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Sustainable Financial Markets: Financial Transaction Tax and High Capital Buffers Indispensable

By: Dorothea Schäfer in: DIW Economic Bulletin 04/2013. The sustainability of the financial markets is a requirement that has only appeared on the economic policy agenda very recently, whereas a stable financial system has been a declared goal for decades. The relationship between sustainability and stability is, however, still unclear. The two terms are often used synonymously but stability ...

Innovation Policy for SMEs Proves Successful

By: Heike Belitz, Alexander Eickelpasch, Anna Lejpras in: DIW Economic Bulletin 04/2013. The innovation policy of the German government and Länder provides small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a wide range of programs to promote their research and development (R&D) and focuses, in particular, on the transfer of knowledge. In recent years, the programs have been streamlined and ...

Members of German Federal Parliament More Risk-Loving Than General Population

By: Moritz Heß, Christian von Scheve, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner in: DIW Economic Bulletin 04/2013. Politics and business often involve making risky or dangerous decisions whose outcomes can be predicted only with difficulty, if at all. As attitudes toward risks and dangers vary between individuals, it is reasonable that people with different attitudes are active in areas requiring ...

Sustainable Financial Markets: Financial Transaction Tax and High Capital Buffers Indispensable

The sustainability of the financial markets is a requirement that has only appeared on the economic policy agenda very recently, whereas a stable financial system has been a declared goal for decades. The relationship between sustainability and stability is, however, still unclear. The two terms are often used synonymously but stability is only one part of sustainability. The following outlines the ...

A Financial System Should Be Able to Restore Stability Autonomously: Seven Questions to Dorothea Schäfer

Innovation Policy for SMEs Proves Successful

The innovation policy of the German government and Länder provides small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a wide range of programs to promote their research and development (R&D) and focuses, in particular, on the transfer of knowledge. In recent years, the programs have been streamlined and funding substantially increased as part of the second economic stimulus package. SMEs have profited ...

Members of German Federal Parliament More Risk-Loving Than General Population

Politics and business often involve making risky or dangerous decisions whose outcomes can be predicted only with difficulty, if at all. As attitudes toward risks and dangers vary between individuals, it is reasonable that people with different attitudes are active in areas requiring decisions with differing degrees of risk. For example, it has frequently been observed that entrepreneurs are more risk-loving ...

Special: Endophilia or Exophobia: Beyond Discrimination

The immense literature on discrimination treats outcomes as relativistic: One group suffers relative to another. But does a difference arise because agents discriminate against others-are exophobic-or because they favor their own kind-are endophiles? We conduct a field experiment in which graders at one university are randomly assigned students' exams that did or did not contain the students'...

Special: Poverty and Well-Being: A Longitudinal Perspective

We analyze the multi-faceted effects of poverty on the subjective well-being of individuals. Using panel data on more than 42,500 individuals living in Germany from 1993 to 2010 we show that self-reported satisfaction with life decreases as a result of both contemporaneous and past episodes of poverty. The intensity of contemporaneous poverty also plays an additional negative role. In addition,...

Direct Evidence on Income Comparisons and Subjective Well-Being

Subjective well-being (SWB) is generally argued to rise with relative income. However, direct evidence is scarce on whether and how intensively individuals undertake income comparisons, to whom they relate, and what they perceive their relative income to be. In this paper, novel data with direct information on income comparison intensity and perceived relative income with respect to predetermined reference ...