Contributions in Merlin

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This article studies several attributes of a firm's long-run decisions about organizational structure, attributes that affect the firm's short-run innovative activity. We focus on flexibility, which lowers the future costs of implementing innovations, and research capabilities, which improve the future opportunities for innovation. We consider two dimensions of innovation: demand-enhancing (product) and cost-reducing (process). These two types of innovation are complementary in terms of increasing the firm's net revenue in the short run. The complementarities between the firm's short-run decision variables then lead to complementarities between its long-run decisions about product and process flexibility and research capabilities.

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In current welfare state analysis there is little theory to explain the action of exclusive groups. This article explores the possibilities of a theory that focuses on the interaction between individual choices and strategies, the formal systems, policies and rules of governments and the informal norms and practices of groups. The argument is that club theory, a branch of public choice concepts, represents a promising new element in such an approach. A theoretical frame has to account for both collectivisation and fragmentation processes - how mass solidarities in welfare states come to be created and in turn to be broken up into narrower mutualities. Migration is used as an example to show how the actions of migrants and policy decisions about them affect these dynamics or are affected by them.

This paper explores the relation between non-exponential waiting times between events and the distribution of the number of events in a fixed time interval. It is shown that within this framework the frequently observed phenomenon of overdispersion, i.e. a variance that exceeds the mean, is caused by a decreasing hazard function of the waiting times, while an increasing hazard function leads to underdispersion. Using the assumption of i.i.d. gamma distributed waiting times, a new count data model is derived. Its use is illustrated in two applications: the number of births, and the number of doctor consultations.

We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to investigate how individual happiness is affected by unemployment. Unemployment has a large and negative effect even after controlling for individual specific fixed effects. Nonparticipation, in contrast, is much less harmful to happiness. Further, we decompose the total well-being costs of unemployment and find that well above three quarters are non-pecuniary, and below one quarter pecuniary. One implication is that income support programs for the unemployed do very little at mitigating the adverse effects of unemployment, and such transfers are unlikely to generate unemployment.

Dieser Beitrag stellt eine Methode zur bedarfsgerechten Gestaltung der Telekooperation vor. Unserer Meinung nach kommt es bei der Gestaltung der Telekooperation insbesondere auf die integrierte Betrachtung von ‘weichen’ Faktoren (aus der betrieblichen Organisationslehre und Personalwirtschaft) und ‘harten’ Faktoren (Software-Engineering und Wirtschaftlichkeitskriterien) an. Das Projekt BTÖV (= Bedarf für Telekooperation in der öffentlichen Verwaltung) hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, eine solche integrierte Methode für die Gestaltung der Telekooperation in der öffentlichen Verwaltung zu entwerfen und zu evaluieren, die sich am Bedarf der Nutzer orientiert und genauso flexibel und schnell änderbar ist, wie ihr Anwendungsgebiet. Es werden zunächst Ausgangspunkt, Konzept und die Ziele des BTÖV-Projekts erläutert. Daran anschließend wird ein Überblick über die Vorgehensweise und Charakteristika der ”BTÖV-Methode” gegeben. Ein Ausblick auf die Weiterentwicklung der BTÖV-Methode schließt den Artikel.