Increasing regional competitiveness by network strategy case: The strategy process of Lahti University Network

In a network society different areas and cities are forced to compete with and against each other. The success of urban districts is partly dependent of the people`s level of know-how and the districts` capability to create, process and spread out knowledge. Although Lahti Region has been considered a declined industrial region, it is full of potential: There are a sufficient amount of inhabitants; its infrastructure is competitive; its logistical position in Finland is central; it is near the capital city, Helsinki; the nature is near in Lahti. The city has innovative enterprises in wood, metal and plastic industries. On the other hand, the lack of university leads to remote R&D-spending, low standard of education and to the fact that the flow of young, educated people is easily passing the urban district of Lahti. Although Lahti does not have a university of its own, it has been able to attract some Finnish universities to start up branch offices in Lahti. Nowadays, there are three units from different universities with nine professorships. The lack of the university emphasizes the need of local actors, like research and education organisations, companies, authorities and Lahti Region Centre of Expertise Programme to co-operate strategically with each other. One example of this co-operation is the Lahti University Centre (LUC). LUC is a network of independent university level organisations in the city of Lahti. According to the co-operation contract, it consists of the following actors: Helsinki University of Technology Lahti Center; Lappeenranta University of Technology; University of Helsinki, Palmenia Centre for Research and Continuing Education; Helsinki University, Department of Ecological and Enviromental Sciences. The basic task of the LUC is to raise the university level know-how capacity in Lahti region and serve its economic life in areas of research, development and education in order to increase regional competitiveness. Although Lahti University Center has been established it does not have a proper strategy or an action plan. The network of these independent university organisations needs a strategy which guidelines and supports their actions and is compatible with the regional innovation system. The study focuses on the strategy process of a network organisation. Research problems are: - how leadership will be decentralized in a network - the roles and commitment of actors - how to formulate a viable vision - what are the main areas of strategic co-operation The study is an action research, where researchers also be actors in the strategy process. The strategy process will be understood as a learning process of the network. Some traditional strategic analyses such as feasibility analysis and benchmarking as well as some creativity tools like vision workshop will be tested. Leadership will be decentralized among all the actors in order to get the full engagement of the actors. The network strategy of the Lahti University Center gives information and serves as a possible benchmarking partner for other similar network organisations in Europe. This case will be one part of the researchers` study project to develop a model for the strategic planning of the network.

Killing them with Kindness: Negative Distributional Externalities of Increasing UI Benefits

Of the many labour market Hartz IV reforms that have been implemented in Germany since 2005, the role of short-term unemployment insurance has not received much attention. In this paper we examine distributional effects of labour earnings and unemployment benefits using simulated increases in unemployment insurance replacement rates or equivalently, increases in the net present value of benefit duration. Starting around an 18%-point increase in the replacement rate, there are significant negative labour supply effects, drawing those employed into unemployment shifting the mass of the earnings distribution to the left. At around a 25%-point increase in the replacement rate, the mass of the distribution shifts right again, as those receiving unemployment benefits simply enjoy an increased transfer. Thus, due to the substantial negative labour supply effects, German economic policy should avoid potentially increasing the UI benefit replacement rate (or equivalently, increasing the benefit duration) in the near future as a response to the worldwide economic crisis.Unemployment, income distribution, labour supply

The Struggle of Becoming Established in a Deprived Inner-City Neighbourhood

The theory of established-outsider figurations developed by Norbert Elias is a use-ful tool for examining deprived neighbourhoods. The case of this paper is Dort-mund Nordstadt in Germany, an old inner-city neighbourhood which from its early days has housed the newly arrived immigrants. Elias claims that the social cohesion of the established together with the stigmatisation of the outsiders lead to status and power differentials that exclude the outsiders. In Nordstadt, three lev-els of established-outsider relations overlap and affect each other. On the first, the societal level, the Germans stand opposite to the immigrants. On the second, the city level, Nordstadt is put into the outsider position. Furthermore, the spatial hierarchy is linked with the first level of established-outsider relations as Nord-stadt is a traditional immigrant neighbourhood. On the third, the neighbourhood level, the other established-outsider relations are in part reproduced and in part changed by recent developments.Deprived neighbourhoods, Immigration, Integration, Established, Outsider, Elias

The parallax view: the military origins of holography

The title of this piece is meant to evoke at least three sources. The first – and perhaps the only obvious one – concerns the ability of holograms to display parallax, a shifting of visual viewpoint that allows a three-dimensional image to reveal background objects behind those in the foreground. This parallax view is a unique feature of holograms as visual media. A second allusion is to the American film The Parallax View (1974, director A. J. Pakula), a rather paranoid thriller focusing on conspiracy theories concerning government and corporations. To a casual observer, the bare details of the military origins of holography suggest just such cynical and centrally-directed development, although I hope to dispel such simplistic ideas here. And a third passing reference is to the book The Parallax View (2006) by Slavoj Zizek, a wide-ranging and deep exploration of duality in political views, ontological interpretations and scientific methods, among other topics. Zizek’s theme, as well as Pakula’s, is relevant to my approach, which focuses on a parallax of both practice and intent. During the first successful decade of holography, conflicting viewpoints developed between distinct communities: the militarily-guided engineers who invented practical holography, and the later imaging scientists and artisans who stressed three-dimensionality and other attributes instead of the original goal of optical image processing. I argue that distinct groups of users had different perceptions of what holography is and what it is for

Cartels, managerial incentives, and productive efficiency in German coal mining, 1881-1913

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of cartelisation and managerial incentives on the productive efficiency of German coal mining corporations. We focus on coal mining in the Ruhr district, Germany’s main mining area. We use stochastic frontier analysis and an unbalanced dynamic panel data set for up to 28 firms for the years 1881-1913 to measure productive efficiency. We show that coal was mined with decreasing returns to scale. Moreover, it turns out that cartelisation did not affect productive efficiency. Controlling for corporate governance variables shows that stronger managerial incentives were significantly correlated with productive efficiency, whereas the debt-equity ratio did not influence it.Economic history; Germany pre-1913; Cartel; Productive efficiency; Corporate Governance

The Core of an Extended Tree Game: A New Characterisation

Cost allocation problems on networks can be interpreted as cooperative games on a graph structure. In the classical standard tree game, the cost of a service delivered, by a source has to be allocated between homogeneous users at the vertices. But, modern networks have also the capacity to supply different (levels of) services. For example, a cable network that provides diff erent television standards. Users that choose different levels of service can not be treated equally. The extended tree game accounts for such differences between users. Here, players are characterised by their level of demand, consequently the implications on the cost structure of the problem can be considered. We show how an ET-game can be formulated as the sum of unanimity games. This observation enables us to directly calculate the weighted Shapley values and to identify the core of an ET-game.Cooperative game theory; extended tree game; core

When Did We Begin to Spell “Heteros*edasticity” Correctly?

Using digitized texts scanned by Google and subjected to optical character recognition, I show that heteroskedasticity overtook heteroscedasticity as the preferred spelling in 2001 and has continued to dominate, except for 2005, up to 2008. The latest trends indicate that writers are moving toward the k variant. However, for words such as homoskedasticity, heteroskedastic, and homoskedastic, the corresponding spellings using c are still overwhelmingly dominant, albeit slowly shifting.Heteroskedasticity; Culturomics; Google Books; econometric orthography; philology

Old Times, Better Times? German Miners’ Knappschaften, Pay-as-you-go Pensions, and Implicit Rates of Return, 1854–1913

This paper contributes to the literature on the weakness of modern pay-as-you-go social security systems in financing pensions by taking a business and economic historical perspective on the issue. It focuses on Prussian Knappschaften (plural of Knappschaft), which provided miners with compulsory invalidity and implicit old-age insurance, and studies the period from 1854 to 1913. Knappschaften used the pay-as-you-go mechanism, and, in the long-term, came under financial pressure by the rising number of pensioners. The question to be answered is whether Knappschaften were able to off er cohorts of miners entering the system at diff erent times the same implicit rates of return. Did Knappschaften provide an intergenerationally sustainable policy, or did adjustments of contributions and other parameters decrease the dividend for insured miners over time?Insurance; implicit rates of return; Knappschaft; mining; pay-as-you-go; pensions; Prussia; welfare state

Analyzing the Labor Market Activity of Immigrant Families in Germany

This paper analyzes whether immigrant families facing credit constraints adopt a family investment strategy wherein,upon arrival,an immigrant spouse invests in host country-specific human capital while the other partner works to finance the family’s current consumption. Using data for West Germany, we do not find evidence for such a specialization strategy.We further examine the labor supply and wage assimilation of families whose members immigrated together relative to families whose members immigrated sequentially. Our estimates indicate that this differentiation is relevant for the analysis of the labor market activities of migrant households.International migration, assimilation, family investment hypothesis