications in compliance with the latest IT standards and regulations. Thus, hospitals search for efficient opportunities to discover and integrate useful digital health innovations into their existing IT landscapes. In addition, although a multitude of digital innovations from digital health startups enter the market, numerous barriers impede their successful implementation and adoption. Against this background, the aim of this study was to explore typical digital innovation barriers in hospitals, and to assess how a hospital data management platform (HDMP) architecture might help hospitals to extract such innovative capabilities. Subject and methods Based on the concept of organizational ambidexterity (OA), we pursued a qualitative mixed-methods approach. First, we explored and consolidated innovation barriers through a systematic literature review, interviews with 20 startup representatives, and a focus group interview with a hospital IT team and the CEO of an HDMP provider. Finally, we conducted a case-study analysis of 36 digital health startups to explore and conceptualize the potential impact of DI and apply the morphological method to synthesize our findings from a multi-level perspective. Results We first provide a systematic and conceptual overview of typical barriers for digital innovation in hospitals. Hereupon, we explain how an HDMP might enable hospitals to mitigate such barriers and extract value from digital innovations at both individual and organizational level. Conclusion Our results imply that an HDMP can help hospitals to approach organizational ambidexterity through integrating and maintaining hundreds of systems and applications, which allows for a structured and controlled integration of external digital innovations.
Editorial
(2017)
The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) allows developed countries to meet part of their obligational emission reductions by carrying out emission reduction projects in developing countries. China imposed a price floor to the CDM carbon credits produced in China through its price review policy. Scholars have not agreed on the purpose of China’s price review policy. With a theoretical model and a coherent empirical study, the present study shows that the price floor imposed by China’s price review is more likely to protect those domestic project owners against price discrimination, rather than to distort the CDM market. Nevertheless, China’s price review has its own flaws. Although a regression study shows month of approval, types of projects and location of project can explain 55% of price floor designation, the operation of price review remains quite random and unpredictable in individual cases. This would bring extra bureaucratically uncertainty on its way to curb market uncertainty. Its function can be fulfilled by alternative policy tools with better economic efficiency and legal legitimacy, such as mandatory price disclosure and trading forum, which doesn’t have such drawback, but still be able to alleviate possible price discrimination in individual cases.
In many European countries, labor markets are characterized by high regional disparities in terms of unemployment rates on the one hand and low geographical mobility among the unemployed on the other hand. In order to counteract the geographical mismatch of workers, the German active labor market policy offers a subsidy covering moving costs to incentivize unemployed job seekers to search/accept jobs in distant regions. Based on administrative data, this study provides the first empirical evidence on the impact of this subsidy on participants' prospective labor market outcomes. We use an instrumental variable approach to take endogenous selection based on observed and unobserved characteristics into account when estimating causal treatment effects. We find that unemployed job seekers who participate in the subsidy program and move to a distant region receive higher wages and find more stable jobs compared to non-participants. We show that the positive effects are (to a large extent) the consequence of a better job match due to the increased search radius of participants.
Gibt es einen Zusammenhang zwischen dem sozialen Entwicklungsstand einer Autokratie und ihrem Legitimationsanspruch? Dieser Frage geht der Beitrag am Beispiel der Säuglingssterblichkeit nach. Unter Berücksichtigung von 321 Autokratien aus 120 Ländern im Zeitraum von 1960 bis 2010 zeigen sich Unterschiede in der sozialen Entwicklung zwischen sechs Autokratietypen mit verschiedenen Legitimationsstrategien: elektorale Autokratien, kommunistische Ideokratien, Monarchien, Einparteiautokratien, Militärautokratien und personalistische Autokratien. Insbesondere, dass kommunistische Ideokratien im Vergleich besser abschneiden als (nicht-ideokratische) Einparteiautokratien, spricht dafür, dass sich die Art der Legitimationsstrategie auf die soziale Entwicklung auswirkt. Allerdings sollte der Einfluss von Legitimationsstrategien auf die soziale Entwicklung nicht überschätzt werden, vor allem da sich die Ergebnisse im Rahmen eines Wachstumskurvenmodells als vorläufig erweisen.
Ramsey meets Thünen
(2016)
Land taxes can increase production in the manufacturing sector and enhance land conservation at the same time, which can lead to overall macroeconomic growth. Existing research emphasizes the non-distorting properties of land taxes (when fixed factors are taxed) as well as growth-enhancing impacts (when asset portfolios are shifted to reproducible capital). This paper furthers the neoclassical perspective on land taxes by endogenizing land allocation decisions in a multi-sector growth model. Based on von Thünen’s observation, agricultural land is created from wilderness through conversion and cultivation, both of which are associated with costs. In the steady state of our general equilibrium model, land taxes not only may reduce land consumption (associated with environmental benefits) but may also affect overall economic output, while leaving wages and interest rates unaffected. When labor productivity is higher in the manufacturing than in the agricultural sector and agricultural and manufactured goods are substitutes (or the economy is open to world trade), land taxes increase aggregate economic output. There is a complex interplay of conservation policy, technological change and land taxes, depending on consumer preferences, sectoral labor productivities and openness-to-trade. Our model introduces a new perspective on land taxes in current policy debates on development, tax reforms as well as forest conservation.
Background:
Research into the application of virtual reality technology in the health care sector has rapidly increased, resulting in a large body of research that is difficult to keep up with.
Objective:
We will provide an overview of the annual publication numbers in this field and the most productive and influential countries, journals, and authors, as well as the most used, most co-occurring, and most recent keywords.
Methods:
Based on a data set of 356 publications and 20,363 citations derived from Web of Science, we conducted a bibliometric analysis using BibExcel, HistCite, and VOSviewer.
Results:
The strongest growth in publications occurred in 2020, accounting for 29.49% of all publications so far. The most productive countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain; the most influential countries are the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The most productive journals are the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), JMIR Serious Games, and the Games for Health Journal; the most influential journals are Patient Education and Counselling, Medical Education, and Quality of Life Research. The most productive authors are Riva, del Piccolo, and Schwebel; the most influential authors are Finset, del Piccolo, and Eide. The most frequently occurring keywords other than “virtual” and “reality” are “training,” “trial,” and “patients.” The most relevant research themes are communication, education, and novel treatments; the most recent research trends are fitness and exergames.
Conclusions:
The analysis shows that the field has left its infant state and its specialization is advancing, with a clear focus on patient usability.
This study examines the reorganization of formal coordination structures of a unique international public organization involved in marine governance in Europe, namely the structural reorganizations of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) between 1999 and 2009. The findings indicate that the reorganizations of ICES’ formal coordination structures were not driven primarily for reasons of efficiency, by clear and consistent goals, and by clear means-ends considerations for organizational design as proposed by rational perspectives in organization theory. Instead, the formal coordination structures have also been adapted to live up to changing expectations in the institutional environment, to modern management concepts in marine governance such as the Ecosystem Approach to Management (EAM), and to ensure the legitimacy of the organization. However, it is also found that institutional explanations alone are insufficient to comprehensively understand why the formal organizational structures of ICES were reorganized. Instrumental and cultural perspectives in organization theory as well as resource-dependence theory additionally add to understand how ICES responded to external demands and why organizational structures have been changed.
The newly collected Potsdam Grievance Statistics File (PGSF) holds data on the number and topics of grievances (Eingaben) that were addressed to local authorities of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the years 1970 to 1989. The PGSF allows quantitative analyses on topics such as participation, quality of life, and value change in the German Democratic Republic. This paper introduces the concepts of the data set and discusses the validity of its contents.
This paper analyses the interaction of domestic political elites and external donors against the backdrop of Mozambique’s decentralisation process. The empirical research at national and local levels supports the hypothesis that informal power structures influence the dynamics of this interaction. Consequently, this contributes to an outcome of externally induced democratisation different to what was intended by external actors. The decentralisation process has been utilised by ruling domestic elites for political purposes. Donors have rather focused on the technical side and ignored this informal dimension. By analysing the diverging objectives and perceptions of external and internal actors, as well as the instrumentalisation of formal democratic structures, it becomes clear, that the ‘informal has to be seen as normal’. At a theoretical level, the analysis contributes to elite-oriented approaches of post-conflict democratisation by adding ‘the informal’ as an additional factor for the dynamics of external-internal interaction. At a policy level, external actors need to take more into account informal power structures and their ambivalence for state-building and democratisation.
Involvement of disadvantaged individuals into entrepreneurship facilitates their social integration into mainstream societies. The present study addresses the drivers of social entrepreneurial appraisal among hearing-impaired individuals within a unique social minority environment. In prior research, social appraisal was empirically shown to determine social entrepreneurial intention. Adopting the theory of planned behaviour, this study investigates the impact of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, general social support and perceived barriers on social entrepreneurial appraisal. Based on a survey with 221 respondents, our results demonstrate that social entrepreneurial appraisal of hearing-impaired individuals result from their entrepreneurial self-efficacy and general social support. In terms of taking advantage of social opportunities, importance should be given to the role of entrepreneurial education and heterogeneous networks across minorities.
The reduction in cost and increasing benefits of 3D printing technologies suggest the potential for printing dental prosthetics. However, although 3D printing technologies seem to be promising, their implementation in practice is complicated. To identify and rank the greatest implementation challenges of 3D printing in dental practices, the present study surveys dentists, dental technicians, and 3D printing companies using a ranking-type Delphi study. Our findings imply that a lack of knowledge is the most crucial obstacle to the implementation of 3D printing technologies. The high training effort of staff and the favoring of conventional methods, such as milling, are ranked as the second and third most relevant factors. Investment costs ranked in seventh place, whereas the lack of manufacturing facilities and the obstacle of print duration ranked below average. An inclusive implementation of additive manufacturing could be achieved primarily through the education of dentists and other staff in dental practices. In this manner, production may be managed internally, and the implementation speed may be increased.
The Limits of Buyer Power
(2018)
This paper studies the behavior of buyers confronting an incumbent monopolist and a potential market entrant in a repeated trade situation. In the experiment, buyers have two possibilities to demand lower prices in future trade periods. First, they can withhold demand. Second, they can voluntarily pay a higher price to the entrant in order to encourage future re-entry. Both these forms of buyer behavior occur in the experiment. They are less frequent when the number of buyers is large as opposed to small. A control treatment tests to what extent such behavior can be attributed to strategic motives.
If war is an inevitable condition of human nature, as David Hume suggests, then what type of societies can best protect us from defeat and conquest? For David Hume, commerce decreases the relative cost of war and promotes technological military advances as well as martial spirit. Commerce therefore makes a country militarily stronger and better equipped to protect itself against attacks than any other kind of society. Hume does not assume commerce would yield a peaceful world nor that commercial societies would be militarily weak, as many contemporary scholars have argued. On the contrary, for him, military might is a beneficial consequence of commerce.
Findings - The results provide (longitudinal) support for the proposed evaluative approach. They reveal new evidence that building brand equity is a means to mitigate negative effects, and indicate that negative spillover effects within a high-equity brand portfolio are unlikely. Finally, this research identifies situations in which developing a new brand might be more beneficial than leveraging an existing brand. Practical implications - This research has significant implications for firms with high-equity brands that might be affected by a scandal. The findings support managers to navigate their brands through a crisis.
This paper presents the first investigation of the effects of optimal energy taxation in an urban spatial setting, where emissions are produced both by residences and commuting. When levying an optimal direct tax on energy or carbon use is not feasible, the analysis shows that exactly the same adjustments in resource allocation can be generated by the combination of a land tax, a housing tax, and a commuting tax. We then analyze the effects of these taxes on urban spatial structure, showing that they reduce the extent of commuting and the level of housing consumption while increasing building heights, generating a more-compact city with a lower level of emissions per capita.
Entrepreneurship is a regional and persistent phenomenon. We jointly investigate spatial dependence and serial dynamics of new business formation. Using panel data from all 402 German counties for 1996-2011, we estimate dynamic spatial panel data models of start-up activity in the high-tech and manufacturing industries. We consider regions of different sizes and systematically search for the most suitable spatial weights matrices. We find substantial spatial dependence as well as time persistence of start-up activity, especially in the high-tech industry. This suggests that local start-up activity has positive extemal effects and that entrepreneurship policy could play an efficiency-enhancing role.
Faced with the increasing needs of companies, optimal dimensioning of IT hardware is becoming challenging for decision makers. In terms of analytical infrastructures, a highly evolutionary environment causes volatile, time dependent workloads in its components, and intelligent, flexible task distribution between local systems and cloud services is attractive. With the aim of developing a flexible and efficient design for analytical infrastructures, this paper proposes a flexible architecture model, which allocates tasks following a machine-specific decision heuristic. A simulation benchmarks this system with existing strategies and identifies the new decision maxim as superior in a first scenario-based simulation.
We test the stability of locus of control, a measure that has been attributed substantial explanatory power for economic outcomes since it depicts how much people believe in their ability to affect life outcomes. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find that a job loss due to a plant closure has no long-lasting effect on locus of control. The common assumption of its stability is thus not rejected. However, during unemployment, control perception decreases by 30 percent of one standard deviation. The effect holds true independent from unemployment duration or socio-demographic characteristics and vanishes as soon as the unemployed find a new job. We therefore conclude that stated locus of control is affected by unemployment. Using this trait as explanatory variable can thus lead to biased estimations when this temporary deviation in measurement is not accounted for.
In response to the impending spread of COVID-19, universities worldwide abruptly stopped face-to-face teaching and switched to technology-mediated teaching. As a result, the use of technology in the learning processes of students of different disciplines became essential and the only way to teach, communicate and collaborate for months. In this crisis context, we conducted a longitudinal study in four German universities, in which we collected a total of 875 responses from students of information systems and music and arts at four points in time during the spring–summer 2020 semester. Our study focused on (1) the students’ acceptance of technology-mediated learning, (2) any change in this acceptance during the semester and (3) the differences in acceptance between the two disciplines. We applied the Technology Acceptance Model and were able to validate it for the extreme situation of the COVID-19 pandemic. We extended the model with three new variables (time flexibility, learning flexibility and social isolation) that influenced the construct of perceived usefulness. Furthermore, we detected differences between the disciplines and over time. In this paper, we present and discuss our study’s results and derive short- and long-term implications for science and practice.
I examine the determinants of both perceived inflation and unemployment in one single survey and include Big Five traits in the analysis. This is the first survey on this topic in Germany. My sample consists of 1771 students from different fields and levels. Using PhD students’ estimates as a reference, I create categories for underestimation and overestimation of both variables. Multinomial logit regressions show that females overestimate both variables. Education and news consumption reduce misestimation. A higher level of Neuroticism is related with a higher probability to overestimate unemployment. Overstating (understating) one indicator is associated with overstating (understating) the other.
Essays on Macroeconomics
(2021)
This dissertation consists of four self-contained papers. Each paper deals with a specific macroeconomic question. The first paper assesses the distributional implications of environmental policies from a general equilibrium macroeconomic perspective. I develop a New-Keynesian model with several types of uncertainties and frictions that incorporates liquidity constrained households. The model is calibrated to match the German economy and the numerical results show that climate policy instruments can be associated with regressive welfare effects. Furthermore, the analysis shows that these effects can be mitigated through an appropriate revenue recycling scheme. The second paper deals with short-run inequality dynamics within a real business cycle model. An empirical evaluation shows that the cyclical components of income inequality, the capital share and real GDP are correlated. We develop tractable representation of common inequality indicators in the general equilibrium model and show that the observed pattern is driven by innovations in the capital share. A Bayesian estimation of the model for the United States with data for the period 1948 to 2017 indicates that the model provides a reasonable fit for the data and successfully replicates the observed pattern of cyclical correlations. The third paper empirically examines the effects of banking regulation on the risk-relationship between sovereigns and banks. Based on a comprehensive data set of the European banking sector, we find that the implementation of the novel European banking regulation framework significantly contributed to a weakening of the risk-link between sovereigns and banks.The fourth paper empirically examines the role of institutional experience for institutional development in transition economies. To capture institutional experience, we develop a novel index, based on historical country records. The results of cross-sectional and panel estimations suggest that institutional experience helps to explain the divergent economic and institutional development in transition economies after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Economists argue that land rent taxation is an ideal form of taxation as it causes no deadweight losses. Nevertheless, pure land rent taxation is rarely applied. This paper revisits the case of land taxation for developing countries. We first provide an up-to-date review on land taxation in development countries, including feasibility and implementation challenges. We then simulate land tax reforms for Rwanda, Peru, Nicaragua and Indonesia, based on household surveys. We find that (i) land taxes provide a substantial untapped potential for tax revenues at minimal deadweight losses; that (ii) linear land value taxes tend to put a high relative burden on poor households as land ownership is pervasive; (iii) non-linear tax schemes could avoid adverse effects on the poor; and that (iv) with technological advances, administrative costs of land taxes have reduced substantially and are outweighed by tax revenues and co-benefits of formalized land tenure. Enforcement and compliance remain, however, a key challenge.
We analyze whether start-up rates in different industries systematically change with business cycle variables. Using a unique data set at the industry level, we mostly find correlations that are consistent with counter-cyclical influences of the business cycle on entries in both innovative and non-innovative industries. Entries into the large-scale industries, including the innovative part of manufacturing, are only influenced by changes in the cyclical component of unemployment, while entries into small-scale industries, like knowledge intensive services, are mostly influenced by changes in the cyclical component of GDP. Thus, our analysis suggests that favorable conditions in terms of high GDP might not be germane for start-ups. Given that both innovative and non-innovative businesses react counter-cyclically in ‘regular’ recessions, business formation may have a stabilizing effect on the economy.
In 2013, large floods affected Germany heavily. The natural disaster transcended jurisdictional and organisational boundaries, necessitating a coordinative effort by disaster relief forces and their administrative and political leadership. In the aftermath, politicians and experts praised the improvement of the German system of crisis management, also in direct comparison with the response to the last German “flood of the century” of 2002. This chapter takes a public policy and organisational perspective to analyse the German disaster relief governance throughout all four crisis management phases. By highlighting the central features of the German governance arrangements and the main organisational changes implemented in reaction to the previous flood in 2002, we find that Whole-of-Government approaches are increasingly used by the federal and Länder government.
The chapter presents an overview about the evolution of the teaching dimension in the academic debate within the EGPA community. Major topics of EGPA’s permanent study group on “PA and teaching” over the last decade are displayed. From a more general perspective, the authors discuss the various types and target groups of academic programs in Public Administration and their change over time. They also shed some light on the change of contents and pedagogical approaches in the last decades. Furthermore, different patterns and degrees of institutionalization of Public Administration as academic discipline across Europe are illustrated. In a short résumé the authors reflect about future educational developments in our field and about the role of EGPA
Introduction
(2019)
Over the past decades, it has become more and more obvious that ongoing globalisation processes have substantial impacts on the natural environment. Studies reveal that intensified global economic relations have caused or accelerated dramatic changes in the Earth system, defined as the sum of our planet’s interacting physical, chemical, biological and human processes (Schellnhuber et al. 2004). Climate change, biodiversity loss, disrupted biogeochemical cycles, and land degradation are often cited as emblematic problems of global environmental change (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015). In this context, the term Anthropocene has lately received widespread attention and gained some prominence in the academic literature
The development of new and better optimization and approximation methods for Job Shop Scheduling Problems (JSP) uses simulations to compare their performance. The test data required for this has an uncertain influence on the simulation results, because the feasable search space can be changed drastically by small variations of the initial problem model. Methods could benefit from this to varying degrees. This speaks in favor of defining standardized and reusable test data for JSP problem classes, which in turn requires a systematic describability of the test data in order to be able to compile problem adequate data sets. This article looks at the test data used for comparing methods by literature review. It also shows how and why the differences in test data have to be taken into account. From this, corresponding challenges are derived which the management of test data must face in the context of JSP research.
Little is known about the conscious experience of internal bodily sensations in preschool-aged children. Given that preschoolers are in the most rapid phase of brain development, and display profound emotional development, it was the aim of the present study to establish an adapted interoceptive accuracy paradigm and to investigate associations between sociodemographic (age, sex) and emotional variables with interoceptive accuracy. Forty-nine children (aged 4–6 years) completed the jumping jack paradigm (JJP), a heartbeat tracking paradigm, which includes a noninvasive physical perturbation via performing jumping jacks for 10 s. An interoceptive accuracy score was based on the comparison between self-reported and objectively recorded heart rate prior to and after completion of jumping jacks. Children also completed validated measures for emotion recognition and emotion regulation. Children's objectively recorded heart rate significantly increased after the JJP by 20 bpm on average. There was a positive relationship between reactivity on self-reported heart rate and objectively recorded heart rate increase. The derived scores for interoceptive accuracy increased with age, suggesting older children to report more self-reported heart rate change than objectively recorded, but were unrelated to children's sex or BMI. While emotion recognition and regulation significantly increased with age, the interoceptive accuracy score was unrelated to emotion recognition, but marginally associated to emotion regulation. Children with higher interoceptive accuracy score (i.e., self-reporting more heart rate change than objectively recorded) received lower emotion regulation score. The present study is the first to depict a novel behavioral paradigm to assess interoceptive accuracy in preschool-aged children.
We take an error management perspective on audit quality. Drawing on 18 months of participant observations and 38 interviews conducted in a Big 4 accounting firm, we develop a multi-level model of error management. With this model, we propose how organizational structures, team procedures and practices, and individual cognitions and emotions interact to manage errors. The multi-level model of error management allows us to conceptually integrate previous behavioral and social research on audit quality, contributes to the rising accounting firm error management literature, and explains how and why two general approaches from the broader error management literature to errors that are usually considered as opposing each other, i.e., error prevention and error resilience, may interact and actually entail each other in accounting firms.
The human personality predicts a wide range of activities and occupational choices-from musical sophistication to entrepreneurial careers. However, which method should be applied if information on personality traits is used for prediction and advice? In psychological research, group profiles are widely employed. In this contribution, we examine the performance of profiles using the example of career prediction and advice, involving a comparison of average trait scores of successful entrepreneurs with the traits of potential entrepreneurs. Based on a simple theoretical model estimated with GSOEP data and analyzed with Monte Carlo methods, we show, for the first time, that the choice of the comparison method matters substantially. We reveal that under certain conditions the performance of average profiles is inferior to the tossing of a coin. Alternative methods, such as directly estimating success probabilities, deliver better performance and are more robust.
Price shock transmission
(2017)
This study assesses the degree of vertical price transmission along the wheat-bread value chain in Ethiopia. This is pursued by applying a vector error correction model and an impulse response analysis using monthly price data for the period 2000-2015. Our analysis considers transmission of price shocks across different market levels, including from the international and domestic wheat grain markets at the upstream to the domestic wheat bread market at the downstream of the value chain. The empirical findings indicate that significant cointegration exists across prices of the different market stages. There is a transmission from international prices to domestic prices at downstream markets, in particular to flour and bread prices. Prices at upstream markets are largely influenced by the domestic wholesale market. In general, the speed of adjustment is quite slow with a half-life of about one year for restoring the equilibrium price relationship. As price margins between the different market stages in the value chain have substantially decreased in the last 15 years, higher transmission, and thus exposure to international market shocks, can be expected in the future. The results also show that causal relationships exist between prices at different market stageswith the wholesale market identified as the key market level where prices and price expectations are formed.
Willentliches Vergessen
(2019)
Dieser Beitrag im Journal Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. stellt dar, wie willentliches Vergessen die Anpassung an notwendige Veränderungen für Individuen, Gruppen und Organisationen verbessert und wie willentliches Vergessen bewusst und gezielt gestaltet werden kann.
Damit Verhalten in Folge einer notwendigen Veränderung angepasst wird, reicht es nicht aus, dass Menschen wissen was zu tun ist, willens und in der Lage sind ihr Verhalten zu verändern. Eine Veränderung gelingt nur dann, wenn nur noch das neue Verhalten zur Anwendung kommt und nicht mehr das Alte, wenn das alte Verhalten vergessen wird. Der notwendige Prozess des willentlichen Vergessens ist durch Entfernen von Hinweisreizen, die die Erinnerung des zu Vergessenden und durch Platzierung von Hinweisreizen, die die Aktivierung des Neuen auslösen, gestaltbar.
Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt die förderliche Wirkung von Hinweisreizen auf willentliches Vergessen dar, stellt sie im Rahmen des Berichts einer experimentellen Studie unter Beweis und gibt praktische Implikationen, wie für Individuen, Gruppen und Organisationen willentliches Vergessen gestaltet werden kann.
Organizations have discovered Design Thinking as a promising framework or language for innovation-focused project teamwork. The goal is to develop new products and services by being customer-centric and working iteratively and in an interdisciplinary way, using specific working principles and methods to create a common language among all stakeholders. The empirical results in this article show that Design Thinking teamwork is different from other forms of teamwork. The difference in Design Thinking team-based project work is that the teams go through a specific learning process that poses individual challenges but also provides the individual with experience-based learning. We show that teams going through this learning process repeatedly find themselves in seemingly insolvable conflicts-so called structural dilemmas-within the framework of project deadlines and under the influence of strategic guidelines of the organization. We explore these structural dilemmas and develop ways to overcome them.
How Will We Dine?
(2020)
Haute cuisine, the cooking style for fine dining at gourmet restaurants, has changed over the last decades and can be expected to evolve in the upcoming years. To engage in foresight, the purpose of this study is to identify a plausible future trend scenario for the haute cuisine sector within the next five to ten years, based on today’s chefs’ views. To achieve this goal, an international, two-stage Delphi study was conducted. The derived scenario suggests that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic will lead to significant restaurant bankruptcies and will raise creativity and innovation among the remaining ones. It is expected that haute cuisine tourism will grow and that menu prices will differ for customer segments. More haute cuisine restaurants will open in Asia and America. Local food will remain a major trend and will be complemented by insect as well as plant-based proteins and sophisticated nonalcoholic food pairings. Restaurant design and the use of scents will become more relevant. Also, private dining and fine dining at home will become more important. The scenario also includes negative projections. These findings can serve as a research agenda for future research in haute cuisine, including the extension of the innovation lens towards the restaurant and the business model. Practical implications include the necessity for haute cuisine restaurants to innovate to cope with increasing competition in several regions. Customers should be seen as co-creators of the value of haute cuisine.
On May 17, 2012, the social networking company Facebook Inc. fixes its initial public offering (IPO) price at $38.00 a share. Over the next couple of months, contrary to expectations raised by previous IPOs, the stock price crashes more than 50 per cent. Immediately, the question arises whether the issuer’s or the stock market’s pricing of the share are in line with the firm’s fundamentals. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to determine the company value in close proximity to the date of IPO.
Die DDR im Jahr 1989
(2020)
Social Media, Quo Vadis?
(2020)
Over the past two decades, social media have become a crucial and omnipresent cultural and economic phenomenon, which has seen platforms come and go and advance technologically. In this study, we explore the further development of social media regarding interactive technologies, platform development, relationships to news media, the activities of institutional and organizational users, and effects of social media on the individual and the society over the next five to ten years by conducting an international, two-stage Delphi study. Our results show that enhanced interaction on platforms, including virtual and augmented reality, somatosensory sense, and touch- and movement-based navigation are expected. AIs will interact with other social media users. Inactive user profiles will outnumber active ones. Platform providers will diversify into the WWW, e-commerce, edu-tech, fintechs, the automobile industry, and HR. They will change to a freemium business model and put more effort into combating cybercrime. Social media will become the predominant news distributor, but fake news will still be problematic. Firms will spend greater amounts of their budgets on social media advertising, and schools, politicians, and the medical sector will increase their social media engagement. Social media use will increasingly lead to individuals’ psychic issues. Society will benefit from economic growth and new jobs, increased political interest, democratic progress, and education due to social media. However, censorship and the energy consumption of platform operators might rise.
Is urbanization good for the environment? This paper establishes a simple core-periphery model with monocentric cities, which comprises key forces that shape the structure and interrelation of cities to study the impact of the urban evolution on the environment. We focus on global warming and the potential of unfettered market forces to economize on emissions. The model parameters are chosen to match the dichotomy between average "large" and "small" cities in the urban geography of the United States, and the sectoral greenhouse gas emissions recorded for the United States. Based on numerical analyzes we find that a forced switch to a system with equally sized cities reduces total emissions. Second, any city driver which pronounces the asymmetry between the core and the periphery drives up emissions in the total city system, too, and the endogenous adjustment of the urban system accounts for the bulk of the change in emissions. Third, none of the city drivers gives rise to an urban environmental Kuznets curve according to our numerical simulations. Finally, the welfare-maximizing allocation tends to involve dispersion of cities and the more so the higher is the marginal damage from pollution.
This paper examines the consequences of international financial integration in a two-sector standard incomplete markets model with occupational choice under risk and financial constraints affecting entrepreneurial activity. We endogenize international productivity differences and discuss the implications of international integration for the macroeconomy, inequality, and welfare. Lending countries are characterized by tighter domestic constraints and experience an increase in gross national product, whereas the gross domestic product effect is ambiguous. We conclude that international integration is beneficial only for economies where there are substantial financial constraints on entrepreneurial activity. Otherwise, a majority of households suffer, due to the unequal distribution of welfare gains and losses across the heterogeneous population.
A large literature exists examining the functions of legislatures and the behaviour of MPs in established democracies. But little efforts have been made to observe how MPs behave in new democratic assemblies. This article seeks to address this shortcoming through an exploration of the use of parliamentary questions in two new democracies: Kenya and Zambia. Analysing an innovative dataset we offer one of the few attempts to directly measure legislative behaviour in new democracies. We examine how the factors found in the literature on parliamentary questions in liberal democracies react to this shift of context and to what degree legislatures in these countries fulfil their core functions. Results show that opposition MPs are not necessarily among the most active but that electoral incentives such as the margin by which MPs have won their seats or the number of voters they represent explain the use and content of parliamentary questions.
The paradox of openness is inherent to all platform ecosystems-the tension in enabling maximum openness to create joint innovation while guaranteeing value capturing for all actors. Governance mechanisms to solve this paradox are embedded into the technical architecture of the platform, addressing the dimensions of access, control, and incentives. Blockchain technology offers unique ways to design novel governance mechanisms through the standardization of interactions. However, the design of such an architecture requires careful consideration of the cost associated with it.
This thesis offers new insights on the effects of Start-Up Subsidies (SUS) for unemployed individuals as a special kind of active labor market program (ALMP) that aims to re-integrate individuals into the labor market via the route of self-employment. Moreover, this thesis contributes to the literature on methods for causal inference when the treatment variable is continuous rather than binary. For example, this is the case when individuals differ in their degree of exposure to a common treatment.
The analysis of the effects of SUS focuses on the main current German program called “Gründungszuschuss” (New Start-Up Subsidy, NSUS) after its reform in 2011. Average Effects on participants' labor market outcomes - as measured by employment and earnings - as well as subjective well-being are estimated mainly based on propensity score matching (PSM) techniques. PSM aims to achieve balance in terms of observed characteristics by matching participants with at least one comparable non-participant in terms of their probability to receive the treatment. This estimation strategy is valid as long as all relevant characteristics that explain selection patterns into treatment are observed and included in the estimation of the propensity score. To make our analysis as credible as possible, we control for a large vector of characteristics as observed through the combination of rich administrative data from the Federal Employment Agency as well as through survey data.
Chapters two to four of this thesis puts special emphasis on aspects regarding (the evaluation of) SUS programs that have received no or only limited attention thus far. The first aspect relates to the interplay of institutional details of the program and its effectiveness. So far, relatively little is known about the importance of SUS program features such as the duration of support. Second, there is no experimental benchmark evaluation of SUS available and thus, the reliability of non-experimental estimation techniques such as PSM is of crucial importance as estimates are biased when relevant confounders are omitted from the analysis. Third, there may be potentially detrimental effects of transitioning into (relatively risky) self-employment on subjective well-being among subsidized founders out of unemployment. These were to remain undetected if the analysis would focus exclusively on labor market outcomes of participants. The results indicate positive long-term effects of SUS participation on employment and earnings among participants. These effects are substantially larger than what estimated before the reform, indicating room for improvement in program design via changes in institutional details. Moreover, non-experimental estimates of treatment effects are remarkably robust to hidden confounding. Regarding subjective well-being, this thesis finds a positive long-run impact on job satisfaction and a detrimental effect on satisfaction with social security. The latter appears to be driven by adverse effects on social insurance contributions.
In chapter five, a novel automated covariate balancing technique for the estimation of causal effects in the context of continuous treatments is derived and assessed regarding its performance compared to other (automated) balancing techniques. Although binary research designs that only differentiate between participants and non-participants of some treatment remain the most-common case in empirical practice, many applications can be adapted to include continuous treatments as well. Often, this will allow for more meaningful estimates of causal effects in order to further improve the design of programs. In the context of SUS, one may further investigate the effects of the size of monetary support or its duration on participants' labor market outcomes. Both Monte-Carlo investigations and analysis of two well-known datasets suggests superior performance of the proposed Entropy Balancing for continuous treatments (EBCT) compared to other existing estimation strategies.
Narratives are shaping our understanding of the world. They convey values and norms and point to desirable future developments. In this way, they justify and legitimize political actions and social practices. Once a narrative has emerged and this world view is supported by broad societal groups, narratives can provide powerful momentum to trigger innovation and changes in the course of action. Narratives, however, are not necessarily based on evidence and precise categories, but can instead be vague and ambiguous in order to be acceptable and attractive to different actors. However, the more open and inclusive a narrative is, the less impact can be expected. We investigate whether there is a shared narrative in research for the sustainable economy and how this can be evaluated in terms of its potential societal impact. The paper carves out the visions for the future that have been underlying the research projects conducted within the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funding programme "The Sustainable Economy". It then analyzes whether these visions are compatible with narratives dominating societal discourse on the sustainable economy, and concludes how the use of visions and narratives in research can contribute to fostering societal transformations.
We model migration across domestic labor markets (internal migration) as the outcome of a job search process in which job seekers form subjective beliefs about the return search effort that are related to their locus of control. Job seekers with an internal locus of control are predicted to search across larger geographic areas and migrate more frequently as a result. We empirically test the relationship between locus of control and the propensity to migrate using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We find that not only do individuals with an internal locus of control express more willingness to migrate, they do in fact also migrate more often.
In a multi-source, lagged design field study of 197 leader-follower dyads, we test a model that predicts positive interactive effects of visionary and empowering leadership on follower performance. Based on the paradox perspective, we argue that visionary and empowering leadership are synergistic in that their combination enables leaders to address a key paradox inherent to leader behavior identified by Waldman and Bowen (2016): Maintaining control while simultaneously letting go of control. We argue that visionary leadership addresses the former and empowering leadership addresses the latter pole of this pair of opposites. Hence, in line with paradox thinking, we posit that leaders will engender more positive effects on follower performance when they enact visionary and empowering leadership behaviors simultaneously and adopt a "both-and" approach, rather than focus on one of these behaviors without the other. Our results support our hypothesized interactive effect of visionary and empowering leadership on goal clarity, as well as a conditional indirect effect such that goal clarity mediates the interactive effect of visionary and empowering leadership on individual follower performance.
We analyse the top tail of the wealth distribution in France, Germany, and Spain using the first and second waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be under-represented in household surveys, we integrate big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto distribution, and impute the missing rich. In addition to the Forbes list, we rely on national rich lists since they represent a broader base of the big fortunes in those countries. As a result, the top 1% wealth share increases notably for the three selected countries after imputing the top wealth. We find that national rich lists can improve the estimation of the Pareto coefficient in particular when the list of national USD billionaires is short.
#Wirtschaft – Niedersachsen
(2020)
Corporate Citizenship
(2020)
Corporate citizenship, which is firms’ societal engagement beyond customer and shareholder interests, is a prominent topic in management practice and has led to extensive research. This increased interest resulted in a complex and fragmented scholarly literature. In order to structure and map the field quantitatively, we conducted a temporal analysis of publications and citations, an analysis of the productivity of involved disciplines, an analysis of the productivity of publication forms including journal impact factors, an author productivity and citation analysis, a co-author analysis, an article citation analysis, an article co-citation analysis, and a keyword co-occurrence analysis. Results of these bibliometric analyses show that corporate citizenship research seems to have been in a phase of stagnation since 2014 and shows a rather low degree of interdisciplinarity. Papers are predominantly published in high impact journals. Authors show little collaboration with other researchers. Current research relates to other business ethics topics, addresses philosophical foundations, and starts to relate to human resource management and organization studies.
Several scholars concerned with global policy-making have recently pointed to a reconfiguration of authority in the area of climate politics. They have shown that various new carbon governance arrangements have emerged, which operate simultaneously at different governmental levels. However, despite the numerous descriptions and mapping exercises of these governance arrangements, we have little systematic knowledge on their workings within national jurisdictions, let alone about their impact on public-administrative systems in developing countries. Therefore, this article opens the black box of the nation-state and explores how and to what extent two different arrangements, that is, Transnational City Networks and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, generate changes in the distribution of public authority in nation-states and their administrations. Building upon conceptual assumptions that the former is likely to lead to more decentralized, and the latter to more centralized policy-making, we provide insights from case studies in Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and India. In a nutshell, our analysis underscores that Transnational City Networks strengthen climate-related actions taken by cities without ultimately decentralizing climate policy-making. On the other hand, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation tends to reinforce the competencies of central governments, but apparently does not generate a recentralization of the forestry sector at large.
Anti-Consumption
(2019)
Transcending the conventional debate around efficiency in sustainable consumption, anti-consumption patterns leading to decreased levels of material consumption have been gaining importance. Change agents are crucial for the promotion of such patterns, so there may be lessons for governance interventions that can be learnt from the every-day experiences of those who actively implement and promote sustainability in the field of anti-consumption. Eighteen social innovation pioneers, who engage in and diffuse practices of voluntary simplicity and collaborative consumption as sustainable options of anti-consumption share their knowledge and personal insights in expert interviews for this research. Our qualitative content analysis reveals drivers, barriers, and governance strategies to strengthen anti-consumption patterns, which are negotiated between the market, the state, and civil society. Recommendations derived from the interviews concern entrepreneurship, municipal infrastructures in support of local grassroots projects, regulative policy measures, more positive communication to strengthen the visibility of initiatives and emphasize individual benefits, establishing a sense of community, anti-consumer activism, and education. We argue for complementary action between top-down strategies, bottom-up initiatives, corporate activities, and consumer behavior. The results are valuable to researchers, activists, marketers, and policymakers who seek to enhance their understanding of materially reduced consumption patterns based on the real-life experiences of active pioneers in the field.
Organizations increasingly use social media and especially social networking sites (SNS) to support their marketing agenda, enhance collaboration, and develop new capabilities. However, the success of SNS initiatives is largely dependent on sustainable user participation. In this study, we argue that the continuance intentions of users may be gender sensitive. To theorize and investigate gender differences in the determinants of continuance intentions, this study draws on the expectation-confirmation model, the uses and gratification theory, as well as the self-construal theory and its extensions. Our survey of 488 users shows that while both men and women are motivated by the ability to self enhance, there are some gender differences. Specifically, while women are mainly driven by relational uses, such as maintaining close ties and getting access to social information on close and distant networks, men base their continuance intentions on their ability to gain information of a general nature. Our research makes several contributions to the discourse in strategic information systems literature concerning the use of social media by individuals and organizations. Theoretically, it expands the understanding of the phenomenon of continuance intentions and specifically the role of the gender differences in its determinants. On a practical level, it delivers insights for SNS providers and marketers into how satisfaction and continuance intentions of male and female SNS users can be differentially promoted. Furthermore, as organizations increasingly rely on corporate social networks to foster collaboration and innovation, our insights deliver initial recommendations on how organizational social media initiatives can be supported with regard to gender-based differences.
Zufriedenheitsanalysen durch Patientenbefragungen, wie in diesem Fall der neu entwickele und getestet Fragebogen (HNO-PROM), haben drei Säulen. Es kann zum einen eine bessere Patientenbindung geschaffen werden, die Qualität kann gemessen, verglichen und optimiert werden und es kann ein Mitarbeiterleitfaden im Sinne einer „Corporate Identity“ erstellt werden, welcher konkrete Managementimplikationen im Sinne von Handlungsimplikationen enthält. Der Leitgedanke des Qualitätsmanagements ist die Patientenorientierung im Sinne der Patientenzentrierten Medizin. Hierbei sollen nicht nur Wünsche und Bedürfnisse des Patienten erfüllt werden, sondern vorallem auch die Zufriedenheit gemessen und geplant werden. Gleichzeit muss man in diesem Zusammenhang die Behandlung der Patienten als Dienstleistung verstehen und die größtmögliche Zufriedenheit des Patienten als primäres Ziel setzen. Dies führt zu einer Kundenbindung dadurch, dass Patienten sowohl eine gleichbleibende Qualität erwarten können als auch und auch weiche Faktoren ihren Wünschen entsprechen werden. Corporate Identity mit dem Ziel als Unternehmen einheitlich für die Werte und damit die Qualität zu stehen.. Dies ermöglicht, das Wohlbefinden in der Vorstellung der Patienten beginnen zu lassen und dadurch Vertrauen zu schaffen. Alle drei Säulen haben nicht nur die Patientenzufriedenheit zum Ziel, sondern in gleichem Maße auch die Positionierung einer Institution auf dem Gesundheitsmarkt und damit die Verbesserung der Kosten-Nutzen-Rechnung durch ein positives Outcome. Damit fördern Zufriedenheitsanalysen nicht nur die ökonomische Position einer Abteilung, sondern behalten gleichermaßen die ethischen Aspekte einer Arzt-Patienten-Beziehung im Blick.
Globalisierung à la carte
(2017)
Reconstructing democracy
(2020)
Across the world, democracies are suffering from a disconnect between the people and political elites. In communities where jobs and industry are scarce, many feel the government is incapable of understanding their needs or addressing their problems. The resulting frustration has fueled the success of destabilizing demagogues. To reverse this pattern and restore responsible government, we need to reinvigorate democracy at the local level. But what does that mean? Drawing on examples of successful community building in cities large and small, from a shrinking village in rural Austria to a neglected section of San Diego, Reconstructing Democracy makes a powerful case for re-engaging citizens. It highlights innovative grassroots projects and shows how local activists can form alliances and discover their own power to solve problems.
Reaching the Sustainable Development Goals requires a fundamental socio-economic transformation accompanied by substantial investment in low-carbon infrastructure. Such a sustainability transition represents a non-marginal change, driven by behavioral factors and systemic interactions. However, typical economic models used to assess a sustainability transition focus on marginal changes around a local optimum, whichby constructionlead to negative effects. Thus, these models do not allow evaluating a sustainability transition that might have substantial positive effects. This paper examines which mechanisms need to be included in a standard computable general equilibrium model to overcome these limitations and to give a more comprehensive view of the effects of climate change mitigation. Simulation results show that, given an ambitious greenhouse gas emission constraint and a price of carbon, positive economic effects are possible if (1) technical progress results (partly) endogenously from the model and (2) a policy intervention triggering an increase of investment is introduced. Additionally, if (3) the investment behavior of firms is influenced by their sales expectations, the effects are amplified. The results provide suggestions for policy-makers, because the outcome indicates that investment-oriented climate policies can lead to more desirable outcomes in economic, social and environmental terms.
Reliable information on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is rare and costly for financial intermediaries. Therefore relationship banking is often considered as the appropriate lending technique. In this paper we offer a theoretical model to analyze relationship banking and the pricing behavior of banks in a Bertrand competition framework with monitoring costs. We show that the lack of reliable information leads to comparable high interest rates even if a long-term relationship between borrower and bank exists. The paper offers a theoretical explanation why SMEs often are faced with borrowing constraints.
The substantial booms and busts in agricultural prices marked by extreme events across commodities lead to heated debates about the effects of speculative trading on commodity price fluctuations. This study proposes a new approach to understanding extreme events and boom-bust processes in agricultural markets. Using weekly futures data for twelve indexed agricultural commodities during 2006 to 2016, we find that extreme price changes, located in the 10% tails of the distribution, cluster across agricultural markets. We then implement a multinomial logit model to investigate which factors are associated with the propagation of extreme events. Specifically, we disentangle three transmission conduits. (1) The macroeconomic conduit captures the possibility that the synchronized extreme price events are generated by business-cycle driven demand shifts mainly in emerging economies. (2) The financial conduit refers to potential links between extreme returns and the increasing flow of money from financial participants into agricultural futures markets. (3) Finally, the energy conduit accounts for possible spillover effects due to oil price shocks. Our results indicate an important role of managed money positions and oil prices while the real demand channel remains mostly insignificant. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Ecosystem services and sustainability have become prominent concepts in international policy and research agendas. However, a common conceptual ground between these concepts is currently underdeveloped. In particular, a vision is missing on how to align ecosystem services with overarching sustainability goals. Originally, the ecosystem service concept focused on sustaining human well-being through biodiversity conservation. Nevertheless, studies within the field also consider appropriation beyond carrying capacities, and natural resource management that involves environmentally damaging inputs as ecosystem service provision. This brings the ecosystem service concept into conflict with the core goal of sustainability, i.e. achieving justice within ecological limits over the long term. Here, we link the ecosystem service concept to sustainability outcomes operationalized in terms of justice. Our framing positions sustainability as an overarching goal which can be achieved through seven key strategies: equitable (1) intergenerational and (2) intragenerational distribution, (3) interspecies distribution, (4) fair procedures, recognition and participation, (5) sufficiency, (6) efficiency, and (7) persistence. Applying these strategies has the potential to re-focus the ecosystem service concept towards the normative goal of sustainability. We identify research needs for each strategy and further discuss questions regarding operationalization of the strategies. (C) 2017 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.
Based on large representative German household survey data, we compare incomes of the self-employed with those of paid employees. We find that the entrepreneurial income gap is largest for those holding a tertiary degree, but in two directions: positive for employers (self-employed with further employees) and negative for solo entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs holding a tertiary degree also face the greatest income variation. However, some solo self-employed earn more than their employed counterparts, in particular those with a university entrance degree as the highest level of education.
It is widely accepted that modern pigs were domesticated independently at least twice, and Chinese native pigs are deemed as direct descendants of the first domesticated pigs in the corresponding domestication centers. By analyzing mitochondrial DNA sequences of an extensive sample set spanning 10,000 years, we find that the earliest pigs from the middle Yellow River region already carried the maternal lineages that are dominant in both younger archaeological populations and modern Chinese pigs. Our data set also supports early Neolithic pig utilization and a long-term in situ origin for northeastern Chinese pigs during 8,000-3,500 BP, suggesting a possibly independent domestication in northeast China. Additionally, we observe a genetic replacement in ancient northeast Chinese pigs since 3,500 BP. The results not only provide increasing evidence for pig origin in the middle Yellow River region but also depict an outline for the process of early pig domestication in northeast China.
Research suggests a positive link between critical thinking and creativity. However, this relationship has not been measured in an empirical study. This study aims to explore whether critical thinking can serve to enhance creativity and whether creativity positively mediates the relationship between critical thinking and business performance. In this study, we analyse these relationships within the entrepreneurial context of a web-based business start-up simulation. We examined data from 26 teams of three to four senior business students and found partial support for our hypotheses. Critical thinking positively influenced creativity, measured as the total number of unique product designs. Creativity (unique product designs) also positively mediated the link between critical thinking and performance. This effect, however, did not exist when creativity was assessed through advertisement designs. This research contributes to entrepreneurship and innovation management by demonstrating the importance of critical thinking as a basis for creativity and testing this relationship in a business start-up simulation context.
This article discusses the challenges for providers of local public services to adapt to increasing marketization and competition in the public sector. Based on some empirical evidence from local government in Germany, the article describes different adaptive measures in the past and shows the legal restrictions to strengthening performance and particularly competitiveness. Furthermore, the article presents some findings from good practice cases of local service providers in Germany who have successfully exposed themselves to market mechanisms. Finally, the article discusses observed results of increased competitiveness in the local government sector, with special regard to quality, efficiency and public employment. The article concludes with describing necessary elements of a competitive regime for public services and with some general reflections about the role of competition in the public sector.
This article is a response to calls in prior research that we need more longitudinal analyses to better understand the foundations of PSM and related prosocial values. There is wide agreement that it is crucial for theory building but also for tailoring hiring practices and human resource development programs to sort out whether PSM-related values are stable or developable. The article summarizes existent theoretical expectations, which turn out to be partially conflicting, and tests them against multiple waves of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study which covers a time period of 16 years. It finds that PSM-related values of public employees are stable rather than dynamic but tend to increase with age and decrease with organizational membership. The article also examines cohort effects, which have been neglected in prior work, and finds moderate evidence that there are differences between those born during the Second World War and later generations.
Previous research on open innovation (OI) has primarily focused on the organisational level of R&D intensive industries. With this paper, we contribute to research on the individual level of analysis by analysing specific perspectives in the context of creative industries. Our study is based on 36 interviews with Haute cuisine chefs in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland listed in the 2012 Michelin Guide. Building on the OI capability concept, our results demonstrate that chefs use absorptive and desorptive capacity (AC, DC) as means to generate and market culinary innovations, respectively. Moreover, we found that chefs almost exclusively rely on their own inventive and innovative capabilities in the early stages of the culinary innovation process. In subsequent phases, however, chefs increasingly integrate other sources such as employees, suppliers, and guests. Our study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, we research the individual level within the OI process, and second, we provide insight into OI practices in the creative industries.
Background: Cloud computing promises to essentially improve healthcare delivery performance. However, shifting sensitive medical records to third-party cloud providers could create an adoption hurdle because of security and privacy concerns. Methods: We empirically investigate our research question by a survey with over 260 full responses. For the setting with a high confidentiality assurance, we base on a recent multi-cloud architecture which provides very high confidentiality assurance through a secret-sharing mechanism: Health information is cryptographically encoded and distributed in a way that no single and no small group of cloud providers is able to decode it.
Public organizations involved in marine management are increasingly confronted with coordination challenges in marine governance. This study examines why and how the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research (IMR) reorganized its formal coordination structures between the areas of fisheries management and marine environmental management The findings indicate that organizing efficient and, at the same time, legitimate coordination structures between different areas of marine governance is a "wicked" organizational problem with no ultimate and single optimal solution. In contrast to the assumptions of classical organization and management theory, the study finds that the reorganization of formal coordination structures is not necessarily driven for reasons of efficiency and perceived coordination problems. Instead, public marine management organizations also change their organizational structures to live up to external expectations to adopt modern management concepts, such as the Ecosystem Approach to Management (EAM). However, the study indicates that the adoption of the EAM has stimulated coordination and integration efforts in the research and advisory activities of the IMR. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.