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.     

Planning in German steel company

Planning, in the past, often discredited in Germany as a device of an authoritarian government, is today an accepted and imprtant management tool, useful in managing a large, multi-divisional company wiht a great degree of delegation of responsibility. This article describes the corporate planning system of one of Germany's major steel companies.     

Slope rotatability over all directions designs

Slope rotatability over all directions (SROAD)is a useful concept when the slope of a second-order response is to be studied. SROAD designs ensure that knowledge of the slope is acquired symmetrically, whatever direction later becomes of more interest as the data are analyzed. Some standard second-order designs are SROAD,but here we explore designs for two and three dimensions, which do not have the full symmetries of such standard designs but which still possess the SROAD property.     

Illegal Migration: What Can We Know And What Can We Explain? The Case of Germany1

Methodological problems in the study of illegal migration as defined in this article relate to questions of indicators for illegal migration, with special reference to Germany. It is argued and demonstrated that illegal immigrants are traceable, to some degree, in official statistics and that these can be analyzed for trends. In present‐day migration processes, illegal immigration frequently is undertaken with the support of human smugglers. The analysis of the social organization of different forms of smuggling is the other main focus of the article. From a methodological point of view, the literature and public discourse lack adequate concepts for describing and explaining the social organization of human smuggling. The theory of organized crime as a main actor in human smuggling is criticized. The study borrows concepts from market and networks theory and applies these to different forms of human smuggling and illegal migration. The social and technological organization of smuggling is under constant pressure to adapt to new conditions. The dynamism for this change results mainly from an “arms race” between smugglers and law enforcement. Since control over territory and population are central elements of state sovereignty, the state cannot simply withdraw from this race.     

Functional Parallelism of Detailed and Rough Speech Processing at the End of Infancy

Although realization of the same speech sound is far from being consistent across different contexts, speech recognition has to rely on phonetic detail in order to detect words. So far, it appeared that young infants cannot avoid noticing subtle speech sound variation whenever it occurs. Only later on, they are able to tolerate speech sound variation in some word recognition tasks. Here, we test whether this ability is associated with the time infants start storing their first word forms. We recorded event‐related potentials (ERPs) in a priming paradigm. German words (targets) followed syllables (primes) with a different amount of phoneme overlap. We tested infants at three, six, and nine months after birth. ERPs reflected sensitivity to prime‐target variation in a single phoneme in three‐month‐olds, tolerance to this in six‐month‐olds, and both processing aspects in nine‐month‐olds. Our findings reveal individual developmental priorities for different aspects of speech processing, with very detailed speech processing dominating at around 3 months, rough processing dominating at around half a year after birth, and an architecture of parallel rough and detailed processing at around 9 months. Functional parallelism at the end of infancy might explain the heterogeneous pattern of results regarding the degree of acoustic detail that toddlers appear to consider at different ages and across different paradigms.     

The physical and the social foundations of technology

A conceptual framework for the analysis of various aspects of technology is indicated. The following points are discussed in succession: Science and technology, the transformation of input variables into output variables, technology as a means, the quasi-autonomy of technological progress. The analysis of the various factors delimiting the given technological possibilities and the investigation of the processes leading to the realization of a certain selection of these possibilities brings the technical and the social aspect together. In this way the assessment implied in the choice among alternative ways of instrumental action becomes evident, and the application of a certain technology can be reconstructed as resulting from a complex social decision.     

Interpolation,Glättung und Saisonbereinigung von Zeitreihen mit Splinefunktionen

This contribution explains the smoothing method with cubic splines with special regard to the problems of approximation for data points at the historical beginning and the actual end of time series. Seasonal adjustment using spline approximation will be shown. Numerical calculation and the discussion of the assumptions about stochastic disturbances require to distinguish between the spline approximation of data points for economic stock and flow variables. A numerical example for application will be presented for a monthly time series for car purchases in the Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, some properties of the smoothing method with splines in relation to a filter design will be discussed.