Precautionary saving in Spain during the great recession: evidence from a panel of uncertainty indicators

The aim of this paper is to empirically study the effect of uncertainty on private consumption using a sample of Spanish households, and therefore, to test the existence of a precautionary motive for saving. Using data provided by the Spanish Survey of Household Finances and the Labour Force Survey we construct several uncertainty measures that are commonly used in the literature and an additional indicator based on job insecurity data, and we consequently estimate different econometric models under the life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis, including these measures of uncertainty. Our results are twofold: first, we find evidence in favour of the precautionary saving hypothesis. Secondly, we find that, unlike other variables related to the performance of the labour market (such as the unemployment rate) the job insecurity indicator is an appropriate variable to approximate income uncertainty in any macroeconomic context.     

Das TIMP-Inventar – Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erfassung von Kern-Faktoren salutogener Führung

Occupational health management and science increasingly focus on the issue of health-promoting leadership. Meanwhile a lot of leadership behaviors have been identified that affect the health of employees. To measure them requires high costs. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify core-factors of salutogenic leadership and to operationalize them for an efficient diagnosis. As an integrative work-related indicator of employees’ health sense of work coherence (Work-SoC) was chosen. In a deductive and inductive process the TIMP-inventory has been developed that enables the economic assessment of three leadership dimensions: Trust, Incident Management and Pressure. These factors explain with less items more variance of the Work-SoC construct than established general and health-related leadership scales of transformational leadership, consideration, social support, demanding leadership as well as positive and negative health behavior. That is why the TIMP-factors can be recognized as core-factors of health-promoting leadership.     

Karriereerfolg als Ergebnis des Personalmanagements

Strategic human resource management has avoided to evaluate its efforts in relation to employees’ careers. Recent research has investigated a selection of individual human resource management (HRM) practices (e.?g., training and development, mentoring, career development, talent management, performance appraisal) in relation to objective and subjective career success, but failed to study HRM systems or bundles. This paper argues that HRM systems and career success can be connected via human capital theory because human capital is understood as an organizational resource and as an individual antecedent to careers. Based on extant research that relates individual HRM practices to objective or subjective career success, this paper reviews and discusses the relationship between bundles of HRM practices and the individual practices contained therein and career success. The final conclusion suggests that evaluations of HRM systems should take careers into account because organizations rely on employees’ human capital. Future research should focus more intensely on the role of HRM for the development of careers also across organizations.     

BarCamps und frühere partizipatorische Konferenzformate

For the ?news‘ section of the journal ?Gruppe, Interaktion, Organisation (GIO)‘, Janine Klemmt inducts into the functioning of US conference formats, which have long-since spread to European conference landscape. Among them there are formats like BarCamp or the predecessor Open-Space-Technology. These formats increasingly rely on the active participation and involvement of their attendees. Occasionally, the conference content is completely locally determined by the attendees. These participatory conferences have a decentralized structure, which is similar to the way social media works, but cannot be explained by an imitation of contemporary social media formats. Rather by means of decentralization online and conference platforms have a common organizational component, a common denominator, which, especially with cybernetics, has moved into the field of science, has been taken up in societal areas such as technology and business, and thus increasingly found its way into the everyday world.     

Nah der Wissenschaft und fern der Führung in einer Fach‑/Expertenlaufbahn?

In order to motivate and retain technical employees, representatives of strategic career management face the challenge of establishing alternative career paths in addition to the common leadership/management career. Surveying a sample of 629 doctorate holders from the STEM fields, we differentiated between five career paths within and beyond structured career models. Structured career ladders were predominantly present in major enterprises. Female participants less frequently reported to be part of a structured career path. Entering a leadership/management career seems to occur at a later stage compared to other paths. Generally, advancement on a leadership/management path was related to stronger increases in incentives than climbing up the technical/expert or project management ladders. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find members of a technical/expert career to work closer to basic research and their initial qualification than their colleagues on other career paths. Members of leadership/management paths reported to have significantly more leadership responsibility than those working on alternative paths.     

The effects of separate taxation on labor participation of married couples. An empirical analysis using propensity score

Up to 1987 the Spanish Income Tax imposed compulsory joint filing for married couples. However, the 1988 reform allowed spouses to choose between joint and separate taxation, involving a reduction in tax rates for secondary earners. Our aim is to analyze this reform as a quasi-natural experiment, assessing the effects of tax changes on labor participation. To find out the causal effect we adopt the difference-in-differences technique. We use data from the ‘Spanish Income Tax Panel 1982–1998’. Our results show that, as a consequence of differential tax changes, married women in families more strongly affected by the fiscal reform increase their labor participation more than secondary earners from families less affected by the reform. The participation rate for secondary earners in the treatment group increases by 9.4 percentage points whereas the control group increases their participation rate by 7.8 percentage points. We define the treatment group as those secondary earners in relatively low-income families in year 1987 and the control group as those in middle-high income families, because the former experiences a stronger reduction in tax rates than the latter. As a result, we can attribute the 1.6-percentage-point-increase in participation rates to the 1988 income tax reform.     

Emerging wealth disparities after the storm: Evidence from Spain

We examine how the recession that started in December 2007 in the United States impacted wealth accumulation and inequality among Spanish households. We find that overall wealth dropped by 15 percent between 2008 and 2011, with losses concentrating among households in the mid and top wealth quintiles. The most hard hit wealth components were business assets, primary home equity, and durable assets, which declined by 40 percent, 23 percent and 19 percent, respectively. Wealth losses among all households were likely sustained by restricted access to credit. Nonetheless, in part due to their more diversified wealth portfolios, households in the top wealth quintile amassed a greater share of the country’s wealth during the recession. Consequently, wealth inequality, which receded during the expansionary years of 2002 through 2005, rose by 2008 and continued its trend in 2011.     

The role of grandparenting in early childcare and child outcomes

This paper examines the short and medium term impact of early childcare provision by grandparents and formal care settings on child cognitive outcomes, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Compared with children placed in formal childcare, children cared for by their grandparents are better at naming objects, but perform worse on tests of basic concept development and non-verbal reasoning. These results mask strong heterogeneities. On the one hand, the positive association between grandparental care and child outcomes is stronger for children from more advantaged households; on the other, the negative association is only significant for those from more disadvantaged households. The results of OLS estimations used for our analysis are confirmed using panel methods and an instrumental variable approach.     

Do childbirth grants increase the fertility rate? Policy impacts in South Korea

In response to a low fertility rate, a number of municipalities in South Korea have been providing family benefits in the form of childbirth grants and child allowances. Using panel data for 230 municipalities that spans the years 2001–2014, this paper examines the impacts of family benefits on the fertility rate in Korea. I use the fact that different municipalities began providing the family benefits at different times to estimate the impact of family benefits on fertility rates using a difference-in-differences approach. This study finds a positive effect of family benefits on total fertility rate. Moreover, it finds little evidence of an anticipatory response within municipalities that adopted the policy. Given that a 10 million Korean won increase in family benefits is associated with a 3.5% increase in the total fertility rate, an increase in family benefits of about 44 million Korean won per child would be required to raise the total fertility rate to a safe zone above 1.5 children per woman, where population declines are gradual and easily reversed.     

Life satisfaction in China and consumption and income inequalities

This research uses nationally representative data to study how economic resources and inequalities are associated with life satisfaction of Chinese residents. We construct economic resource and inequality measures from expenditure rather than from income, after confirming that expenditure inequality is a better measure in the Chinese context. We find that economic inequalities in general are negatively associated with life satisfaction, and that this association is larger for inequalities in the lower half of the distribution than those in the upper half of the distribution. We further explore the mechanisms under which inequality can be associated with life satisfaction, and find that aspiration is potentially one important channel.