Verarmungsrisiken nach kritischen Lebensereignissen in Deutschland und den USA

We study how the impact of job loss, sickness, retirement, and family dissolution on the risk of relative income poverty differs between Germany and the United States, and whether the impact of these events has changed between 1980 and 2009. Americans are more likely than Germans to enter poverty after any of the four events, yet they also recover more quickly from job loss and family dissolution. Comparisons over time do not indicate a secular rise in the impact of critical life events on poverty risks, but our results show that poverty trajectories are subject to stronger cyclical fluctuations in the United States: Through its emphasis on market mechanisms, the liberal American welfare state raises the importance of (re-)employment opportunities for coping with the consequences of adverse life events. The absence of clear long-term trends leads to a reassessment of common views about welfare state change such as Jacob Hacker??s thesis of a ??Great Risk Shift?? or the notion of an ??Americanization?? of Continental European welfare states. So far, there is also little evidence that the often claimed recalibration of welfare states towards ??new social risks?? has alleviated the adverse economic consequences of family dissolution.     

HAC Corrections for Strongly Autocorrelated Time Series

Applied work routinely relies on heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) standard errors when conducting inference in a time series setting. As is well known, however, these corrections perform poorly in small samples under pronounced autocorrelations. In this article, I first provide a review of popular methods to clarify the reasons for this failure. I then derive inference that remains valid under a specific form of strong dependence. In particular, I assume that the long-run properties can be approximated by a stationary Gaussian AR(1) model, with coefficient arbitrarily close to one. In this setting, I derive tests that come close to maximizing a weighted average power criterion. Small sample simulations show these tests to perform well, also in a regression context.     

Assessing the impact of initial nonresponse and attrition in the analysis of unemployment duration with panel surveys

We show how register data combined at person-level with survey data can be used to conduct a novel type of nonresponse analysis in a panel survey. The availability of register data provides a unique opportunity to directly test the type of the missingness mechanism as well as estimate the size of bias due to initial nonresponse and attrition. We are also able to study in-depth the determinants of initial nonresponse and attrition. We use the Finnish subset of the European Community Household Panel (FI ECHP) data combined with register panel data and unemployment spells as outcome variables of interest. Our results show that initial nonresponse and attrition are clearly different processes driven by different background variables. Both the initial nonresponse and attrition mechanisms are nonignorable with respect to analysis of unemployment spells. Finally, our results suggest that initial nonresponse may play a role at least as important as attrition in causing bias. This result challenges the common view of attrition being the main threat to the value of panel data.     

The influence of different dimensions of social comparison on performance measure choice and team composition

Empirical research in the economic literature is increasingly addressing the implications of social comparison on incentive contracts by using analytical principal-agent models. Contrary to the existing investigations, which are primarily based on the assumption that individuals exclusively compare monetary income, theories of behavioral science suggest that monetary income and effort represent different dimensions of social comparison, which are weighted individually. Using a LEN framework, the present study focuses on this aspect of social comparisons and discusses how these dimensions and their individual weights affect optimal contract design and contract efficiency. I consider status-seeking agents who compare themselves to each other and differ with regard to their intensity of social preferences and the specific relevance of dimensions. Finally, I draw conclusions for the drafting of contracts with respect to (1) the choice of performance measures and (2) an optimal team composition.     

International business taxation and the business cash flow tax

Investments and business profits are internationally mobile. Countries respond by tackling international profit shifting. As a result, the international allocation of taxable profits becomes an increasingly complex and costly issue. Reform proposals either address the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development approach to international profit allocation or target tax bases that are less mobile than profits. This paper investigates cash flow as a tax base. A business cash flow tax abolishes current accrual accounting and has the potential to block international profit shifting. Financing vanishes to become a tax-planning tool because the investments’ market return is tax free under a cash flow tax. Profit shifting via intra-group transactions is eliminated if the business cash flow tax is based on the country of destination principle. However, a destination-based business cash flow tax might distort the investment decisions of international groups.     

Resource utilization as an internal driver of alliance portfolio evolution: The Qatar Airways case (1993–2010)

This article aims to understand the role played by resource utilization levels as a driver of alliance portfolio evolution over time. Based on our theoretical framework and on a case study of Qatar Airways (199.3–2010), we develop insights into the micro-dynamics of resource structuring in firms that possess an alliance portfolio. Our research shows that firms can create either their own or network resources with different deployment modes according to their resource utilization levels to remain profitable. We also emphasize that optimized resource utilization is a key driver of resource-structuring efforts in firms. Finally, we show that based on the focal firm's life cycle phase, the level of resource utilization changes and leads to various resource-structuring mechanisms that can be observed at the alliance portfolio level.     

Issues in the assessment of non-inferiority: perspectives drawn from case studies

Superiority claims for improved efficacy are the backbone of clinical development of new therapies. However, not every new therapy in development allows for such a claim. Some therapies per se do not try to improve efficacy further but concentrate on important aspects in safety or convenience. Such improvements can be equally important to patients, and development strategies should be available for such compounds. A three-arm design with placebo, active control and experimental treatment may be viewed as the golden standard for such compounds; however, it may be difficult if not impossible to add a placebo arm in certain diseases. In such situations, non-inferiority designs are the only development option left. This paper will highlight some of the key issues with such designs in practice and will report experience from two studies from different therapeutic areas intended for regulatory submission.     

Process matters – How strategic decision-making process characteristics impact capital allocation efficiency

We employ strategic decision-making process theory to study the internal capital markets of firms and argue that varying allocation efficiency can result from the configuration of the capital allocation decision-making process. Learning from earlier research on firms' portfolio allocations, we also develop assumptions on interaction effects with firm-level unrelated diversification and environmental dynamics. We test our hypotheses with structural equation modeling on an international sample of large multi-business firms. Our results suggest that process formalization and analytical comprehensiveness have a positive influence on the efficiency of allocation decisions. Another key result is that unrelated diversified portfolios positively moderate the influence of analytical comprehensiveness and formalization, while dynamic environments negatively impact the influence of formal processes but reward managerial involvement.     

An ‘unholy alliance’ of existential proportions: Negotiating discourses with men's experiences of cancer and aging

Little is understood about how experiencing cancer and aging together can disrupt people's socio-personal worlds and lead to existential questions about identity, life ambiguity, and death. Toward this end, we interpreted the metaphors that three aging men with cancer used in a focus group to describe their existential concerns. We also considered how two dominant cultural discourses around cancer and aging, generally referred to as discourses of “progress” and “decline”, figured into the participants' meanings. Finally, we compared the men's attitudes toward cancer and aging to dominant ideas about how men respond to these life events. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis, informed by critical phenomenology, we came to three conclusions. First, the men's interpretations of cancer and aging shared similar existential themes of tragedy and transcendence. Second, these existential concerns were informed by dominant discourses of cancer and aging, in that they followed the culturally constructed trajectories of decline and progress, respectively. The men's metaphors point to a negotiation of these two discourses. A third and related point is that the men predominantly contradicted gendered assumptions about dealing with life adversity but in some ways repeated them. This research indicates that people interpret cancer and aging in somewhat shared ways, via dominant cultural discourses, but also in individual ways depending on personal life histories. As discourses and life histories seem to influence how people make sense of aging life with cancer, it may be useful to be aware of these contexts when providing psycho-social care to aging cancer patients.     

Is There a Stabilizing Selection Around Average Fertility in Modern Human Populations?

Possibly the greatest challenge for an evolutionary explanation of demographic transition is the fact that fertility levels universally start to fall first among the well‐to‐do, well‐educated, healthy classes, which can be explained only by some voluntary or at least adaptive action. The problem of how restraints on fertility could have evolved by natural selection has been tackled with group selection models as well as with stabilizing selection models. The latter model, which is critically discussed in this article, posits that some intermediate (rather than maximal) level of fertility is optimal for long‐term reproductive success. Tests of stabilizing selection in human populations are rare, their results inconclusive. Here four sets of data are analyzed: they are samples drawn from the 'class of 1950 of the US Military Academy at West Point (cohorts 1923–29), retired US noncommissioned officers (cohorts 1913–37), and western German and eastern German physicians (cohorts 1930–35), all containing fertility data over two generations, and from European royalty (cohorts 1790–1939) containing fertility data over four generations. Deterministic as well as stochastic fitness measures are used. It is found that maximal, not average, fertility in the first generation leads to maximal long‐term reproductive success. Also against prediction, no decreasing marginal fitness gains by increasing fertility can be observed. The findings leave little space for considering stabilizing selection as a plausible mechanism explaining the course of demographic transition but indicate instead that biological evolution today is as fast and vigorous as ever in human history. Even in large populations, all people living today may be the descendants of just some few percents—a much smaller proportion than generally believed— of the people living some generations ago.