Contributions in Merlin

Zahl und Vielfalt der ökonomischen Probleme des Hochschulsektors haben in den letzten Jahren - nicht zuletzt aufgrund knapper werdender Ressourcen - deutlich zugenommen. Dies war Anlass für den Bildungsökonomischen Ausschuss, sich auf seiner 27. Jahrestagung, die im März 2002 an der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena stattfand, mit hochschulökonomischen Fragen zu beschäftigen. Die Beiträge dieser Tagung sind im vorliegenden Band zusammengestellt. Die Aufsätze sind zum einen hochschulinternen organisatorischen, personalpolitischen oder produktionstheoretischen Problemen gewidmet, zum anderen werden die makroökonomischen Konsequenzen alternativer Finanzierungssysteme eines gesamten Hochschulsystems betrachtet. Dabei werden nicht nur theoretische Überlegungen vorgestellt, sondern auch umfassende empirische Studien, die die Bedeutung der dargestellten hochschulökonomischen Probleme und Lösungsansätze deutlich unterstreichen.

When the price of an input factor to a production process increases, then the optimal output level declines and the input is substituted by other factors. Marshall's rule is a formula that determines the own-price elasticity for one factor as a weighted sum of the elasticities of output market demand and factor substitution. This note offers a proof for Marshall's rule that is significantly shorter and somewhat more intuitive than existing derivations.

We analyze positive theories of redistribution, social insurance and public good provision in a dynamic macroeconomic framework. Political outcomes are determined via repeated voting and driven by a conflict of interests between agents. Voters and politicians rationally forecast the impact of current political choices on future political and economic outcomes. The theory is consistent with large differences in the size of governments across societies. These need not rely on intrinsic differences in preferences or technology, but may be driven by self-fulfilling expectations about the robustness of the welfare state.

We present a new approach to endogenizing technological spillovers. Firms choose levels of a cost-reducing innovation from a continuum before they engage in competition for each other's R&D-employees. Successful bids for the competitor's employee then result in higher levels of cost reduction. Finally, firms enter product market competition. We apply the approach to the long-standing debate on the effects of the mode of competition on innovation incentives. We show that incentives to acquire spillovers are stronger and incentives to prevent spillovers are weaker under quantity competition than under price competition. As a result, for a wide range of parameters, price competition gives stronger innovation incentives than quantity competition.

We set up a partial equilibrium model of Cournot competition, where firms can strategically choose their outsourcing intensity. This decision is based on a trade-off between lower marginal production costs and higher fixed costs. In this model, a lower number of identical firms leads to higher market concentration and higher outsourcing activities. The theoretical hypothesis of a positive correlation between market concentration and international outsourcing is confirmed by rank correlation coefficients and a fixed effects panel data analysis using data on the intermediate goods imports to output ratio and market concentration in the EU12 countries. In the fixed effects regression analysis we show that market concentration has to be treated as an endogenous variable to avoid biased and inconsistent estimates.

We set up a model, in which firms in a small industrialized country outsource part of their production to a foreign economy, which is rich in low-skilled labour. We analyse, how a decline in trade costs affects outsourcing activities and the production structure in the small economy. A stimulation of cross-border outsourcing raises wage dispersion and, if labour markets are unionized, also the employment of high-skilled relative to low-skilled labour. Using a panel of Austrian industries, we find, first, that decreasing trade barriers - as observed after the fall of the Iron Curtain - indeed stimulate outsourcing to Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and, second, that outsourcing to these countries significantly shifts relative employment in favour of high-skilled labour.

From the mid-1990s citizens in Belgium, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands and Switzerland have a guaranteed periodic choice among risk-bearing sickness funds, who are responsible for purchasing their care or providing them with medical care. The rationale of this arrangement is to stimulate the sickness funds to improve efficiency in health care production and to respond to consumers’ preferences. To achieve solidarity, all five countries have implemented a system of risk-adjusted premium subsidies (or risk equalization across risk groups), along with strict regulation of the consumers’ direct premium contribution to their sickness fund. In this article we present a conceptual framework for understanding risk adjustment and comparing the systems in the five countries. We conclude that in the case of imperfect risk adjustment—as is the case in all five countries in the year 2001—the sickness funds have financial incentives for risk selection, which may threaten solidarity, efficiency, quality of care and consumer satisfaction. We expect that without substantial improvements in the risk adjustment formulae, risk selection will increase in all five countries. The issue is particularly serious in Germany and Switzerland. We strongly recommend therefore that policy makers in the five countries give top priority to the improvement of the system of risk adjustment. That would enhance solidarity, cost-control, efficiency and client satisfaction in a system of competing, risk-bearing sickness funds.