Suchergebnisse

We develop a small open economy, overlapping-generations model that incorporates non-stationary demographic transition paths to study the dynamic fiscal effects of demographic shift in Australia. Since the recent ageing of Australia's population is projected to exacerbate over the coming decades, there are potentially significant macroeconomic implications and impacts on fiscal commitments for old-age related expenditures. To investigate these implications and fiscal impacts, our model pays special attention to Australia's taxation and retirement schemes, to the age structure of government expenditures, and to population dynamics via fertility, longevity and immigration. Our simulation results demonstrate that population ageing shifts the tax base from labour income towards asset income and consumption, and substantially increases old-age related government expenditures. Significant future adjustments in other government expenditures and taxes will be required to finance these expenditures. Interestingly, the main driving factor behind increased fiscal costs is the increase in survival, not the decline in fertility, rates. Increases in fertility and immigration are not effective solutions to such fiscal challenges.

The interactions between the European Union (EU) and international policy regimes are ever more important. Much of the existing literature has focused on the bottom-up dimension of the EU's role in global institutions, assuming that the EU predominantly seeks to project its policies to the global level. However, our review of empirical research reveals that EU policy exports tend to be rare and that EU-global interactions are more varied. On a global scale, the EU is not a hegemonic power that can easily transfer its standards to international regimes, nor does it always desire to do so. This article conceptualizes the EU's interactions with international institutions in four modes (policy export, policy promotion, policy protection and policy import), establishes different rationales motivating EU actors to engage through a given mode and relates recent empirical research to this comprehensive typology. Adapted from the source document.

Previous research on self-assessed intelligence (SAI) has been focused on sex differences to the exclusion of other pertinent factors, including objective and subjective social class differences. In this study, 343 participants completed an online questionnaire in which the salience
of social class identity was manipulated and measures of self-assessed overall intelligence, participant sex, and objective and subjective social class status were obtained. Results showed that participants of a high social class had a significantly higher SAI when their social class identity
was salient, but there was no significant difference in the SAI of low social class groups with or without their social class identity salient. Results also revealed significant sex differences in SAI, but only among participants of a high social class. Overall, these results suggest that
social class salience may be an important factor in shaping SAI.

"Recent Eurozone reforms mark the most profound deepening of European integration since Maastricht. This book analyses how member states formed preferences in the politics of these reforms, and how preferences translated into policy outcomes on the European level. The chapters summarize insights on the role of different actors and institutions from four datasets based on 200 expert interviews, the analysis of 5000 policy documents and constitutional court cases in all EU member states. The findings confirm some common wisdom, dispel some myths, and provide insights into mechanisms facilitating further reforms. While quantitative analyses show that 'Northern' and 'Southern' member states were deeply divided, case study chapters provide more refined view. Empirical data also indicate that reform decisions were dominated by governments and EU institutions but dispel the notion that Germany alone imposed its preferred policy. This book goes further and unpacks the legacies of the EMU crisis that make future reforms dependent on the reduction of financial sector risks, which is a necessary condition for rebuilding trust and restarting the gradual convergence of Eurozone reform preferences."

Meaningful work (MW) is an important topic in psychological and organizational research with theoretical and practical implications. Many prior studies have focused on operationalizing MW and distinguish between the attributes of a job that make it meaningful, such as task variety or significance, and the affective experience of meaning during work, such as the feeling that what one does at work is meaningful. However, most empirical research focuses on the former definition and utilizes quantitative scales with deductive questions that omit what people find important in their experiences. To address this, we conduct a qualitative investigation of psychological narratives focusing in-depth on the quality and content of feelings of meaningfulness and meaninglessness during experiences at work—crucially, without any framing around task attributes. We introduce the term affective eudaimonia to describe these experiences. Overall, our results corroborate many existing thematic findings in the MW literature, such as the importance of connecting and contributing to others and avoiding confinement. We also offer new findings: Although the way that people give language to meaningless narratives is more descriptive, vivid, and experiential in tone than meaningful narratives, meaningless narratives are also more structurally static and constrained. We use these results to inform practical suggestions to promote day-to-day experiences of meaning at work and provide a basis for further academic discussion.

In this paper, we investigate two fiscal policy options to mitigate fiscal pressure arising from ageing of the Australian population: pension cuts or tax hikes. Using a computable overlapping generations model, we find that while both policy options achieve the same fiscal goal, the macroeconomic and welfare outcomes differ significantly. Future generations prefer pension cuts, whereas current generations prefer tax hikes to finance government spending commitments. Interestingly, taxing consumption or income results in opposing macroeconomic and welfare effects. Increases in the consumption tax rate have positive effects on labour supply, domestic assets and output (similar to pension cuts), but reduce the welfare of low income households most. Conversely, increases in progressive income or payroll taxes have negative effects on the economy but reduce the welfare of low income households least. Our results highlight the intra- and inter-generational conflicts of interest and political constraints when implementing any structural fiscal reforms.

AbstractIn the multilevel system of the European Union (EU), national governments have been empowered at the expense of parliaments. We study the executive power shift in EU politics in the formation of national preferences. This article shows that governments are more likely to integrate parliaments and external actors, such as other governments and EU institutions, when they advocate extreme bargaining positions in EU negotiations. We theoretically develop this argument and provide an empirical study of Eurozone politics, covering the preference formation of 27 EU member states. The analysis shows that the executives are overall the dominating power: most of the time, governments form national preferences on their own. When governments integrate additional actors, they mostly rely on external actors and do so to avoid blame and to shift responsibility. These findings question whether the integration of national parliaments in EU politics indeed addresses democratic accountability concerns.