Portuguese Migrants in the German Labor Market: Selection and Performance1

The labor market performance of Portuguese workers in Germany is analyzed in this article. While previous work has compared wages and characteristics of migrants to natives only, this study also matches the data set with an equivalent survey from the sending country. The findings show that Portuguese migrants as a whole are negatively selected, with the exception of blue‐collar workers, the largest group among the movers. The finding that Portuguese migrants earn more than comparable Germans indicates that they have higher unobservable skills.     

On games under expected utility with rank dependent probabilities

Expected utility with rank dependent probabilities is a generalization of expected utility. If such preference representations are used for the payoffs in the mixed extension of a finite game, Nash equilibrium may fail to exist. Set-valued solutions, however, do exist even for those more general utility functions. But some set-valued solutions may have certain conceptual shortcomings. The paper thus proposes a new set-valued solution concept, called fixed sets under the best reply correspondence. All set-valued solution concepts are robust to perturbations of the expected utility hypothesis.     

Inside the black box: incentive regulation and incentive channeling on energy markets

This paper aims to achieve more insight into the complex interplay between the “external” market regulations and “internal” regulations (corporate governance) of energy firms. In recent years, many countries have deregulated the incumbent energy monopolies and have introduced new modes of regulation. However, the new incentive schemes do not represent an unmitigated success story. A major problem seems to be the neoclassical framework that is used for the analysis of energy markets. Therefore, an important goal of this paper is to clarify the boundaries of neoclassical regulation theory. There are two restrictions that hamper the neoclassical analysis of energy markets. The first is the difficulty of overcoming the widely held “black box” view of firms. The second is the idea that agents always make rational choices. The paper proposes a kind of theoretical division of labor for understanding the effectiveness of regulatory schemes in energy markets. Neoclassical economics points out to the sources of market failure, and helps to identify where in particular on the supply chain one is likely to observe natural monopolies. Transaction cost economics explains appropriate governance of vertical relations along the supply chain. And organizational theories can elucidate what happens within firms: their response to regulation, competition, and relations with suppliers. A research agenda for the third component is proposed, drawing on insights from New Sociological Institutionalism and organizational behavior.     

Processing Institutional Change in Public Service Provision

With the proliferation of New Public Management (NPM) worldwide, public service providing agencies are increasingly expected to operate in a business-like manner and exposed to ‘competing institutional logics’. Exploring the German hospital sector, this article shows that this is processed within two areas of collective action simultaneously: at enterprise-level and at the regulatory infrastructure of the organizational field. In both places, ‘institutional work’ takes place, albeit differently. With emerging tensions, trial-and-error strategies (deployed by individual hospitals) and mitigating (regulatory) measures engender a nervous cohabitation of the two logics, endangering potentially the sector’s public mission in the long term.     

Factor Structure,Reliability, and Known Groups Validity of the German Version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Short-Form) in Swiss Patients and Nonpatients

The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form is the most widely used instrument to assess childhood trauma and has been translated into 10 languages. However, research into validity and reliability of these translated versions is scarce. The present study aimed to investigate the factor structure, internal consistency, reliability, and known-groups validity of the German Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form (Bernstein & Fink, 1998). Six-hundred and sixty-one clinical and nonclinical participants completed the German Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the 5-factor structure of the original Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form. To investigate known-groups validity, the confirmatory factor analysis latent factor levels between clinical and nonclinical participants were compared. The original 5-factor structure was confirmed, with only the Physical Neglect scale showing rather poor fit. As a conclusion, the results support the validity and reliability of the German Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form. It is recommended to use the German Childhood Trauma Questionnaire–Short Form to assess experiences of childhood trauma.     

Comments on goodness-of-fitmeasures in binary choice models by frank windmeijer

Why study Pseudo-R²,s for limited dependent variable models? After all, even in the much clearer ordinary least squares case, R² is a poor guide to model selection, at least when used by itself, because it never decreases and typically increases whenever an independent variable is added. There are even cases where R² will tend to one when there is no relationship among the (nonstationary) variables whatsoever (Granger and Newbold, 1974). Surely applied researchers would not want to bother with such a statistic in the limited dependent variable case, particularly when the intuitive explainedvariation- to- total- variation interpretation is no longer available.     

Normal random numbers lying on spirals and clubs

Two methods for transforming uniformly distributed random numbers into normally distributed random numbers are considered in conjunction with linear congruential generators. The two-dimensional lattice structure of the uniform random numbers is transformed by the Box-Muller method into a spiral structure and by the polar method into a club-shaped structure. The approximation of the two-dimensional normal distribution and the independence of the associated random variables are discussed.