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.     

Sustainable development and ecological modernization – the limits to a hegemonic policy knowledge

The implementation problems of effective global environmental politics have essentially to do with the fact that approaches to and the knowledge about sustainability remain sectoralized. There is a gap between the dominant or even hegemonic forms of environmental policy knowledge which are embodied in the concept of sustainable development, on the one hand, and the socially dominant forms of environmental knowledge concerning the appropriation of nature on the other. Until now, the policy knowledge of sustainable development has not been able to question the main assumptions and to shape existing practices of dominant forms of the appropriation of nature. This is shown along five crucial dimensions; of particular importance is the existence of the so-called valorization paradigm. Theoretically, the article is informed by the theory of societal relationships with nature and it focuses on the role of knowledge in social reproduction, innovation, and transformation.     

Betriebswirtschaftslehre ohne Unternehmensethik? Vom Scheitern einer Ethik ohne Moral

Zusammenfassung  In Auseinandersetzung mit einer jüngst von Horst Albach ge?u?erten Auffassung von Betriebswirtschaftslehre ohne Unternehmensethik wird eine gegenteilige Auffassung entwickelt. Es wird gezeigt, dass der Glaube an die reinigenden Marktkr?fte eine ?konomistische Fiktion darstellt und mithin eine Ethik ohne Moral, d.h. ohne bewusst ethisch agierende Personen, unhaltbar ist. Stattdessen werden Anforderungen erkennbar, die als eine Richtschnur für die Entwicklung unternehmensethischer Perspektiven zu verstehen sind.

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Management without business ethics? On the failure of ethics without morality

Summary  Recently, Horst Albach developed an ethical approach which identifies management science being inherently ethical. This paper offers an alternative view. We examine how a pure market driven understanding of business ethics leads to questionable positions and logical contradictions. Therefore we propose a business ethics with morality which includes people, acting from ethically reflected grounds. Additionally, we define requirements to be fulfilled when developing business ethics within management science.

     

Friedman, Harsanyi, Rawls, Boulding – or somebody else? An experimental investigation of distributive justice

This paper investigates distributive justice using a fourfold experimental design: The ignorance and the risk scenarios are combined with the self-concern and the umpire modes. We study behavioral switches between self-concern and umpire mode and investigate the goodness of ten standards of behavior. In the ignorance scenario, subjects became, on average, less inequality-averse as umpires. A within-subjects analysis shows that about one half became less inequality-averse, one quarter became more inequality-averse and one quarter remained unchanged as umpires. In the risk scenario, subjects became on average more inequality-averse in their umpire roles. A within-subjects analysis shows that about half became more inequality-averse, one quarter became less inequality-averse, and one quarter remained unchanged as umpires. As to the standards of behavior, several prominent ones (leximin, leximax, Gini, Cobb-Douglas) were not supported, while expected utility, Boulding’s hypothesis, the entropy social welfare function, and randomization preference enjoyed impressive acceptance. For the risk scenario, the tax standard of behavior joins the favorite standards of behavior.Financial Support of the European Commission under TMR Contract No. ERBFMRXCT98-0248 is gratefully acknowledged. We are indebted to Serge-Christophe Kolm, Alf Erling Risa, Peter Zweifel, two anonymous referees and an editor of Social Choice and Welfare for helpful comments. We thank Marc Paolella for improving our English writing style. The usual disclaimer applies. The experimental data can be obtained from the authors (e-mail: traub@bwl.uni-kiel.de).     

Assessing the bias due to non-coverage of residential movers in the German Microcensus Panel: an evaluation using data from the Socio-Economic Panel

The German Microcensus (MC) is a large scale rotating panel survey over three years. The MC is attractive for longitudinal analysis over the entire participation duration because of the mandatory participation and the very high case numbers (about 200000 respondents). However, as a consequence of the area sampling that is used for the MC, residential mobility is not covered and consequently statistical information at the new residence is lacking in the MC sample. This raises the question whether longitudinal analyses, like transitions between labour market states, are biased and how different methods perform that promise to reduce such a bias. Similar problems occur also for other national Labour Force Surveys (LFS) which are rotating panels and do not cover residential mobility, see Clarke and Tate (2002). Based on data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which covers residential mobility, we analysed the effects of missing data of residential movers by the estimation of labour force flows. By comparing the results from the complete SOEP sample and the results from the SOEP, restricted to the non-movers, we concluded that the non-coverage of the residential movers can not be ignored in Rubin’s sense. With respect to correction methods we analysed weighting by inverse mobility scores and log-linear models for partially observed contingency tables. Our results indicate that weighting by inverse mobility scores reduces the bias to about 60% whereas the official longitudinal weights obtained by calibration result in a bias reduction of about 80%. The estimation of log-linear models for non-ignorable non-response leads to very unstable results.     

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.     

Efficient Institutions and Effective Deterrence: On Timing and Uncertainty of Formal Sanctions

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - Economic theory suggests that the deterrence of deviant behavior is driven by a combination of severity and certainty of punishment. This paper presents the first...     

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.     

Germany and its immigrants: a socio-demographic analysis

"Germany is today, along with the USA and Russia, one of the three most important immigration countries worldwide. The authors examine how the immigrant population of Germany has risen despite the fact that the German government has sought to restrict it. They analyse six major streams of migration: refugees and expellees who came immediately after World War II, German resettlers from Eastern Europe (?Aussiedler'), emigration of (West) Germans, migration between East and West Germany, foreign labour migrants and asylum seekers. The dynamics of immigration within each of these channels was remarkably different. As far as absorption and integration are concerned the authors argue that different groups of immigrants should be treated more equally."