Multinationale Unternehmen, die gerade auch in weniger entwickelten Ländern investieren, sind beliebte Prügelknaben. Ihnen wird unter anderem vorgeworfen, wegen geringerer Regulierung die Umwelt zu verschmutzen, Menschenrechte zu verletzten oder von tieferen Sozialstandards auf Kosten der lokalen Belegschaft zu profitieren. Die Wirklichkeit ist komplexer. Sie zeigt: Multinationale Unternehmen können einen großen Beitrag zur Entwicklung leisten. Dies ist in ihrem eigenen Interesse. Was dafür nötig ist, und wie diese positive Tendenz unterstützt werden kann, ist kein Geheimnis. Das Rezept lautet: «Embeddedness» – Einbindung von ausländischen Unternehmen in die lokale Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.
Since the 1990s, research on publication outputs in business and economics has almost exclusively focused on journal articles. While earlier work has shown that journal articles and other publications were indeed complements in the 70s and 80s, we find that this is no longer the case when we include the most recent decades. Apparently, the notable shift in the scientific community’s attention in the 90s on journal articles and the corresponding incentives towards publications in internationally highly ranked journals on average led researchers to focus one-sidedly on journal publications at the expense of other publication forms. To see whether the aggregate result also holds for individual researchers, we perform a cluster analysis and find four different types of individual researchers: “Journal Specialists”, “Book-Based Publishers”, a small group of “Highly Productive All-round Publishers” and a large group of what we call “Inconspicuous” researchers, with a very modest publication productivity in all forms. In addition, we find that researchers’ age matters for their publication patterns: in our sample, more experienced researchers are less productive with respect to journal articles, but more productive with respect to other publication forms. This, however, is not the result of an individual career effect. Rather, it can be attributed to a cohort effect: among today’s active researchers, the younger cohorts are more productive in journal articles than the older ones. Our explanation is as follows: the younger cohorts were still in their socialization and hiring phase and were more strongly affected by the newly introduced incentives towards international journal publications—and have thus reacted more strongly to the “regime change” resulting from the scientific community’s one-sided attention to publications in internationally highly ranked journals.
Social norms are a ubiquitous feature of social life and pervade almost every aspect of human social interaction. However, despite their importance we still have relatively little empirical knowledge about the forces that drive the formation, the maintenance and the decay of social norms. In particular, our knowledge about how norms affect behavior and how norm obedience and violations shape subsequent normative standards is quite limited. Here, we present a new method that makes norms identifiable and continuously observable and, thus, empirically measurable. We show – in the context of public goods provision – the quick emergence of a widely accepted social cooperation norm that demands high contributions but – in the absence of the punishment of free-riders – norm violations are frequent and, therefore, the initial normative consensus as well as the high cooperation demands required by the norm break down. However, when peer punishment is possible, norm violations are rare from the beginning and a strong and stable normative consensus as well as high contribution requests prevail throughout. Thus, when norm compliance is costly social norms tend to unravel unless norm violations are kept to a minimum. In addition, our results indicate that – in an environment that has previously shown to be detrimental for cooperation and welfare – the opportunity to form a social norm unambiguously causes high public good contributions and group welfare when peer-punishment is possible.
The existing literature assumes that unemployment insurance (UI) affects the labor market through the job finding rate of eligible workers. I argue that this focus is too narrow. I show evidence for UI effects through three other margins: (i) search externalities; (ii) takeup of other welfare state programs; and (iii) job separations. This suggests that the analysis of optimal UI should take a more comprehensive view of how UI affects the labor market.
This paper investigates the effct of domestic market size on innovation activities across different durable good industries in the Chinese manufacturing sector. We address the endogeneity of market size by an IV strategy, based on a measure of potential market size, which is driven only by changes in the Chinese income distribution. This measure is exogenous to changes in prices and qualities of durable goods and is a valid instrument for expected future market size. Our results indicate that an increase in market size by one percent leads to an increase in firm-specific total factor productivity by 0.46 percent and an increase in labor productivity by 0:50 percent. These findings are robust to controlling for export behavior of firms and supply side drivers of R&D.
This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students' grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor's gender, we find that women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues. This bias is driven by male students' evaluations, is larger for mathematical courses and particularly pronounced for junior women. The gender bias in teaching evaluations we document may have direct as well as indirect effects on the career progression of women by affecting junior women's confidence and through the reallocation of instructor resources away from research and towards teaching.
Recent years have seen a large expansion in the use of rigorous impact evaluation techniques. Increasingly, public administrations are collaborating with academic economists and other quantitative social scientists to apply such rigorous methods to the study of public finance. These developments allow for more reliable measurements of the effects of different policy options on the behavioral responses of citizens, firm owners, or public officials. They can help decision makers in tax administrations, public procurement offices, and other public agencies design programs informed by well-founded evidence. This article provides an introductory overview of the most frequently used impact evaluation methods. It is aimed at facilitating communication and collaboration between practitioners and academics by introducing key vocabulary and concepts used in rigorous impact evaluation methods, starting with randomized controlled trials and comparing them with other methods ranging from simple pre–post analysis to difference-in-differences, matching estimations, and regression discontinuity designs.
