Wissenschaftliches Fehlverhalten und der Ethikkodex des Vereins für Socialpolitik

Begründet durch Vorfälle außerhalb und innerhalb der ökonomischen Profession hat sich der Verein für Socialpolitik im Sommer 2012 einen Ethikkodex gegeben, der auf dem Dreieck von Transparenz, Objektivität und Fairness im wissenschaftlichen Umgang fußt. Der vorliegende Aufsatz begründet diese Prinzipien und weist auf praktische Aspekte des ethischen Verhaltens hin, die der Kodex verlangt. Der Kodex setzt eher auf soziale Normen und gesunden Menschenverstand als auf justiziable Regeln. Das Verhalten von Institutionen regelt er nur indirekt; anlässlich des Trends zum externen Sponsoring von Wissenschaft gibt es möglicherweise Anlass zur Nachjustierung. Es gilt in den kommenden Jahren zu überprüfen, ob der Ethikkodex das Verhalten der Mitglieder nachhaltig beeinflusst.Peer Reviewe

A dimension-breaking phenomenon for water waves with weak surface tension

It is well known that the water-wave problem with weak surface tension has small-amplitude line solitary-wave solutions which to leading order are described by the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. The present paper contains an existence theory for three-dimensional periodically modulated solitary-wave solutions which have a solitary-wave profile in the direction of propagation and are periodic in the transverse direction; they emanate from the line solitary waves in a dimension-breaking bifurcation. In addition, it is shown that the line solitary waves are linearly unstable to long-wavelength transverse perturbations. The key to these results is a formulation of the water wave problem as an evolutionary system in which the transverse horizontal variable plays the role of time, a careful study of the purely imaginary spectrum of the operator obtained by linearising the evolutionary system at a line solitary wave, and an application of an infinite-dimensional version of the classical Lyapunov centre theorem.Comment: The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00205-015-0941-

Wissenschaftliches Fehlverhalten und der Ethikkodex des Vereins für Socialpolitik

Begründet durch Vorfälle außerhalb und innerhalb der ökonomischen Profession hat sich der Verein für Socialpolitik im Sommer 2012 einen Ethikkodex gegeben, der auf dem Dreieck von Transparenz, Objektivität und Fairness im wissenschaftlichen Umgang fußt. Der vorliegende Aufsatz begründet diese Prinzipien und weist auf praktische Aspekte des ethischen Verhaltens hin, die der Kodex verlangt. Der Kodex setzt eher auf soziale Normen und gesunden Menschenverstand als auf justiziable Regeln. Das Verhalten von Institutionen regelt er nur indirekt; anlässlich des Trends zum externen Sponsoring von Wissenschaft gibt es möglicherweise Anlass zur Nachjustierung. Es gilt in den kommenden Jahren zu überprüfen, ob der Ethikkodex das Verhalten der Mitglieder nachhaltig beeinflusst

Tackling the undeclared economy in the European Union: an evaluation of the tax morale approach

To evaluate a new approach towards tackling the undeclared economy which views participants as social actors rather than rational economic actors, this paper reports evidence from 27,563 face-to-face interviews conducted across the European Union during 2013. Multilevel logistic regression analysis reveals a strong association between participation in undeclared work and the level of tax morale. Finding that higher tax morale (and thus a lower propensity to engage in undeclared work) is strongly correlated with greater levels of state intervention but also with individual-level characteristics such as gender, age, education and employment status, the paper concludes not only by confirming a political economy approach and refuting modernization and neo-liberal explanations and remedies, but also by revealing for the first time the importance of solutions not so far considered, including improving educational attainment, older citizens mentoring for younger people, and improving women’s participation in the labour force

Discrete Routh Reduction

This paper develops the theory of abelian Routh reduction for discrete mechanical systems and applies it to the variational integration of mechanical systems with abelian symmetry. The reduction of variational Runge-Kutta discretizations is considered, as well as the extent to which symmetry reduction and discretization commute. These reduced methods allow the direct simulation of dynamical features such as relative equilibria and relative periodic orbits that can be obscured or difficult to identify in the unreduced dynamics. The methods are demonstrated for the dynamics of an Earth orbiting satellite with a non-spherical $J_2$ correction, as well as the double spherical pendulum. The $J_2$ problem is interesting because in the unreduced picture, geometric phases inherent in the model and those due to numerical discretization can be hard to distinguish, but this issue does not appear in the reduced algorithm, where one can directly observe interesting dynamical structures in the reduced phase space (the cotangent bundle of shape space), in which the geometric phases have been removed. The main feature of the double spherical pendulum example is that it has a nontrivial magnetic term in its reduced symplectic form. Our method is still efficient as it can directly handle the essential non-canonical nature of the symplectic structure. In contrast, a traditional symplectic method for canonical systems could require repeated coordinate changes if one is evoking Darboux' theorem to transform the symplectic structure into canonical form, thereby incurring additional computational cost. Our method allows one to design reduced symplectic integrators in a natural way, despite the noncanonical nature of the symplectic structure.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, numerous minor improvements, references added, fixed typo

M3 money demand and excess liquidity in the euro area

Recent empirical studies have found evidence of unstable long run money demand functions if recent data are used. If the link between money balances and the macroeconomy is fragile, the rationale of monetary aggregates in the ECB strategy has to be doubted. In contrast we present a ``stable'' long run money demand relationship for M3 for the period 1983-2006. To obtain the result, the short run homogeneity restriction between money and prices is relaxed and a break in the income elasticity of money demand after 2001 is taken into account. Measures of excess liquidity do not show significant inflation pressures.The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11127-010-9679-5. This publication was produced as part of the FINESS project, funded by the European Commission through the 7th Framework Programme under contract no. 217266 (http://www.finess-web.eu/)

The Normative Problem of Merit Goods in Perspective

In his Theory of Public Finance (1959), Musgrave invented the concept of merit wants to describe public wants that are satisfied by goods provided by the government in violation of the principle of consumer sovereignty. Starting from Musgrave’s mature discussion (1987), I construct two categories to classify the explanations of merit goods. The first strand of thought attempts to justify merit goods within the New welfare economics, by modifying its assumptions to accommodate irrationality, uncertainty, lack of information, and psychic externalities. The second category encompasses more radical departures from consumer sovereignty, drawn from philosophical critiques of economics. In the third part of the paper, I argue that the two strands might be represented by a non-individualistic social welfare function. I also show how this solution echoes Musgrave’s early views on public expenditures before he coined the concept of merit wants. From an historical perspective, the survival of the concept highlights the persistence of a social point of view in welfare economics