Die wahrgenommene Gerechtigkeit des eigenen Erwerbseinkommens: Geschlechtstypische Muster und die Bedeutung des Haushaltskontextes

The rise in female labor market participation and the growth of ??atypical?? employment arrangements has, over the last few decades, brought about a steadily decreasing percentage of households in which the man is the sole breadwinner, and a rising percentage of dual-earner households. Against this backdrop, the paper investigates how household contexts in which the traditional ??male breadwinner?? model still exists or has already been challenged affect individuals?? subjective evaluations of the justice of their personal earnings. In the first step we derive three criteria used by individuals to evaluate the fairness or justice of their personal earnings: compensation for services rendered, coverage of basic needs, and the opportunity to earn social approval. In the second step, we apply considerations from household economics and new approaches from gender research to explain why men??s and women??s evaluations of justice are determined to a considerable degree by the specific situation within their household. The assumptions derived regarding gender-specific patterns in justice attitudes are then tested on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) from 2007 and 2005. The results support our central thesis that gender-specific patterns in the evaluation of personal earnings are both reduced and increased in dual-earner households. They are reduced because women in dual-income households tend to have higher income expectations that challenge the existing gender wage gap. At the same time, gender-specific patterns are increased because men evaluate the equity of their personal income in relation to their ability to fulfill traditional gender norms and thus their capacity to live up to corresponding notions of ??masculinity.??     

The long shadows of the difficult past? How young people in Denmark,Finland and Germany remember WWII*

This paper focuses on the question of how young people today evaluate the Second World War today and how this ‘difficult past’ determines their political attitudes. Furthermore, the channels through which the current young generation in Europe is informed about the events dating back to the first half of the twentieth century (e.g. parents and grandparents, schools, the media) are examined. The theoretical basis chosen for addressing these questions is the work of Mannheim (1928) on the formation of successive generations, and the theories of collective memories and identities of Eisenstadt and his followers. Our empirical evidence comes from a transnational comparison of young people’s memories of this difficult past in Denmark, Finland and Germany. From a historical perspective a comparison of the three countries is particularly interesting as they played different roles during the Second World War. The evidence highlights the different perceptions of history among youth and points to the absence of a common European understanding of what happened between 1939 and 1945. The empirical evidence comes from a research project (2011–2015) funded by the European Commission and covering 14 European countries. Its main focus has been on present-day young people’s perceptions of history and politics (MYPLACE?=?Memory, Youth, Political Legacy and Civic Engagement).     

‘Life is a state of mind’ – on fiction,society and Trump

The article undertakes an allegorical double reading of Being There and Trump as instances of what we call socio-fiction. Crucially in this respect, reality and fiction are not two opposed realms. The two realms always interact in subtle ways, which is why cinema can be a resource for diagnostic social analysis. We first articulate a general commentary on the relationship between cinema and society, introducing the concept of ‘socio-fiction’. Secondly, we analyse Peter Sellers’ Being There, an interesting film focused on the relationship between reality and fiction. In this analysis, we elaborate on different ways of approaching fiction in a sociological prism. And finally, we discuss Trump as a fallout effect of Being There. After all, a film is not just an image of a reality, a shadow or appearance of a social fact; sometimes the reality itself seems to have become an appearance of an appearance, a shadow of a shadow.     

Towards more sustainable debt attitudes and behaviors: the importance of basic economic skills

This research builds on the idea that debt-related financial distress faced by an individual results primarily from the inability to understand and apply fundamental economic concepts to debt decisions rather than from a lack of highly specific financial knowledge. This notion offers a potential explanation for why current financial literacy programs, which generally focus on the latter aspect, are considered to be mostly ineffective. We hypothesize that the understanding of fundamental economic concepts plays an essential role in explaining debt attitudes and behaviors. To test this hypothesis, we empirically examine how basic economic skills relate to these traits among German adolescents while controlling for their levels of financial literacy. Our results indicate that basic economic skills beneficially relate to both individual debt attitudes and behaviors. In contrast, we do not find a significant impact of financial literacy. Therefore, a stronger consideration of fundamental economic concepts in financial literacy programs might be a fruitful way to increase their effectiveness.     

Und wer coacht die Coaches?

Business coachings have become one of the most important instruments in human resource-development. However, scientific examinations of risks and side effects of coachings are still limited. This article presents first empirical results regarding negative effects of coaching for clients. Further, we explore which negative effects result from coachings for coaches. 20 coaching experts were questioned within a problem-centered interview. Results show that negative effects for coaches and clients are multifaceted. Causes of negative effects for coaches and clients partly overlap, for instance when considering the differentiation between psychotherapy and coaching.     

The Ghost of Grandeur

Abstract

Carsten Meiner analyses a series of classic French films, from Truffaut to Haneke, and their uses of the home with respect to the relation between grandeur and individuality. Homes thus become problematizing mediators between individuals and national grandeur, and together the films form a historical series of quite consistent albeit surprising articulations of the metabolism of life in national grandeur. This focus on the home leads to reflections on the problems of the idea of “represented nationalism” in cinema.     

Inequality and the time structure of earnings: evidence from Germany

This paper studies the relationships between annual and subannual inequality and mobility during the course of the year. We apply an exact decomposition framework as outlined in Wodon and Yitzhaki (Econ Bull 4:1–8, 2003), and in Yitzhaki and Wodon (Research on Economic Inequality 12:179–199, 2004). Earnings records of pension insurants in Germany serve as the database. The long time horizon of our database allows us to investigate the stability and robustness of the parameters of the decomposition over time. Specifically, we show that the mobility component of the decomposition, as measured by Gini correlation coefficients, changes over the observation period. This makes it difficult to predict the impact of the income accounting period on inequality in a more general context. Thus, it is of paramount importance to use income data from a uniform accounting period in distributional analyses.     

On estimands and the analysis of adverse events in the presence of varying follow‐up times within the benefit assessment of therapies

The analysis of adverse events (AEs) is a key component in the assessment of a drug's safety profile. Inappropriate analysis methods may result in misleading conclusions about a therapy's safety and consequently its benefit‐risk ratio. The statistical analysis of AEs is complicated by the fact that the follow‐up times can vary between the patients included in a clinical trial. This paper takes as its focus the analysis of AE data in the presence of varying follow‐up times within the benefit assessment of therapeutic interventions. Instead of approaching this issue directly and solely from an analysis point of view, we first discuss what should be estimated in the context of safety data, leading to the concept of estimands. Although the current discussion on estimands is mainly related to efficacy evaluation, the concept is applicable to safety endpoints as well. Within the framework of estimands, we present statistical methods for analysing AEs with the focus being on the time to the occurrence of the first AE of a specific type. We give recommendations which estimators should be used for the estimands described. Furthermore, we state practical implications of the analysis of AEs in clinical trials and give an overview of examples across different indications. We also provide a review of current practices of health technology assessment (HTA) agencies with respect to the evaluation of safety data. Finally, we describe problems with meta‐analyses of AE data and sketch possible solutions.     

Inequality-minimization with a given public budget

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, it can be solved by an interior-point algorithm. If it is quasiconvex, the bisection method can be used. Using artificial and real-world data, we implement the procedures and show that the optimal transfer scheme need not comply with a transfer scheme that perfectly equalizes incomes at the bottom of the distribution.