Suchergebnisse

Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion and that the number of administrators in an office is bound to increase over time. An unique laboratory to test Parkinson's ideas are vehicle registration offices in Germany. Using their data we found empirical support for Parkinson's law: First, service quality is no better in offices that have more staff per case. Second, service quality is worse if the service procedure is disaggregated into multiple smaller sub-services. Third, the staff size is a convex function of the number of customers. These results are robust to specifications in various alternative models. -- Bureaucracy ; Parkinson's law ; Waiting time ; Service Quality ; Queueing Theory

Abstract
In January 2023, the Health System Advisory Council published its latest report. It analyses the extent to which the German healthcare system is prepared for future crises and what changes are required to strengthen its resilience. Rarely has our country been hit by so many exogenous shocks at the same time. The COVID-19 pandemic, the war against Ukraine, climate change and the resulting disrupted supply chains, energy shortages, heat waves and forest fires pose challenges for practically all areas of life. However, they also affect people's health. Despite the widespread perception before the pandemic that Germany is well organised and well prepared to deal with unexpected events, the health system did not perform as well as expected. One key result of the report is that problems mainly lie in the areas of data availability and use, implementation of well-known solutions and communication.

Am 24. März 2021 hat der "Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der Entwicklung im Gesundheitswesen" sein Gutachten "Digitalisierung für Gesundheit - Ziele und Rahmenbedingungen eines dynamisch lernenden Gesundheitssystems" der Bundesregierung überreicht. Wesentliche Aspekte des Gutachtens werden präsentiert, wobei ökonomische Gesichtspunkte und Bezüge zur Corona-Pandemie besonders hervorgehoben werden. ; When it comes to digitalising healthcare, Germany lags way behind other countries. In its 2021 report, the Health System Advisory Council discusses a strategy to overcome this shortcoming, i. e. the digitalisation of the German healthcare system. The idea is to shape digitalisation in a way that healthcare provision is improved with patients' well-being in mind. Therefore, market failures in digital health markets have to be addressed as well as the chances and challenges that come with the usage of large amounts of data. Furthermore, this article highlights the potential of the electronic health record (EHR) and of the digital health app market and discusses requirements for reaching environmental and social sustainability within the context of the digitalisation of health.

Abstract
Federalism is always torn between the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity. Defining the federal structure of a country by finding the welfare-maximizing amount and design of government layers is challenging. Thereby, the financial endowment of different layers of government which they need to fulfill their respective tasks is an important aspect. European countries have chosen quite different federal designs to address the question of an optimal degree of fiscal decentralization. The aim of this paper is to analyze these different approaches for Germany, Italy, and the European Union. Parallels can be found in that all the three entities share a form of institutional asymmetry, a kind of fiscal bailout system, and a sort of fiscal equalization scheme.

SUMMARYParkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion and that the number of administrators in an office is bound to increase over time. A unique laboratory to test Parkinson's ideas are vehicle registration offices in Germany. Using their data we found empirical support for Parkinson's Law: First, service quality is no better in offices that have more staff per case. Second, service quality is worse if the service procedure is disaggregated into multiple smaller sub‐services. Third, the staff size is a convex function of the number of customers. These results are robust to specifications in various alternative models.

Eine nachhaltige Finanzpolitik der Länder sollte zu den Zielen einer Föderalismusreform gehören. Wie kann die Veröffentlichung von Indikatoren dazu beitragen, dieses Ziel zu erreichen? Welche Nachhaltigkeitskonzepte gibt es und wo liegen deren Chancen und Grenzen? Welche besonderen Probleme sind auf Länderebene zu beachten?

Im März 2007 haben Bundestag und Bundesrat die Kommission zur Modernisierung der Bund-Länder-Finanzbeziehungen (Föderalismuskommission II) ins Leben gerufen, um die Finanzbeziehungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland neu zu ordnen. Die Vorschläge zu einer Reform öffentlicher Verschuldungsregeln reichen von einem vollständigen Verschuldungsverbot für Bund und Länder, über ausgefeilte Frühwarnsysteme und (konjunkturabhängige) Schuldenbremsen bis hin zur Auflösung der Solidargemeinschaft von Bund und Ländern und der Insolvenzfähigkeit von Ländern. Fast ebenso umfangreich sind die Reformvorschläge im Hinblick auf die Einnahmekompetenz der Bundesländer. Auf der einen Seite stehen die Verfechter der These, dass nur ein Festhalten am Status quo die Einheitlichkeit der Lebensverhältnisse in Deutschland sichern kann; auf der anderen Seite gibt es Vertreter, die ein Zuschlagrecht der Länder oder gar die vollständige Steuerautonomie der Länder bei einzelnen Steuern favorisieren. Das Buch beleuchtet die Fragestellungen aus ökonomischer und juristischer Perspektive.(Quelle: Verlag / Internet).

Abstract
Significant gender gaps in labour market participation still exist in most countries. Nevertheless, from 2013 to 2015, there was a nationwide home care allowance for parents who did not use public childcare for children aged one to two years in Germany. Even after 2015, the home care allowance continued to exist in several federal German states. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel, we exploit the differences in the design of home care allowance between the federal states and examine its effects on the labour market participation of mothers. For both immigrant and native-born mothers, the impact is significantly negative, i.e. such transfers reduce the labour market participation of mothers.

In the past decades many European countries implemented numerical fiscal rules in order to strengthen fiscal discipline on all levels of government. This development was intensified by the financial crisis in 2008. Although plenty of research points to the discipline-enhancing effect of these rules on the national level, comparably little is known about their impact on local governments. This is even truer when it comes to the effect of specific rules like the so-called Balanced Budget Rule (BBR). With this contribution, we shed some light on the question if BBRs are an effective instrument to put local government budget balances on a sound footing. We estimate a dynamic fiscal reaction function within a LSDVC framework using a panel of 19 European countries over a period of 19 years (1997-2015). Although a potential endogeneity bias cannot be fully ruled out, the results suggest a discipline enhancing effect of BBRs over a range of different specifications. Other fiscal rules seem to be less important. Disentangling the effect of the mere existence of a BBR from its institutional implementation reveals that there is no significant effect for simply making a BBR part of an intergovernmental fiscal framework; what counts is its proper implementation in terms of characteristics like regulatory embeddedness, monitoring, enforcement, and media visibility.