Attracting Attentive Academics: Paper, Person or Place?

ISSN:1439-230

Crowdfunding, Efficiency, and Inequality

We show how decentralized individual investments can efficiently allocate capital to innovating firms via equity crowdfunding. We develop a model where consumers have privately known consumption preferences and may act as investors. Consumers identify worthwhile investments based on their own preferences and invest in firms whose product they like. In the presence of aggregate demand uncertainty, an efficient capital allocation is achieved if all groups of consumers have enough liquidity to invest. If some groups of consumers cannot invest, capital flows reflect preferences of liquid investors but not future demand. Comparing with traditional financing forms, crowdfunding in the absence of liquidity constraints can be superior unless traditional financiers are fully competitive and perfectly informed

'Do I Really Need to Go to Rehab? I'd Say No, No, No.' Estimating Price Elasticities of Convalescent Care Programs

This study is the first to estimate the price elasticities of demand for both medical rehabilitation programs and treatment at health spas. In Germany, the Statutory Health Insurance (SHI) covers both forms of therapy if administered in authorized medical facilities on referral from a physician. While health resort stays are prescribed to recover from general symptoms of poor health and are preventive in character, medical rehabilitation implies recovering from a specific illness or accident. From 1997 onwards, the German government more than doubled the copayments for both types of health care services from DM 12 (e6.14) to DM 25 (e12.78) per day for those insured under the SHI. Using longitudinal microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this exogenous price variation allows us to study the causal effects on demand, since we have a sound control group available. The data suggest that pull-forward effects in 1996 accounted for up to one-fifth of the subsequent decrease in demand. Taking this anticipation effect into account, we show that the reform induced a decrease in total demand of about 20 percent. We estimate the price elasticity for rehabilitation programs that aim at preventing work incapacity to be about -0.15, whereas the elasticity for rehabilitation programs for recovery from work accidents lies around -0.30. In contrast, the price elasticity for treatment at health spas is elastic and lies between -1 and -2.5

Community Development Venture Capital: Concept and Status Quo in Germany

As most other countries, Germany also faces dramatic regional differences in terms of socioeconomic development. One important driver of such development is the existence of a healthy entrepreneurial activity and the creation of new companies. We argue that venture capital (VC) and especially community development venture capital (CDVC) can be a powerful instrument to stimulate entrepreneurship and to support the growth of ambitious companies. Hence, the present paper deals with the general questions, whether there are regional gaps in the supply of VC in Germany? Whether these regional gaps do geographically correspond to the most deprived areas in Germany, and which kind of VC companies are currently in place in order to close potential regional gaps? Geographically, we find that the north-eastern part of Germany is far more deprived than the rest of the country, but is relatively well supplied with VC. Nevertheless, the primary potential target area for CDVC activities in the country is the federal state of Brandenburg in this area. Our assessment of German players in the VC market reveals that some public VC companies do investments similar to CDVC. However, these companies do not offer real hands-on support for entrepreneurs, and real CDVC engagement in the country is yet to come

Discourse and Regulation Failures: The Ambivalent Influence of NGOs on Political Organizations

In the last decades, NGOs have become an important participant in the work of political organizations (e.g., national authorities, the EU or the UN). This development brings many opportunities and also some challenges, including discourse failure which is one of the topics discussed in this paper. We present a case study that illustrates the interdependence of discourse failure and regulations failure. We conclude that discourse failure is frequently not merely an accidental by-product, but rather, a non-intended consequence of deliberate NGOs’ campaigns. We make particular note of probable discourse failure when campaigns attempt to deal with complex issues in an environment rife with wide-spread prejudices and where the NGO’s work is transparent. In this situation, regulation failure may be consequent upon discourse failure. We present collectively binding commitments for NGOs and binding services enforced by political organizations to prevent discourse failure. In conclusion, we argue that the field of political economy can benefit from this challenging environment if it systematically researches the interdependencies between discourses and regulations.In den letzten Jahrzehnten kamen NGOs als wichtige Akteure im politischen Regelsetzungsprozess hinzu (z. B. in der EU, der UN und auch auf den nationalen Ebenen). Aus dieser Entwicklung ergeben sich für die Zivilgesellschaft vielfältige Chancen, allerdings auch einige Herausforderungen. Zu den Herausforderungen zählt unter anderem Diskursversagen, woraus häufig Regulierungsversagen resultiert. Der Beitrag präsentiert eine Fallstudie, die das Zusammenspiel aus Diskurs- und Regulierungsversagen aufzeigt. Das Beispiel illustriert, dass Diskursversagen nicht nur ein zufälliger Nebeneffekt von öffentlichen Diskursen ist, sondern eine nicht-intendierte Folge zielgerichteter Kampagnen von NGOs sein kann. Insbesondere Kampagnen, die sich mit komplexen Themen auseinandersetzen, über die es in der Öffentlichkeit weitverbreitete Vorurteile gibt, neigen zu Diskursversagen. Durch transparente Kampagnen seitens der NGOs wird dies sogar begünstigt. Zur Überwindung dieser Defizite stellt der Beitrag verschiedene Bindungsmechanismen für NGOs und Bindungsservices durch Behörden und Politik vor. Abschließend zeigt der Beitrag auf, dass die Politische Ökonomik davon profitieren kann, wenn sie systematisch das Zusammenspiel zwischen Diskurs und Regulierung erforscht