FZID discussion papers

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  • Publication
    Network evolution, success, and regional development in the European aerospace industry
    (2014) Barber, Michael J.; Guffarth, Daniel
    The success breeds success hypothesis has been mainly applied to theoretical network approaches. We investigate the European aerospace industry using data on the European Framework Programmes and on Airbus suppliers, focusing on the success breeds success hypothesis at four levels of analysis: the spatial structure of the European aerospace R&D collaboration network, its topological architecture, the individual actors that make up the network, and through a comparison of the Airbus invention and production networks. On the spatial level, SBS is favored: successful regions maintain their position and grow on a large scale, especially so for regions that have strongly participated from the very beginning. The regional hub structure is mirrored in the architecture of the European aerospace R&D collaboration network, where well-connected hub organizations play a key role in shaping the structure of the network through their many collaborative partnerships and do so in a way that strategically positions themselves with greater ability to access and regulate knowledge flows, as assessed by several centrality measures. Only successful organizations have the ability to form so many ties, with success thus breeding success in the European aerospace R&D collaboration network. The importance of the core organizations made clear through the centrality analysis is further supported by the analysis of weak ties, where we observe that the core organizations are connected to the rest of the network with many weak ties, thereby confirming their outstanding positions in the European aerospace R&D collaboration network as being able to access knowledge or other resources. With the combination of the R&D collaboration network and the Airbus production network on a spatial level, we see additional support for SBS, as those regions whose actors are frequent participants in both networks show the greatest share of successful actors. The European aerospace industry shows an ambidextrous character as a whole, which is nonetheless insufficient to avoid recent and future challenges demanding a strong emphasis on production skills.
  • Publication
    Chinese urbanites and the preservation of rare species in remote parts of the country : the example of Eaglewood
    (2014) Pelz, Sonna; Langenberger, Gerhard; Frör, Oliver; Ahlheim, Michael
    Based on a Contingent Valuation study in Shanghai we assess peoples willingness to contribute personally to the alleviation of environmental problems occurring in distant parts of the country. One split of our survey assessed Shanghai residents willingness to pay for the preservation of rainforest in Yunnan, while the other split referred to the willingness to pay for the preservation of a single plant species (i.e. eaglewood) growing in this rainforest. The objectives of this study were twofold. Firstly, we wanted to find out if people living in big Chinese cities like Shanghai take an interest in the environmental problems existing in some remote parts of the country and if they are willing to contribute personally to remedy these problems. Secondly, we wanted to learn more about the motivation behind this kind of empathy, if it exists. We were especially interested in the question if this empathy refers to the specific environmental problems we addressed in our surveys or if it is motivated more by a general feeling of obligation towards environmental issues.
  • Publication
    Ranking the performance of national innovation systems in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America from a neo-Schumpeterian economics perspective
    (2014) Gomes, Luiz Flávio Autran Monteiro; Pereira, Javier; Pyka, Andreas; Paredes-Frigolett, Harold
    We present the results of an empirical study of the national innovation systems of countries in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America from a comprehensive neo-Schumpeterian economics (CNSE) perspective. The empirical study covered the period from 2000 until 2011 and the countries analyzed are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain. Unlike previous approaches that used cluster analyses as a methodological framework to analyze national innovation systems from a CSNE perspective, we use a novel approach based on multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) to rank innovation performance. We show how an MCDA approach can be followed in order to rank the performance of national innovation systems and provide an analysis of the results obtained at the financial, public and industry pillars of the CNSE model.
  • Publication
    Non-financial hurdles for human capital accumulation : landownership in Korea under Japanese rule
    (2014) Kim, Tai-Yoo; Jun, Bogang
    This paper suggests that inequality in landownership is a nonfinancial hurdle for human capital accumulation. It is the first to present evidence that inequality in landownership had an adverse effect on the level of public education in the Korean colonial period. Using a fixed effects model, the present research exploits variations in inequality in land concentration across regions in Korea and accounts for the unobserved heterogeneity across these regions. The analysis establishes a highly significant adverse effect of Land inequality on education in the Korean colonial period.
  • Publication
    The tradeoff between fertility and education : evidence from the Korean development path
    (2014) Lee, Joongho; Jun, Bogang
    Unified Growth Theory suggests the demographic transition and the associated rise in human capital formation were critical forces in the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern economic growth. This paper provides empirical evidence in support of this hypothesis based on the Korean industrialization in the late 20th century. Using a fixed effects model and a fixed effect two-stage least squares model, this study exploits variations in fertility and in human capital formation across regions in Korea over the period 1970 to 2010. This analysis finds a virtuous cycle, where technological progress increased the demand for human capital, leading to an increase in the level of education and, in turn, to a demographic transition. This establishes the existence of a quantity–quality tradeoff on the Korean development path.
  • Publication
    Varieties of knowledge-based bioeconomies
    (2014) Pyka, Andreas; Urmetzer, Sophie
    Governments around the world seek for strategies to overcome the reliance on fossil resources and provide solutions for the most challenging contemporary global issues: food shortage, depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation and climate change. A very recent and widely diffused proposition is to transform economic systems into bio-based economies, which are based on new ways of intelligent and efficient use of biological re-sources and processes. If taken seriously, such endeavour calls for the creation and diffusion of new knowledge as basis for innovation and behavioural change on various levels and therefore often is referred to as knowledge-based bioeconomy. In the current debate, the requirement for innovation is mostly seen in the advance of the biotechnology sector. How-ever, in order to fulfil the requirement of sustainability, which implicitly is connected with the bio-based economy, the transformation towards a bioeconomy requires a fundamental socio-economic transition and must comprise changes in technology as well as in markets, user practices, policy, culture and institutions. To illustrate a nation’s capability for this transition, we refer to the concept of national innovation systems in its broad approach. With the help of an indicator-based multivariate analysis we detect similarities and dissimilarities of different national systems within the European Union as basis for a transition towards a knowledge-based bioeconomy. The analysis allows to compare the different strategies and to identify bottlenecks as well as success factors and promising approaches in order to design policy instruments to foster this imperative transformation.
  • Publication
    Outlier detection in structural time series models : the indicator saturation approach
    (2014) Proietti, Tommaso; Marczak, Martyna
    Structural change affects the estimation of economic signals, like the underlying growth rate or the seasonally adjusted series. An important issue, which has attracted a great deal of attention also in the seasonal adjustment literature, is its detection by an expert procedure. The general–to–specific approach to the detection of structural change, currently implemented in Autometrics via indicator saturation, has proven to be both practical and effective in the context of stationary dynamic regression models and unit–root autoregressions. By focusing on impulse– and step–indicator saturation, we investigate via Monte Carlo simulations how this approach performs for detecting additive outliers and level shifts in the analysis of nonstationary seasonal time series. The reference model is the basic structural model, featuring a local linear trend, possibly integrated of order two, stochastic seasonality and a stationary component. Further, we apply both kinds of indicator saturation to detect additive outliers and level shifts in the industrial production series in five European countries.
  • Publication
    The geography of stock exchanges in Imperial Germany
    (2014) Lehmann-Hasemeyer, Sibylle; Burhop, Carsten
    23 Stock Exchanges were in operation in Germany in 1913. We provide new data about the number of listed firms, their market value, and the number of IPOs between 1897 and 1913 for all exchanges. We assess reasons why a firm opts to be listed at a certain exchange. Large firms tend to be listed and tend to go public at the Berlin Stock Exchange, while the regional stock exchanges were important hosts for small and medium-sized firms. Borders and distance affect listing decisions, suggesting that a patriotic home bias and asymmetric information between issuer and investors affected listing decisions.
  • Publication
    Job insecurity, employability, and health : an analysis for germany across generations
    (2014) Otterbach, Steffen; Sousa-Poza, Alfonso
    In this paper, we use 12 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel to examine the relationship between job insecurity, employability and health-related well-being. Our results indicate that being unemployed has a strong negative effect on life satisfaction and health. They also, however, highlight the fact that this effect is most prominent among individuals over the age of 40. A second observation is that job insecurity is also associated with lower levels of life satisfaction and health, and this association is quite strong. This negative effect of job insecurity is, in many cases, exacerbated by poor employability.
  • Publication
    Kartellbekämpfung und interne Kartellstrukturen : ein netztheoretischer Ansatz
    (2013) Saitis, Athanasios
    Die ökonomische Theorie beschäftigt sich schon seit längerer Zeit mit dem Phänomen von Kartellen und ihrer Bekämpfung, doch die Bedeutung der internen Strukur eines Kartellnetzwerks blieb dabei weitgehend unberücksichtigt. In dieser Arbeit soll deshalb anhand einiger grundlegender netzwerktheoretischer und spieltheoretischer Konzepte die Problematik der internen Stabilität von Kartellstrukturen vor dem Hintergrund analysiert werden, dass eine Kartellbehörde existiert, die das Verhalten der Kartellmitglieder zu entdecken und zu sanktionieren versucht. Dabei zeigt sich in einem einfachen ökonomischen Grundmodell, dass die Art und Weise der Bestrafung der Kartellmitglieder einen Einfluss auf die interne Struktur eines Kartells und dessen Stabilität haben kann. Während sich fixe Bußgelder als strukturneutral erweisen, führt eine Bestrafung, die die Bedeutung der einzelnen Kartellteilnehmer bei der Ermittlung der Bußgelder berücksichtigt, unter bestimmten Bedingungen zu einer Veränderung der internen Kartellstruktur.
  • Publication
    The European aerospace R&D collaboration network
    (2013) Barber, Michael J.; Guffarth, Daniel
    We describe the development of the European aerospace R&D collaboration network from 1987 to 2013 with the help of the publicly available raw data of the European Framework Programmes and the German Förderkatalog. In line with the sectoral innovation system approach, we describe the evolution of the aerospace R&D network on three levels. First, based on their thematic categories, all projects are inspected and the development of technology used over time is described. Second, the composition of the aerospace R&D network concerning organization type, project composition and the special role of SMEs is analyzed. Third, the geographical distribution is shown on the technological side as well as on the actor level. A more complete view of the European funding structure is achieved by replicating the procedure on the European level to the national level, in our case Germany.
  • Publication
    Risiken aus Cloud-Computing-Services : Fragen des Risikomanagements und Aspekte der Versicherbarkeit
    (2013) Haas, Andreas; Hofmann, Annette
    Cloud-Computing services are changing the risk situation of IT-outsourcing and represent a challenge for the insurance industry. The most important problem to guarantee insurability of these emerging risks is that they are not stochastically independent. On the one hand, the interdependent network structure of these risks implies a significant contagion risk; on the other hand, new risks emerge that have not been addressed by existing (cyber risk) policies so far. Insurance concepts should be supported by innovative risk diversification concepts for cloud computing service. Addressing and classifying the new risks resulting from Cloud-Computing services, this article discusses insurability issues and risk management solutions.
  • Publication
    Subprime and euro crises : should we blame the economists?
    (2013) Spahn, Peter
    Economists in the public are accused of propagating highly professional, but unrealistic theories that mislead market agents and policy makers to place too much confidence in rational behaviour and market equilibrium. The paper analyses to what extent the US banking crisis and the euro crisis can be ascribed to fallacious assessments and recommendations on the part of economic theory. In the first case, myopic financial market theory and practice had neglected systemic repercussions of micro bank trading patterns. The euro crisis emerged from the neglect of undergraduate economic wisdom of necessary adjustment mechanisms in a currency union. Economists hopefully misinterpreted current account deficits as a sign of structural change.
  • Publication
    Does medieval trade still mater? Historical trade centers, agglomeration and contemporary economic development
    (2013) Wahl, Fabian
    This study empirically establishes a link between medieval trade, agglomeration and contemporary regional development in ten European countries. It documents a statistically and economically significant positive relationship between prominent involvement in medieval trade and commercial activities and regional economic development today. Further empirical analyses show that medieval trade positively influenced city development both during the medieval period and in the long run; they also reveal a robust connection between medieval city growth and contemporary regional agglomeration and industry concentration. A mediation analysis indicates that a long-lasting effect of medieval trade on contemporary regional development is indeed transmitted via its effect on agglomeration and industry concentration. This research thus highlights the long-run importance of medieval trade in shaping the development of cities as well as the contemporary spatial distribution of economic activity throughout Europe. The path-dependent regional development processes caused by medieval commercial activities help explain the observed persistent regional development differences across the European countries considered.
  • Publication
    The influence of ethnicity and culture on the valuation of environmental improvements : results from a CVM study in Southwest China
    (2013) Frör, Oliver; Börger, Tobias; Ahlheim, Michael
    The provision of environmental goods by government creates social benefits which might vary between citizen groups with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. These differences as well as the overall extent of benefits should be analysed before the implementation of public projects in order to consider not only the efficiency aspects of such a project but also its distributional effects. In Southwest China we are facing a rapid deforestation for the development of rubber cultivation and at the same time find an ethnically highly diverse population. This Contingent Valuation study tries to assess the short-term and long-term benefits accruing from a public reforestation programme in Xishuangbanna and their distribution among different ethnic groups living in that region. The results show that different ethnic groups value short-term and future benefits of reforestation differently and that these differences can be explained by the different cultural and historical backgrounds of these ethnic groups.
  • Publication
    Capital income shares and income inequality in the European Union
    (2013) Schmid, Kai Daniel; Schlenker, Eva
    In this paper, we measure the effect of changing capital income shares upon inequality of gross household income. Using EU-SILC data covering 17 EU countries from 2005 to 2011 we find that capital income shares are positively associated with the concentration of gross household income. Moreover, we show that the transmission of a shift in capital income shares into the personal distribution of income depends on the concentration of capital income in an economy. Using fixed effect models we find that changing capital income shares play an important role in the development of household income inequality. Hence, in many industrialized countries income inequality has by no means evolved independently from the observed structural shift in factor income towards a higher capital income share over the last decades.
  • Publication
    Turkish-German innovation networks in the European research landscape
    (2013) Heller-Schuh, Barbara; Pyka, Andreas; Prostolupow, Irene
    Research networks are regarded as channels for knowledge creation and diffusion and are thus essential for the development and integration of economies. In this paper we have a look at the long Turkish-German-migration history which should offer opportunities for both countries to benefit from brain circulation, transnational entrepreneurs and research networks. The present paper examines the structure of research networks of the European Framework Programmes (FP) that are established by joint participation of organizations in research projects, in particular German research organizations with Turkish participants in FP5 to FP7 in the knowledge-intensive technology fields ICT, Biotechnology and Nanoscience. A better understanding of these networks allows for improving the design of research policies at national levels as well as at the EU level. The empirical examination of network properties reveals that the diverse networks show a range of similarities in the three technology fields in each FP such as the small-world properties. Moreover, our findings show that German actors play a specific role in most examined research networks with Turkish participation.
  • Publication
    Migration and innovation : a survey
    (2013) Pyka, Andreas; Rashidi, Sheida
    In a world characterized by competition on a global scale, persistent structural change driven by innovation and aging societies in industrialized economies, also the competition for the best talents on the labour markets becomes global and more intensive. Therefore it is not surprising that old-fashioned brain drain explanations for migration are no longer convincing. In the knowledge-based economies of the 21st centuries the ideas of brain circulation and international (diaspora) innovation networks become prevailing and should guide the design of migration policies. This paper is a survey on the theoretical and empirical approaches which address the important relationship between migration and innovation.