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Der bevorstehende Beitritt Sloweniens in die OECD1 (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), die jüngste Bewertung des BTI-Status-Index 2008 (Bertelsmann-Transformation-Index) auf dem 2. Platz, der Ratsvorsitz der EU (Europäische Union) im 1. Halbjahr 2008, die Mitgliedschaft zum Schengen-Raum und die Einführung des Euro, sind nur die jüngsten Meilensteine der erfolgreichen und nachhaltigen Transformation in ein demokratisches System und die Festlegung auf eine marktwirtschaftliche Ordnung. Die Geschichte Sloweniens stand lange Zeit im Schatten der Geschichte Österreichs und Jugoslawiens. Als eine Nation in einem eigenen Staat sieht sich Slowenien seit dem Zerfall Jugoslawiens in einer gänzlich neuen Rolle. Das Erbe der früheren Abhängigkeiten ist einem neuen Selbstbewusstsein gewichen. Die graduelle Transformation Sloweniens während der 1990er Jahre in einen völkerrechtlich unabhängigen Staat, eine politische Demokratie und eine freie Marktwirtschaft erscheint im europäischen Kontext „…only [as] a chapter in the larger tale of the democratic wave that rather unexpectedly swept across Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe during the last years of the twentieth century.“ In Reflexion der historischen Ereignisse beurteilt Kornai die Transformation am Ende des letzten Jahrhunderts in Europa „…in spite of serious problems and anomalies …[as] a success story.“ Im Rahmen des Transformationsprozesses konnte sich Slowenien als „politischer und ökonomischer Zwerg“ als unabhängiger Staat in das demokratische Europa und die Europäische Union integrieren und fest verankern. Um Gründe und Faktoren dieses Prozesses zu identifizieren, ist eine Betrachtung der Entwicklungen in den 1980er Jahren, die zur Auflösung des blockfreien sozialistischen Jugoslawiens und zur Selbstständigkeit Sloweniens geführt haben, notwendig. Jede der konstituierenden Teilrepubliken und Regionen Jugoslawiens blickt zurück auf eine eigene historische, religiöse und sprachliche Tradition mit individuellen Erfahrungen und spezifischen Spannungen innerhalb und außerhalb der gemeinsamen Föderation. Sloweniens Weg in die politische, ökonomische und demokratische Unabhängigkeit war ein individueller nationaler Differenzierungs- und Umgestaltungsprozess und Ergebnis vielfältiger mehrdimensionaler Konflikte. Unerwartet und plötzlich war der Bruch und die Herauslösung aus dem Staatenbund Jugoslawiens am 25. Juni 1991 nicht. Die Gründung und der Niedergang eines Staates sind schwierig zu erklärende und komplexe Phänomene. Die Triebkräfte der auflösenden gesellschaftlichen Prozesse im Jugoslawien der 1980er Jahre ausschließlich auf die Nationalitätenfrage zu reduzieren, bewertet Weißenbacher als eine zu enge Fokussierung der Darstellung und Begründung auf die ethnischen Spannungen innerhalb des Vielvölkerstaates. Er argumentiert: „Die Wurzeln der Desintegration des sozialistischen Jugoslawiens in alten ethnischen Feindseligkeiten zu suchen, hieße die ökonomischen, sozialen und politischen Prozesse zu ignorieren….“ Die zunehmenden regionalen Inkompatibilitäten Jugoslawiens in den 1980er Jahren verdeutlichen in Betrachtung des spezifischen Entwicklungspfads der Teilrepublik Slowenien, dass die politisch-gesellschaftlichen, kulturellen und die sozioökonomischen Strukturen letztendlich nicht dauerhaft mit den Strukturen anderer jugoslawischer Teilrepubliken vereinbar waren. Die politische und wirtschaftliche Instabilität Jugoslawiens und der frühzeitige Wandel innerhalb der slowenischen Gesellschaft und der Kommunistischen Partei in den 1980er Jahren führten durch politischen Reformdruck und makroökonomische Ungleichgewichte zum Kollaps des jugoslawischen Staatenbundes. Mencinger betont, dass die tiefe Krise Jugoslawiens letzten Endes ohne einen radikalen Systembruch und Sturkurwandel von politischer und ökonomischer Machtverteilung nicht zu überwinden gewesen wäre. Der vorliegende Beitrag greift die Rahmenbedingungen, Entwicklungen, Konflikte und Ziele auf und zeichnet die wesentlichen politischen und wirtschaftlichen Geschehnisse nach, denen sich die slowenische Bevölkerung und Politik in den Jahren vor der Loslösung gegenübersahen und die zur Gründung des unabhängigen Staates geführt haben.
Smart(phone) investing? A within investor-time analysis of new technologies and trading behavior
(2021)
Using transaction-level data from two German banks, we study the effects of smartphones on investor behavior. Comparing trades by the same investor in the same month across different platforms, we find that smartphones increase purchasing of riskier and lottery-type assets and chasing past returns. After the adoption of smartphones, investors do not substitute trades across platforms and buy also riskier, lottery-type, and hot investments on other platforms. Using smartphones to trade specific assets or during specific hours contributes to explain our results. Digital nudges and the device screen size do not mechanically drive our results. Smartphone effects are not transitory.
The Capital Markets Union-project of the European Commission aims for an increase of marketbased debt financing of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), complementing bank lending. In this essay we argue that rather than focussing on pure non-bank lending, a reasonable mix of bankand market-based financing should be considered. Banks are said to have a comparative advantage in critical lending functions such as credit screening, debtor monitoring and debt renegotiation. All forms of lending require a persistent skin-in-the-game of critical players in order to be effective. The regulator should insist on full disclosure of skin-in-the-game, thereby improving capital allocation and reducing systemic risks.
Self-control failure is among the major pathologies (Baumeister et al. (1994)) affecting individual investment decisions which has hardly been measurable in empirical research. We use cigarette addiction identified from checking account transactions to proxy for low self-control and compare over 5,000 smokers to 14,000 nonsmokers. Smokers self-directing their investment trade more frequently, exhibit more biases and achieve lower portfolio returns. We also find that smokers, some of which might be aware of their limited levels of self-control, exhibit a higher propensity than nonsmokers to delegate decision making to professional advisors and fund managers. We document that such precommitments work successfully.
We introduce an innovative approach to measure bank integration, based on the corporate culture of multinational banking conglomerates. The new measure, the Power Index, assesses the prevalence of a language of power and authority in the financial reports of global banks. We employ a two-step approach: as a first step, we investigate whether parent-bank or parent-country characteristics are more important for bank integration. In a second step, we analyze whether bank integration affects the transmission of shocks across borders. We find that the level of integration of global banks is determined by parent-bank-specific factors, as well as by the social centralization in the parent’s country: ethnically diverse and linguistically homogenous countries nurture decentralized corporate structures. Political and economic factors, such as corruption, political rights and economic development also affect bank integration. Furthermore, we find that organizational integration affects the transmission of exogenous shocks from parent banks to their subsidiaries: the more centralized a global bank is, the lower the lending of its subsidiaries after a solvency shock. Wholesale shocks do not appear to be transmitted through this channel. Also, past experience with solvency shocks reduces the integration between parents and subsidiaries.
In times of increased political polarization, the continuing existence of a deliberative arena where people with antagonistic views may engage with each other in non-violent ways is critical for democracy to live on. Social media are usually not conceived as such arenas. On the contrary, there has been widespread worry about their role in increasing polarization and political violence. This paper suggests a more positive impact of social media on democracy. Our analysis focuses on the subreddit “r/WallStreetBets” (r/WSB) - a finance-related forum that came under the spotlight when its users coordinated a financial attack on hedge funds during the Gamestop saga in early 2021. Based on an original method attributing partisanship scores to users, we present a network analysis of interactions between users at the opposite sides of the political spectrum on r/WSB. We then develop a content analysis of politically relevant threads in which polarized users participate. Our analyses show that r/WSB provides a rare space where users with antagonistic political leanings engage with each other, debate, and even cooperate.
We develop a model of managerial compensation structure and asset risk choice. The model provides predictions about how inside debt features affect the relation between credit spreads and compensation components. First, inside debt reduces credit spreads only if it is unsecured. Second, inside debt exerts important indirect effects on the role of equity incentives: When inside debt is large and unsecured, equity incentives increase credit spreads; When inside debt is small or secured, this effect is weakened or reversed. We test our model on a sample of U.S. public firms with traded CDS contracts, finding evidence supportive of our predictions. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, we also show that our results are robust to using an instrumental variable approach.
When markets are incomplete, social security can partially insure against idiosyncratic and aggregate risks. We incorporate both risks into an analytically tractable model with two overlapping generations and demonstrate that they interact over the life-cycle. The interactions appear even though the two risks are orthogonal and they amplify the welfare consequences of introducing social security. On the one hand, the interactions increase the welfare benefits from insurance. On the other hand, they can in- or decrease the welfare costs from crowding out of capital formation. This ambiguous effect on crowding out means that the net effect of these two channels is positive, hence the interactions of risks increase the total welfare benefits of social security.
When markets are incomplete, social security can partially insure against idiosyncratic and aggregate risks. We incorporate both risks into an analytically tractable model with two overlapping generations. We derive the equilibrium dynamics in closed form and show that joint presence of both risks leads to over-proportional risk exposure for households. This implies that the whole benefit from insurance through social security is greater than the sum of the benefits from insurance against each of the two risks in isolation. We measure this through interaction effects which appear even though the two risks are orthogonal by construction. While the interactions unambiguously increase the welfare benefits from insurance, they can in- or decrease the welfare costs from crowding out of capital formation. The net effect depends on the relative strengths of the opposing forces.
The privatization of Old Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance was a top priority on president Bush’s domestic political agenda. Although Bush’s reform initiative has failed and president Obama has declared not to privatize social security, the system of public old age security in the United States is still in crisis, mainly because of demographic factors and the ensuing financial problems but also because of the recent and deep economic recession in the United States. This article reviews the initiative of the Bush-Administration to partially privatize social security and analyzes the main objectives behind Bush policy as well as the main arguments against and obstacles to it. By placing Bush politics of privatizing social security in a broader context of comparative welfare state reform, this article discusses the consequences of privatizing social security systems on equality and poverty, as well as on the legitimacy of the political system in general.