Firm-NGO collaborations

This paper studies the motivation that drives NGO-firm collaborations, factors that contribute to their success and threats the partners face. It builds on existing literature that studies collaborations between firms and examines whether they differ from collaborations between NGOs and private-owned companies. Although they are similar in many aspects, they differ on others. For instance, firms often collaborate with NGOs to get access to the reputation and legitimacy of an NGO. In contrast, NGOs usually enter a collaboration with a corporate partner to advance its managerial skills and receive financial resources. There are also differences on how firms and NGOs measure the performance and success of a firm-NGO relationship: while firms primarily seek financial success, NGOs pursue more ideological goals and offer intangible assets such as reputation and authenticity that are more difficult to quantify. Finally, an NGO suffers more if a partner does not behave in a way that respects the partnership and damages the reputation and legitimacy of the NGO. This is problematic for NGOs, since reputation and legitimacy are their key resources.     

Parenthood and Quality of Life in Old Age: The Role of Individual Resources,the Welfare State and the Economy

Although the notion of ‘Social Europe’ can refer to different principles and policy options, most research narrows down attitudes towards Social Europe to a unidimensional construct. In this study, we instead propose a multi-dimensional approach, and contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we elaborate the notion of ‘Social Europe’ conceptually, and distinguish between the decision-making level for social policy, European social citizenship, harmonization, member-state solidarity and interpersonal solidarity. Second, analysing the 2014 Belgian National Election Study by means of confirmatory factor analysis we evidence that citizens indeed have distinct attitudes towards the policy principles and instruments of Social Europe. Although these attitudinal dimensions are interrelated, they cannot be reduced to a single Social Europe factor, meaning that citizens differentiate in their attitudes between various aspects of Social Europe. In addition, our research indicates that member-state solidarity is the primary aspect of Social Europe in public opinion, whereas the feature that has received most scholarly attention in empirical research to date—the preferred decision-making level for social policy—cannot be considered as a key component of attitudes towards Social Europe. Third, we investigate whether citizens with different educational levels conceptualize Social Europe similarly using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. Results indicate that the attitudinal factor structure of Social Europe is largely equivalent among lower and higher-educated citizens.     

Adaptive graph‐based multiple testing procedures

Multiple testing procedures defined by directed, weighted graphs have recently been proposed as an intuitive visual tool for constructing multiple testing strategies that reflect the often complex contextual relations between hypotheses in clinical trials. Many well‐known sequentially rejective tests, such as (parallel) gatekeeping tests or hierarchical testing procedures are special cases of the graph based tests. We generalize these graph‐based multiple testing procedures to adaptive trial designs with an interim analysis. These designs permit mid‐trial design modifications based on unblinded interim data as well as external information, while providing strong family wise error rate control. To maintain the familywise error rate, it is not required to prespecify the adaption rule in detail. Because the adaptive test does not require knowledge of the multivariate distribution of test statistics, it is applicable in a wide range of scenarios including trials with multiple treatment comparisons, endpoints or subgroups, or combinations thereof. Examples of adaptations are dropping of treatment arms, selection of subpopulations, and sample size reassessment. If, in the interim analysis, it is decided to continue the trial as planned, the adaptive test reduces to the originally planned multiple testing procedure. Only if adaptations are actually implemented, an adjusted test needs to be applied. The procedure is illustrated with a case study and its operating characteristics are investigated by simulations. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Verallgemeinerte bayes-verfahren bei sequentiellen testproblemen

In this paper, problems of sequential decision theory are taken into consideration by extending the definition of the BAYES rule and treating BAYES rules. This generalisation is quite useful for practice. In many cases only BAYES rules can be calculated. The conditions under which such sequential decision procedures exist are demonstrated, as well as how to construct them on a scheme of backward induction resulting in the conclusion that the existence of BAYES rules needs essentially weaker assumptions than the existence of BAYES rules.Futhermore, methods are searched to simplify the construction of optimal stopping rules. Some illustrative examples are given.     

Premia in Forward Foreign Exchange as Unobserved Components: A Note

We reconsider the signal-extraction approach to measuring premia in the pricing of forward foreign exchange, put forward by Wolff, in which the difference between the forward rate and the associated future spot rate is modeled as an autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model for the risk premium buried in a white-noise forecast error. We point out that an ARMA model for the risk premium is not always identifiable from information on the difference between the forward rate and the future spot rate only. We present solutions to the problem of identification and show how the model for the risk premium can be estimated in a direct way, provided that the identification problem is solved. For reason of comparison, we use the series analyzed by Wolff to estimate the models for risk premia. The results confirm the earlier finding that premia in forward exchange exhibit a certain degree of persistence over time.     

Der Einfluss politischer Ereignisse auf die PopularitÄt von Parteien und Politikern und auf das Parteiensystem

Political events, entering the political system as external shocks, can have a sizable impact on the popularity of political parties and politicians. We investigate this impact using as examples the unregistered campaign donations to chancellor Kohl (CDU-Spendenaffäre) and the political handling of the flash flood in the Elbe region shortly before the last federal election. Our special contribution to the literature is the combined analysis of event impacts on the valence dimension of the German party system and the inertia of the ideological dimension. By using a principal component analysis we extract a two-dimensional political configuration containing the position of parties and politicians and voters’ ideal points. We show that the basic ideological structure of the party system remains nearly unaltered even by such prominent events as the Spendenaffäre (donations scandal). The main changes affect the valence dimension. Focusing on voters we show that the greatest change of evaluation of parties takes place within the group of independents while the partisans remain rather stable in their assessments.     

Soziale Einflüsse auf die Klassenwahl im Generationen- und Periodenvergleich:

Social influences on the class vote result in a higher SPD-vote of workers who live in class homogeneous environments. These environments can be operationalized as ego-centric networks. In West Germany, these social influences are restricted to older cohorts and earlier Bundestag elections. This result gets corroborated by applying a more sophisticated dynamic version of an influence model, which analyses the relationship between party identification and the vote intention. It is shown that workers who do not identify with a party get mobilized as SPD-voters during election campaigns if they have contacts with other workers. This effect cannot be observed with ALLBUS-data from 1980, 1990 and 2000 for which interviewing did not take place during election campaigns. What has not changed in the last decades is the recruitment of friends and acquaintances from the same social class and subjective class identification under the impact of class homogeneous networks. What has changed is the politisation of these class homogeneous networks.     

Intergenerationelles Lernen als Herausforderung für NGOs

In this article the learning between different generations in Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) is discussed. Therefore the development and history of NGOs as a special kind of organisations is presented before the relationship between different generations is analysed within two steps. Firstly the voluntary engagement of different age groups is taken into account and secondly the learning opportunities between different generations in NGOs are theoretically reflected. Finally the challenges of intergenerational relationships within NGOs and the possibilities of institutionalised intergenerational learning are described.