Suchergebnisse

Diplomacy as a family business. The Casatis as Spanish-Milanese envoys in Lucerne and Chur (1660-1700)

The astonishing family career of the Casatis contradicts widespread impressions of early modern diplomacy. This monograph explains how a Spanish-Milanese diplomatic dynasty shrewdly managed, using a highly complex network of confessional, social and cultural connections, to concentrate and deploy its resources upon key actors, and put itself beyond competition from potential challengers.
"Other than following God and their own self-interest, this people knows no further impulse," was the devastating judgment of Alfonso Casati in 1674 concerning the Swiss Confederates. The diplomats nonetheless had to accommodate the needs of these local hosts, or lose their trust and that of their royal employer, the Spanish king. In order to fulfill the demands placed upon him as a diplomat, Alfonso Casati, like most envoys in early modern Europe, periodically reached into his own pockets. In contrast to many contemporaries, however, he did not respond to the costly requirements of the job by seeking to be relieved of his duties. On the contrary, he laid the ground for ensuring that his own son became the fourth generation representative in a nearly continuous position held by the same family.
Tapping extensive source materials which are interpreted from the perspective of various historical actors, this study not only reconstructs the position and influence of an extraordinary diplomatic family, but also shines new light on a colorful history of patronage, corruption and politics in the external relations of the Confederacy and Graubünden.

In Deutschland leben derzeit rund 82 Millionen Menschen. Dabei liegt die Sterblichkeitsrate bei etwa einem Prozent der Bevölkerung pro Jahr, was ca. 800 000 Todesfälle jährlich bedeutet. Einige dieser Menschen werden auf ihrem Weg zum Tod von professionellen Helfern gepflegt, unterstützt und begleitet. Die Soziale Arbeit erbringt einen Teil dieser Leistungen. Die vorliegende Arbeit hat zum Ziel sowohl Hospizarbeit breitbandig darzustellen, als auch die Rolle der Sozialen Arbeit darin zu erörtern.

The paper explores the investment behaviour of German firms in the context of the Qapproach, which plays a dominant role in empirical investment research. The analysis is based on the Deutsche Bundesbank's corporate balance sheet statistics. The panel data set contains some 2,300 German firms' balance sheet data covering the years 1988-1998. While the Q-theory is mainly applied on the basis of stock market data, which facilitates the exploitation of market expectations and the calculation of average Q, the direct forecasting approach (Chirinko 1993) suggested by Abel and Blanchard (1986) and extended to panel data by Gilchrist and Himmelberg (1995, 1998) enables the Q-theory to be applied to non-quoted firms which are by far the majority in Germany. One of the key variables when using balance sheet data, which has attracted much detailed research, is firms' net capital stock at replacement costs. The challenge is to transform historical cost data, depreciated at non-economic, tax-oriented depreciation rates, into unreported and probably unknown economically meaningful data at actual replacement values. We suggest a complex procedure for calculating reliable replacement values of a firm's capital stock. To calculate Q we follow two different operationalisation strategies. First we estimate average Q based on balance sheet data by forecasting the present value of future profits using a VAR model. Second, we estimate marginal Q following the approach suggested by Gilchrist and Himmelberg. We compare the results from two different estimation techniques for dynamic investment models, GMM and direct bias correction. The results show that marginal as well as average Q influence investment significantly. When classifying the firms by size, we find that smaller firms react more strongly to Q and, to a lesser extent, to lagged investment.

Die Arbeit stellt eine empirische Analyse des deutschen Außenhandels hinsichtlich des Phänomens des intraindustriellen Außenhandels dar. Eine ausführliche Deskription des deutschen Außenhandels in doppelter Gliederung nach dem Güterverzeichnis der Produktionsstatistiken und nach Ländergruppen für den Zeitraum 1976 bis 1993 zeigt eindrucksvoll die Zunahme des Anteils des intraindustriellen Außenhandels, sowohl für die einzelnen Gütergruppen als auch für die einzelnen Ländergruppen. -- Die Untersuchung von Bestimmungsgründen der Anteile des intraindustriellen Handels sowohl für einzelne Gütergru.

During the last three decades the decomposition method originally suggested to explain differences in mean wages has been considerably extended. In more recent approaches the focus has turned towards analyzing complete income distributions and differences between groups' incomes at all percentiles. We discuss in detail and apply four approaches: firstly, the approach of Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1991, 1993), the approach suggested by Machado and Mata (2001, 2005), the approach suggested by Donald, Green and Paarsch (2000) and finally, the approach suggested by DiNardo et al. (1996) and Fortin and Lemieux (1998). In this paper, we compare these approaches and decompose differences in men's wage distributions between the USA and Germany in 2007.

We analyze wage growth and changes in wage inequality in eleven European
countries between 1994 and 2001. The data base used throughout is the User Data
Base (UDB) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The decomposition
analysis is carried out independently for both genders. Following Juhn, Murphy
and Brooks (1991; 1993) we split the current wage into components to isolate the
forces underlying the wage change. While the decomposition method is in the spirit
of the well known Oaxaca decomposition (1973), in the approach of Juhn, Murphy,
and Pierce the residual of Mincerian-earnings equations is decomposed further into
relative rank position and the effect of the residual distribution.

We find wage inequality to be greater among men for most northern countries
of the EU, while in southern countries, wage inequality is greater among women.
Between 1994 and 2001, wage inequality was found to have moved in the same direction
for men and women in all countries. Inequality increased in five countries,
most pronouncedly in the Netherlands; inequality decreased in six countries, most
markedly in Ireland. Decomposition of the changes in inequality into quality, price,
and unobserved effects revealed that the quality effect explained only a minor part
of the total change. Changes in prices for individual characteristics are found to be
the most important source of inequality changes for women, and about as important as
changes in residual effects are for men. Altogether, the heterogeneous development of
wages across the European Union does not hint at a common trend toward the rising
inequality that has been observed in the United States for decades.

enth.