How much does reducing inequality matter for global poverty?

The Journal of Economic Inequality - The goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and working towards a more equal distribution of incomes are part of the United Nations’ Sustainable...     

Payout policy,taxes, and corporate insiders: evidence from the German Tax Reduction Act 2001

Based on a large panel data set of listed German firms we analyze the corporate payout behavior around the German Tax Reduction Act 2001 (GTRA). The GTRA has considerably changed the tax preference of shareholders and consequently affected the attractiveness of different forms of payout. Using the tax reform as an exogenous source of variation we examine whether payout decisions are driven by corporate insiders or by influential shareholders. We find that the GTRA 2001 reduced both the propensity to pay dividends as well as their size. However, we find that in those firms where management board members hold substantial stakes, dividend payout behavior has not changed in the aftermath of the GTRA. This effect does not depend on the existence of other influential shareholders as for instance institutional shareholders. Hence, we conclude that the dividend policy is strongly driven by the interests of corporate insiders.     

Partial Distributional Policy Effects

In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the effect of a counterfactual change in the unconditional distribution of a single covariate on the unconditional distribution of an outcome variable of interest. Both fixed and infinitesimal changes are considered. We show that such effects are point identified under general conditions if the covariate affected by the counterfactual change is continuously distributed, but are typically only partially identified if its distribution is discrete. For the latter case, we derive informative bounds, making use of the available information. We also discuss estimation and inference.     

Was heißt „dialogische Beziehung“ in berufsbezogener Beratung (Supervision und Coaching)?

What is the meaning of ?dialogical relationship“ in supervision and coaching? The model of the ?socratic dialogue“ The author presents the ?socratic dialogue“ as a model of the counseling settings supervision and coaching. In contrast to a dogmatized store of knowledge the recognition of the own notknowing concerning the other person and the problem to be solved is a crucial attitude. Instead of a secure professional knowledge and of a corresponding indoctrination or e.g. interpretations of ?resistance“, the central issues are the common questioning and scrutinizing as well as the courage to open oneself to the encounting unknown. A dialogue attitude means, to become aware of and to endure the contradiction of equality vs. unequality, knowing vs. not-knowing, self-interest vs. openness to the other.     

ON THE HETEROGENEOUS EMPLOYMENT EFFECTS OF OFFSHORING: IDENTIFYING PRODUCTIVITY AND DOWNSIZING CHANNELS

This article examines the channels through which offshoring affects employment in a representative sample of German establishments, using a difference‐in‐differences matching approach. Offshoring is measured by an increase in the share of foreign to total intermediate inputs at the plant‐level. We identify a positive productivity effect and isolate a negative downsizing effect from offshoring on employment, by exploiting differences between offshoring plants that do and do not simultaneously restructure. Furthermore, we cannot find evidence of negative indirect employment effects on domestic suppliers or competitors. (JEL F16, J23, F23, C21)     

Implementing Operations Strategy: How Vertical and Horizontal Coordination Interact

We study the implementation of operations strategy at six German manufacturers in mature businesses. Search theory argues that vertical coordination (i.e., unilateral top‐down adjustment of lower‐level search actions) balances stability against the improvement potential enabled by frontline search and also that horizontal coordination (i.e., bilateral adjustment among lower‐level search actions) is required to ensure compatibility among the initiatives generated in various organizational subunits. Much less is known about how vertical and horizontal coordination interact in operations strategy implementation—that is the focus of this study. We first study how horizontal and vertical coordination affect the compatibility and creativity of distributed search, triangulating our cross‐level interviews with data on the manufacturers' productivity gains and their strategic projects. We then examine whether and how vertical and horizontal coordination interact. Our case comparisons suggest that leaving either one of them “loose” and keeping the other one “tight” results in a useful balance between compatibility and creativity; in contrast, tightening both types of coordination suppresses creativity and loosening both types risks incompatibility of initiatives across units. These results lead to a theoretical framework that identifies vertical and horizontal coordination as partial substitutes for operations strategy implementation.     

如何管理利益冲突？

由于公司丑司的不断出现，许多国家都加强了公司治理的力度，其中一个方面就是要求公司用一种正确而透明的方式来处理董事会成员们身上的利益冲突问题。     

Phillips-Perron-type unit root tests in the nonlinear ESTAR framework

Summary In this paper, we propose Phillips-Perron type, semi-parametric testing procedures to distinguish a unit root process from a mean-reverting exponential smooth transition autoregressive one. The limiting nonstandard distributions are derived under very general conditions and simulation evidence shows that the tests perform better than the standard Phillips-Perron or Dickey-Fuller tests in the region of the null. We would like to thank conference participants of the Pfingsttagung 2005 in Münster for their helpful comments.