Bei Assistenzsystemen und noch mehr beim selbstfahrenden Fahrzeug zeigen sich neue Fragestellungen und Herausforderungen. Neben Fragen strafrechtlicher Verantwortung und ethischen Problemen bei der Entwicklung dieser Automobile beleuchten die Autoren auch die Auswirkungen auf das Haftpflicht- und Versicherungsrecht und plädieren für eine gesteigerte
Verantwortung des Fahrzeugherstellers.
One of the most important factors shaping world outcomes is where investment dollars are placed. In this regard, there is the rapidly growing area called sustainable investing where environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) measures are taken into account. With people interested in this type of investing rarely able to gain exposure to the area other than through a mutual fund, we study a cross section of U.S. mutual funds to assess the extent to which ESG measures are embedded in their portfolios. Our methodology makes heavy use of points on the nondominated surfaces of many tri-criterion portfolio selection problems in which sustainability is modeled, after risk and return, as a third criterion. With the mutual funds acting as a filter, the question is: How effective is the sustainable mutual fund industry in carrying out its charge? Our findings are that the industry has substantial leeway to increase the sustainability quotients of its portfolios at even no cost to risk and return, thus implying that the funds are unnecessarily falling short on the reasons why investors are investing in these funds in the first place.
The U.S. tort system has experienced various reforms over the last three decades. While there is an extensive literature on the consequences of these reforms, very little is known about their determinants. In this study, we investigate the role of party politics in the reform process across U.S. states. In order to test whether any party effect goes beyond voter preferences, we apply the idea behind regression discontinuity studies based on close electoral outcomes to semi-parametric proportional hazards models. We find that in states with close election outcomes, a narrow Republican majority in the lower house is associated with a 50 to 150% higher risk of tort reform enactment compared to a narrow Democratic majority. Our results indicate that party politics plays a role in tort reforms over and above potential underlying preferences in the constituency.
We propose a forensic approach to investigate the politico-economic forces that influence narrow vote outcomes in legislative assemblies. Applying nonparametric estimation techniques to a data set covering all roll call votes between 1990 and 2014, we can identify the existence of precise control over legislative vote outcomes in the U.S. House of Representatives. Several pieces of evidence indicate that this control seems to be, at least partly, driven by campaign finance donations. Moreover, control seems to be most prevalent in times of higher electoral competition, i.e. during election years. Our contribution sheds new light on the role of money in politics and, more generally, opens a novel perspective to empirical research on legislative voting.
The rise of the programmable web offers new opportunities for the empirically driven social sciences. The access, compilation and preparation of data from the programmable web for statistical analysis can, however, involve substantial up-front costs for the practical researcher. The R-package RWebData provides a high-level framework that allows data to be easily collected from the programmable web in a format that can directly be used for statistical analysis in R without bothering about the data's initial format and nesting structure. It was developed specially for users who have no experience with web technologies and merely use R as a statistical software. The core idea and methodological contribution of the package are the disentangling of parsing web data and mapping them with a generic algorithm (independent of the initial data structure) to a at table-like representation. This paper provides an overview of the high-level functions for R-users, explains the basic architecture of the package, and illustrates the implemented data mapping algorithm.
Strompreismodelle sind seit der Liberalisierung der Elektrizitätsmärkte ein elementares Werkzeug bei der Bewertung von Risiken aus dem Großhandelsmarkt. Die Bereinigung der Daten von Saisonalitäten und Sprüngen so-wie die Kalibrierung der Modellparameter sind entscheidende Schritte für die Qualität der Bewertung. Dieser Artikel stellt die Problematik dar und zeigt die wesentlichen Effekte in einer empirischen Studie an EEX Marktpreisen.
Im Rahmen der Fachtagung wurde das Modul "Stadtökonomie" für interessierte Lehrerinnen und Lehrer in einem Workshop aufbereitet. Dieser hatte das Ziel, das Modul kennenzulernen, es zu diskutieren und Kolleginnen und Kollegen auf die damit verbundene wissenschaftlichen Begleitforschung aufmerksam zu machen.
