Anatomy of regional price differentials: Evidence from micro price data

Over the last three decades the supply of economic statistics has vastly improved. Unfortunately, statistics on regional price levels (sub-national purchasing power parities) have been exempt from this positive trend, even though they are indispensable for meaningful spatial comparisons of regional output, income, wages, productivity, standards of living, and poverty. To improve the situation, our paper demonstrates that a highly disaggregated and reliable regional price index can be compiled from data that already exist. We use the micro price data that have been collected for Germany's Consumer Price Index in May 2016. For the computation we introduce a multi-stage version of the Country- Product-Dummy method. The unique quality of our price data set allows us to depart from previous spatial price comparisons and to compare only exactly identical products. We find that the price levels of the 402 counties and cities of Germany are largely driven by the cost of housing and to a much lesser degree by the prices of goods and services. The overall price level in the most expensive region, Munich, is about 27 percent higher than in the cheapest region. Our results also reveal strong spatial autocorrelation

Tracing the First Steps of American Sturgeon Pioneers in Europe

Background: A Baltic population of Atlantic sturgeon was founded ~1,200 years ago by migrantsfrom North America, but after centuries of persistence, the population was extirpated in the 1960s,mainly as a result of over-harvest and habitat alterations. As there are four genetically distinctgroups of Atlantic sturgeon inhabiting North American rivers today, we investigated the geneticprovenance of the historic Baltic population by ancient DNA analyses using mitochondrial andnuclear markers.Results: The phylogeographic signal obtained from multilocus microsatellite DNA genotypes andmitochondrial DNA control region haplotypes, when compared to existing baseline datasets fromextant populations, allowed for the identification of the region-of-origin of the North AmericanAtlantic sturgeon founders. Moreover, statistical and simulation analyses of the multilocusgenotypes allowed for the calculation of the effective number of individuals that originally foundedthe European population of Atlantic sturgeon. Our findings suggest that the Baltic population of A.oxyrinchus descended from a relatively small number of founders originating from the northernextent of the species\u27 range in North America.Conclusion: These results demonstrate that the most northerly distributed North American A.oxyrinchus colonized the Baltic Sea ~1,200 years ago, suggesting that Canadian specimens should bethe primary source of broodstock used for restoration in Baltic rivers. This study illustrates thegreat potential of patterns obtained from ancient DNA to identify population-of-origin toinvestigate historic genotype structure of extinct populations

A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS APPROACH TO EXPLAIN THE PATH DEPENDENCY OF SEASONAL FARM LABOUR REGULATIONS IN GERMANY

This article introduces discourse analysis as a theoretical concept and an empirical methodology that may enable the endogenization of path creation and path breaking changes in conventional models of political path dependencies. Economic criteria such as rents created by a policy do not always provide a comprehensive explanation for path dependent political decisions. Discourse theory implies that specific interpretative schemata and narratives, such as storylines in the mass media, heavily influence the political discourse. Discourses themselves exercise a constitutive power that constrains decision-making processes and, thus, influence the ensuing policy creation path. Hence, discourses must be taken into account when political path creation is analysed. In this paper we trace over time individual storylines that represent important elements of the discourse underlying the restriction of seasonal farm workers from central and eastern European countries in Germany. We illustrate how dominant speakers and their storylines have been and currently are interacting to shape this policy.Agricultural Policy, Path Dependencies, Discourse Analysis, Seasonal Farm Labour, Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

Magnetic properties of single nanomagnets: EMCD on FePt nanoparticles

Energy-loss magnetic chiral dichroism (EMCD) allows for the quantification of magnetic properties of materials at the nanometer scale. It is shown that with the support of simulations that help to identify the optimal conditions for a successful experiment and upon implementing measurement routines that effectively reduce the noise floor, EMCD measurements can be pushed towards quantitative magnetic measurements even on individual nanoparticles. With this approach, the ratio of orbital to spin magnetic moments for the Fe atoms in a single L$1_0$ ordered FePt nanoparticle is determined to be ${m_l}/{m_s} = 0.08 \pm 0.02$. This finding is in good quantitative agreement with the results of XMCD ensemble measurements.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figure