Dieses Discussion Paper enthält die Beiträge und einiges darüber hinausgehendes Material des Workshops zum Thema „Kritische Reflexion empirischer Forschungsmethodik“, der vom 7.9. – 9.9.2006 an der ESCP-EAP in Berlin stattfand. Der Workshop wurde von der Kommission Wissenschaftstheorie im Verband der Hochschullehrer für Betriebswirtschaft (VHB) mit Unterstützung durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) und die Arbeitsgruppe Nachwuchs im VHB durchgeführt.

This paper analyses the relation between authority and incentives. It extends the standard principal-agent model by a project selection stage in which the prin- cipal can either delegate the choice of project to the agent or keep the authority. The agent's subsequent choice of effort depends both on monetary incentives and the selected project. We find that the consideration of effort incentives makes the principal less likely to delegate the authority over projects to the agent. In fact, if the agent is protected by limited liability, delegation is never optimal.

We develop an economic theory of tolerance where endogenous lifestyles and exogenous traits are invested with symbolic value by people. Value systems are rationally chosen by parents for their children. In conjunction with actual behavior, value systems determine the esteem enjoyed by individuals. Intolerant individuals attach all symbolic value to a small number of attributes and are irrespectful of people with di¤erent ones. Tolerant people have diversi ed values and respect social alterity. We study the formation of values attached to various types of attributes and identify circumstances under which tolerance spontaneously arises. Policy may a¤ect the evolution of tolerance in distinctive ways, and there may be e¢ ciency as well as equity reasons to promote tolerance.

Optimum Currency Area (OCA) theory proves inadequate in the analysis of the new regional monetary integration schemes that have sprung up among developing and emerging market economies since the 1990s. Building on the concept of ‘original sin’ developed by Eichengreen et al. we argue that a different conceptual framework is needed as these regional monetary South-South integration (SSI) schemes differ fundamentally from North-South arrangements because they involve none of the international reserve currencies. Insights from the cases of monetary south-south cooperation in Southern Africa, East Asia and Latin America suggest that SSI can have beneficial effects on macroeconomic stability. This paper sketches a first set of hypotheses on the necessary conditions for these stability gains to materialise.

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.

Countless determinants of export success that are supposed to help managers reduce the failure rates of export ventures have been identified. Despite this abundance of studies, however, little is known about the determinants of the internationalization success of services. In this paper, based on prior studies focusing primarily on manufactured goods and the key characteristics distinguishing services from goods, a comprehensive conceptual model for the successful internationalization of services is developed.

Channeling human resources into the right occupations has historically been a key to economic prosperity. Occupational choices are not only driven by the material rewards associated with the various occupations, but also by the esteem that they confer. We propose a model of endogenous growth in which occupations carry a symbolic value that makes them more or less attractive; the evolution of symbolic values is endogenous and determined by purposive transmission of value systems within families. The model sheds light on the interaction between cultural and economic development and identi es circum- stances under which value systems matter for long-run growth. It shows the possibility of culturally determined poverty traps and o¤ers a framework for thinking about the transition from traditional to modern values.

The growth experience of virtually all but the very rich countries is best explained as a combination of high and low growth episodes. Therefore, there is a need to under- stand the sources of growth during high and low growth regimes and in particular the influences as growth regimes change. This paper approaches the issue by combining the derivation of structural breaks in economic growth with nonparametric growth accounting that enables the decomposition of productivity changes into technologi- cal and effciency changes. The results show that even in the medium run growth rate changes are mainly the result of productivity changes whereas factor accumula- tion plays only a minor role. Except for high income countries productivity changes usually represent effciency changes. A comparison of growth take-offs and growth collapses reveals that factor accumulation is even less important in periods of acceler- ating growth.

The German Microcensus (MC) is a large scale rotating panel survey over three years. The MC is attractive for longitudinal analysis over the entire participation duration because of the mandatory participation and the very high case numbers (about 200 thousand respondents). However, as a consequence of the area sampling that is used for the MC , residential mobility is not covered and consequently statistical information at the new residence is lacking in theMCsample. This raises the question whether longitudinal analyses, like transitions between labour market states, are biased and how different methods perform that promise to reduce such a bias. Based on data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which covers residential mobility, we analysed the effects of missing data of residential movers by the estimation of labour force flows. By comparing the results from the complete SOEP sample and the results from the SOEP, restricted to the non-movers, we concluded that the non-coverage of the residential movers can not be ignored in Rubin’s sense. With respect to correction methods we analysed weighting by inverse mobility scores and loglinear models for partially observed contingency tables. Our results indicate that weighting by inverse mobility scores reduces the bias to about 60 percent whereas the official longitudinal weights obtained by calibration result in a bias reduction of about 80 percent. The estimation of loglinear models for nonignorable nonresponse leads to very unstable results.

This study dates business cycles in 10 European countries, the United States, and Japan between 1925 and 1936. The aim is to establish a consistent dating of the world economic crisis, which is a precondition for understanding the sharp economic decline in many countries during the interwar period. Three approaches were applied that are common in business cycle dating. First, a deskriptive analysis infers on recessions based on the two-consecutive quarters approach often associated with the US National Bureau of Economic Research. Second, the time series is decomposed into trend and cycle using the Hodrick-Prescott (1980) filter. The third approach is to use Markov-regime switching models, which was proposed by Hamilton (1989) for such purposes. The results of confirm that the Great Depression was a global phenomenon, not limited to the US or Germany. Business cycle comovement in the interwar period is at a level comparable to the post- WWII period. This finding points at the contribution of international business cycle integration to the course of the decline in single countries.

Die Generalisierbarkeitstheorie stellt einen messtheoretischen Ansatz dar, der im Gegensatz zur klassischen Testtheorie verschiedene Fehlerquellen gleichzeitig berücksichtigen kann. Auf der Basis der Ergebnisse einer Generalisierbarkeitsstudie lassen sich genaue Angaben zur Gestaltung generalisierbarer Messdesigns ermitteln. Der Beitrag gibt eine kurze Einführung in die Generalisierbarkeitstheorie mit ihren Grundannahmen und ihrer typischen Untersuchungsanlage. Darauf aufbauend wird ein Überblick über Anwendungen der Generalisierbarkeitstheorie in der betriebswirtschaftlichen Forschung gegeben.

Politicians travel extensively abroad, for various reasons. One purpose of external visits is to improve bilateral economic relations. In this paper, I examine the effect of state visits on international trade. I use a large data set covering the travel activities of the heads of state of France, Germany and the United States between 1948 and 2003. My results indicate that state and official visits are indeed positively correlated with exports. A typical visit is associated with higher bilateral exports by about 8 to 10 per cent, holding other things constant.

Die Riester-Förderung soll dazu beitragen, dass häufiger und mehr für die Altersvorsorge gespart wird. Der Einfluss der Riester-Förderung auf die Sparneigung von Haushalten mit niedrigem Einkommen ist dabei ein zentrales Kriterium zur ökonomischen Evaluation dieser Politik. Unsere ökonometrische Untersuchung auf Basis des Soziooekonomischen Panels liefert einen in dieser Hinsicht negativen Befund: Höhere Riester-Förderquoten bei den Niedrigeinkommensbeziehern erhöhen weder den Anteil der sparenden Haushalte in dieser Gruppe noch ihre Sparquote. Somit scheint die Riester-Förderung fürerhebliche Mitnahmeeffekte anfällig zu sein.

This paper proposes a model that can be implemented to estimate the willingness to pay for distributive justice, defined as distribution according to desert. We derive a formula that allows one to recover the willingness to pay for distributive justice from fiscal data and the estimated coefficients of a probit regression. Using this formula and data from a 1998 Gallup Social Audit, we find that on average the monetary value of justice forUS households amounts to about one fifth of their disposable income. Moreover, we find evidence of markedly heterogeneous preferences for justice along the lines of race and education.

Income-expenditure surveys typically provide incomes on the household level. As households can differ in size and needs, a reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population. Ebert and Moyes (2003) and Shorrocks (2004) theoretically explore the properties of two alternative conversion strategies: a weighting of household equivalent incomes by size and by needs. We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study for examining the sensitivity of the Gini and the Theil index to the chosen conversion strategy, and explain our results by means of an inequality decomposition by population subgroups.