The impact of investor sentiment on the German stock market

This paper develops a broad-based sentiment indicator for Germany and investigates whether investor sentiment can explain stock returns on the German stock market. Based on a principal component analysis, we construct a sentiment indicator that condenses information of several well-known sentiment proxies. We show that this indicator explains the return spread between sentiment sensitive stocks and stocks that are not sensitive to sentiment fluctuations. Specifically, stocks that are difficult to arbitrage and hard to value are sensitive to the indicator. However, we do not find much predictive power of sentiment for future stock returns.     

Differences Between Household Income from Surveys and Registers and How These Affect the Poverty Headcount: Evidence from the Austrian SILC

We take advantage of the fact that for the Austrian SILC 2008–2011, two data sources are available in parallel for the same households: register-based and survey-based income data. Thus, we aim to explain which households tend to under- or over-report their household income by estimating multinomial logit and OLS models with covariates referring to the interview situation, employment status and socio-demographic household characteristics. Furthermore, we analyze source-specific differences in the distribution of household income and how these differences affect aggregate poverty indicators based on household income. The analysis reveals an increase in the cross-sectional poverty rates for 2008–2011 and the longitudinal poverty rate if register data rather than survey data are used. These changes in the poverty rate are mainly driven by differences in employment income rather than sampling weights and other income components. Regression results show a pattern of mean-reverting errors when comparing household income between the two data sources. Furthermore, differences between data sources for both under-reporting and over-reporting slightly decrease with the number of panel waves in which a household participated. Among the other variables analyzed that are related to the interview situation (mode, proxy, interview month), only the number of proxy interviews was (weakly) positively correlated with the difference between data sources, although this outcome was not robust over different model specifications.     

Digital document and interpretation: re-thinking “text” and scholarship in electronic settings

The contribution starts from outlining the evolution of the scholarly production flow from the print based paradigm to the digital age and in this context it explores the opposition of digital versus analog representation modes. It then develops on the triple paradigm shift caused by genuine digital publishing and its specific consequences for the social sciences and humanities (SSH) which in turn results in re-constituting basic scholarly notions such as ‘text’ and ‘document’. The paper concludes with discussing the specific value that could be added in systematically using digital text resources as a basis for scholarly work and also states some of the necessary conditions for such a ‘digital turn’ to be successful in the SSH.     

Welfare Regimes and Welfare Opinions: a Comparison of Eight Western Countries

Social Indicators Research -     

Class, Attitudes and the Welfare State: Sweden in Comparative Perspective

One of the most important arenas for contemporary class politics is the welfare state. In this article, attitudes towards welfare policies among different classes in Sweden are compared with other Western countries and over time. In the first part of the article, attitudes towards state intervention among different classes are compared across four Western countries: Sweden, Germany, Britain and the USA. The data come from the 1996 survey on “The Role of Government” conducted within the International Social Survey Programme. In the second part of the article, more detailed national data sets are used in order to track developments within Sweden from the early 1980s until 2002. Attitudes towards welfare spending, financing of welfare policies and service delivery are used to track developments of class differences in attitudes over time. It is concluded (a) that class differences are particularly large in Sweden, and (b) that changes over time indicate stability in overall class differences, combined with changes in attitudes among non‐manual employees. The implications of the results for recent arguments about the restructuring of class relations and the impact of welfare policies on stratification are discussed.     

The Inter-Institutional Distribution of Power in EU Codecision

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act strategically. Predicted bargaining outcomes of the crucial Conciliation stage of codecision are shown to be strongly biased towards the legislative status quo. Making symmetric preference assumptions for members of CM and EP, CM is on an average much more conservative because of its internal qualified majority rule. This makes CM by an order of magnitude more influential than EP, in contrast to a seeming formal parity between the two ‘co-legislators’.     

Accepting the unacceptable: the concept of acceptance in work with the perpetrators of hate crime

We consider the challenge presented to social workers in working with people who are the perpetrators of hate crime. We argue that in order to be able to bring about positive change in this group, as in any other, the work can only take place in the context of a constructive relationship between worker and client, a relationship which is underpinned by the acceptance of the client by the worker. We trace the development of the concept of acceptance from its early formulation in the work of Rogers, through other writers, to its contemporary manifestation, as is to be found in some examples of work with the perpetrators of hate crime and most explicitly in the work of Krafeld. We conclude that in this area of work the concept needs to be understood in terms of an active and dynamic rather than passive approach.     

Figuren der reflektierten Improvisation in der sozialpädagogischen Jugendberatung

The author analyses the meaning of not planed and impossible to plan events in the field of social pedagogical counselling of young people. As a first step he describes how far the social pedagogical counselling always includes elements of improvisation. An analysis of the question how norma improvisation could be qualified as reflective improvisation follows. Finally the authors shows which forms of acting emerge using the reflected improvisation in the social pedagogical counselling.