Suchergebnisse

Die Alterung der Gesellschaft und deren Auswirkungen stellten in den vergangenen fünf Jahren ein sehr stark und mitunter kontrovers diskutiertes Thema dar. Die Konsequenzen der Bevölkerungsalterung sind vielschichtig und betreffen bei weitem nicht nur die Sicherheit der sozialen Sicherungssysteme (Börsch-Supan 2004; Schmidt 2004, 2005). Dabei wurde bis dato nur in sehr begrenztem Umfang die Verbindung zwischen demografischem Wandel, Gründungsgeschehen und Gründungsförderung betrachtet. Im Rahmen einer Studie für das BMWi hat sich das RWI Essen umfassend mit diesem Konnex auseinandergesetzt und hierzu jüngst den Endbericht vorgelegt (Engel et al. 2007). Gegenstand des vorliegenden Beitrags ist eine Aufbereitung der wesentlichen Erkenntnisse aus der Befragung bei Wirtschaftskammern und kommunalen Einrichtungen in den Jahren 2005 und 2006.Darüber hinaus werden Ergebnisse vertiefender Analysen dargestellt, die sich mit der Positionierung der Kammern in der Förderlandschaft bzw. denKooperationsstrategien detailliert auseinandersetzen. Hintergrund hierfür ist einerseits die Diskussion bezüglich der übersichtlichen Gestaltung des deutschen Förder- bzw. Beratungssystems (Klemmer et al. 1996; Kailer 2001: 113). Handlungsalternativen bieten sich vor allem in der engeren Abstimmung bzw. Bündelung von Angeboten verschiedener Einrichtungen. Andererseits hat die Nachfrage gerade älterer gründungsinteressierter Personen1 erheblich zugenommen. Die in den letzten Jahren zu beobachtende Veränderung im Kreis der Gründungsinteressierten gibt einen Vorgeschmack auf das Kommende.Da die Ausstattung mit Personal mit dieser Entwicklung scheinbar nicht Schritt hielt, erhöht sich der Druck auf die Gründungsberatung zu mehr Effizienz. Ausgehend davon spricht vieles dafür, sich mit den Anforderungen und Potenzialen älterer Gründungsinteressierter sowie mit den Einschätzungen der Kammern zu möglichen Anpassungserfordernissen in der Gründungsberatung auseinanderzusetzen. Das Ziel dieser Studie besteht darin, hierzu einen ersten, bundesweiten Überblick aus dem Blickwinkel der Gründungsintermediäre zu bieten.

This paper presents a simple model of state-dependent pricing that allows identification of the relative importance of the degree of price rigidity that is inherent to the price setting mechanism (intrinsic) and that which is due to the price's driving variables (extrinsic). Using two data sets consisting of a large fraction of the price quotes used to compute the Belgian and French CPI, we are able to assess the role of intrinsic and extrinsic price stickiness in explaining the occurrence and magnitude of price changes at the outlet level. We find that infrequent price changes are not necessarily associated with large adjustment costs. Indeed, extrinsic rigidity appears to be significant in many cases. We also find that asymmetry in the price adjustment could be due to trends in marginal costs and/or desired mark-ups rather than asymmetric cost of adjustment bands.

Using a large running race in Sweden, this study shows that there are male-dominated environments in which the selection of women who participate are more likely to be confident/competitive and that, within this group, performance improves equally for both genders.

This paper discusses the occurrence of Skill-Enhancing Technology Import (SETI), namely the relationship between imports of embodied technology and widening skill-based employment differentials in a sample of low and middle income countries (LMICs). In doing so, this paper provides a direct measure of technology transfer at the sector level from high income countries (HICs), namely those economies which have already experienced the occurrence of skill-biased technological change, to LMICs. GMM techniques are applied to an original panel dataset comprising 28 manufacturing sectors for 23 countries over a decade. Econometric results provide robust evidence of the determinants of widening employment differentials in LMICs. In particular, capital-skill complementarity represents a source of relative skill-bias while SETI provides an absolute skill-bias effect on the employment trends of skilled and unskilled workers witnessed in these countries.

Paper addresses the recent initiatives of EU Lisbon Agenda to increase level of R&D expenses in EU Member States by studying firm-level panel data in most advanced transition economy, Slovenia. Previous empirical literature mainly cross-sectional has tested the demand-pull hypothesis and found in overall that R&D expenses may be driven by output. Using a panel of over 150 Slovene firms over the 1996-2000 period, and checking for fixed effects, time, industrial and size dummies and for the path-dependent nature of R&D, we also find a significant role of sales in inducing R&D expenditures. Besides that data also confirm that internal funds and (un)successful bargaining for higher wages present significant variables for higher R&D expenses. However, at the micro level, the demand-pull, internal funds and bargaining effects play a varying role for the different sub-samples of firms. In particular, exporting firms, those which are liquidity-constrained, those not receiving public subsidies and those not heading a business group, seem to be particularly sensitive in deciding their R&D expenditures. R&D behavior at the firm level is modeled as error-correction model and estimated in system GMM specification.

Over the last four decades, academic and wider public interest in inequality and poverty has grown substantially. In this paper we address the question: what have been the major new directions in the analysis of inequality and poverty over the last thirty to forty years? We draw attention to developments under seven headings: changes in the extent of inequality and poverty, changes in the policy environment, increased scrutiny of the concepts of 'poverty' and 'inequality' and the rise of multidimensional approaches, the use of longitudinal perspectives, an increase in availability of and access to data, developments in analytical methods of measurement, and developments in modelling.

Population policies are defined here as voluntary programs which help people control their fertility and expect to improve their lives. There are few studies of the long-run effects of policy-induced changes in fertility on the welfare of women, such as policies that subsidize the diffusion and use of best practice birth control technologies. Evaluation of the consequences of such family planning programs almost never assess their long-run consequences, such as on labor supply, savings, or investment in the human capital of children, although they occasionally estimate the short-run association with the adoption of contraception or age-specific fertility. The dearth of long-run family planning experiments has led economists to consider instrumental variables as a substitute for policy interventions which not only determine variation in fertility but are arguably independent of the reproductive preferences of parents or unobserved constraints that might influence family life cycle behaviors. Using these instrumental variables to estimate the effect of this exogenous variation in fertility on family outcomes, economists discover these "cross effects" of fertility on family welfare outcomes tend to be substantially smaller in absolute magnitude than the OLS estimates of partial correlations referred to in the literature as evidence of the beneficial social externalities associated with the policies that reduce fertility. The paper summarizes critically the empirical literature on fertility and development and proposes an agenda for research on the topic.

This paper develops the mathematical foundations of comparison, referential, and relative (CRR) processes. The key ingredients are: (1) three kinds of terms; and (2) two kinds of relations. Combining the three terms - absolute amount, relative amount, and relative rank - with the two kinds of relations - functions of one variable and functions of two variables - produces a set of six fundamental CRR processes. The paper analyzes the appropriate general functions for each of the six basic CRR processes, and explores the theoretical criteria for specific functions. The paper takes three further steps. First, it links the six basic types of CRR processes to the three fundamental sociobehavioral forces in the recently proposed new unified theory, which also links the forces to identity and to happiness. Second, following the new unified theory, the paper shows how change over time in the fundamental sociobehavioral outcomes provides new manifestations of CRR processes. Third, the paper describes how the primordial sociobehavioral outcomes, like their change over time, operate as explanatory factors that generate rich new phenomena, including new emergent subgroups and new inequalities.

We apply a semi-parametric latent variable model to estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of private returns to schooling for college graduates during China's reform between 1988 and 2002. We find that there were substantial sorting gains under the traditional system, but they have decreased drastically and become negligible in the most recent data. We take this as evidence of growing influence of private financial constraints on decisions to attend college as tuition costs have risen and the relative importance of government subsidies has declined. The main policy implication of our results is that labor and education reform without concomitant capital market reform and government support for the financially disadvantaged exacerbates increases in inequality inherent in elimination of the traditional "wage-grid".

Obesity has become a major health issue. Research in economics has provided important insights as to how technological progress reduced the relative price of food and contributed to the increase in obesity. However, the increased availability of food might well have overstrained will power and led to suboptimal consumption decisions relative to people's own standards. We propose the economics of happiness as an approach to study the phenomenon. Based on proxy measures for experienced utility, it is possible to directly address whether certain observed behavior is suboptimal and therefore reduces a person's well-being. It is found that obesity decreases the well-being of individuals who report limited self-control, but not otherwise.

This paper investigates certain issues of economic and ethnic segregation from the perspective of children in the three metropolitan regions of Sweden by using a relative new operationalization of the neighbourhood concept. Neighbourhoods are clustered by population share of visible immigrants in proportion to share of native born residents. The target variable under study is child income based on income of parents. Inequality in child income 1990, 1996 and 2002 is studied by decomposing additively decomposable inequality indexes. Based on this, measures of residential economic polarisation and residential ethnic polarisation are obtained. Of major significance is that residential polarisation increased for all three regions and for both sub-periods 1990-1996 and 1996-2002. For example, while in the Stockholm region 7 percent of inequality in child income in 1990 was due to differences in mean income across neighbourhoods, the proportion had increased to as much as 22 percent in 2002. Ethnic residential polarisation increased as well and we report a relatively large overlap between economic and ethnic polarisation. Based on estimated regression models, we conclude that increased returns to parental education have forcefully contributed to larger economic polarisation among children in Swedish metropolitan regions. -- Segregation ; children ; Sweden ; immigrants ; income ; education

Exploiting a rich panel data child survey merged with administrative records along with a pseudo-experiment generating variation in the take-up of pre-school across municipalities, we provide evidence of the effects on non-cognitive child outcomes of participating in large scale publicly provided universal pre-school programs and family day care vis-à-vis home care. We find that, compared to home care, being enrolled in pre-school at age three does not lead to significant differences in child outcomes at age seven no matter the gender or mother's level of education. Family day care, on the other hand, seems to significantly deteriorate outcomes for boys whose mothers have a lower level of education. Finally, increasing hours in family day care from 30-40 hours per week to 40-50 hours per week and hours in pre-school from 20-30 hours per week to 30-40 hours per week leads to significantly poorer child outcomes. -- Non-cognitive outcomes ; publicly provided universal child care ; pseudo-experiment