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This article presents the results of the project „ENKOR - Constellations of Civic Engagement in Rural Areas" funded by the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture. In a three-stage research with participatory components, nine communities in rural areas of Hesse, Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania were examined. The focus was on specific challenges of civic engagement in rural areas, influencing contextual conditions and possible support measures. While the German Survey on Volunteering points that the forms in which people get involved is changing - institutionalized engagement is losing, while the number of individually organized volunteers is constantly increasing - the surveys in the ENKOR project show that there is a convergence of the different forms. Institutionalized and unbound engagement are not opposite, but rather move towards each other, cooperate and network. The advantage lies on both sides: associations become more attractive for young or potential members and informal engagement thus has the opportunity for insurance and support, rather access to resources at all. The article also shows the conditions for successful civic engagement, such as the existence of social places where the community can meet. In addition to the physical social places, events and festivals are also important for coexistence and cohesion. This "festivalized engagement" enriches the leisure activities, requires and promotes the cooperation and sharing of resources by various clubs, groups and districts and drives their networking. Due to the central role of the mayor and municipal administration in interaction with civil society, the article also offers very concrete approaches, such as a checklist, which administrations can use to check whether they have actually exhausted all possibilities of supporting their active. With a view to the limited options of smaller local governments, the ENKOR project has provided important information regarding necessary funding policy support structures, which are presented at the end of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a new strategy for the (tax) optimization of foreign direct investments in the U.S. This strategy is particularly favorable for natural persons. By using a foreign upstream hybrid partnership, a substantial tax optimization of the current taxation of profits as well as the taxation of capital gains can be achieved. In addition, current and final losses may also be offset cross‐border to a certain extent in the case of an exemption under treaty law. This tax structuring idea is presented by way of example and explained on the basis of the country constellation U.S./Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article explores two museum exhibits in Frankfurt—Gustave Courbet's painting at the Städel Museum and Cameron Rowland's "Amt 45 i" at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK)—and discusses the complex historical connections between art, finance, and slavery. It highlights how the Städel Museum's focus on Courbet's aesthetic mastery neglects the artist's later radical political actions during the Paris Commune, a social movement that demanded reform of the economy. Meanwhile, Rowland's exhibition at MMK delves into Germany's historical involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, using documentary evidence and conceptual works to reveal the financial interconnections and material culture of slavery. The article critiques German scholarship for potentially perpetuating a form of nationalism and emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and addressing historical wrongs beyond mere recognition. Rowland's artworks, particularly the conceptual piece "Bankrott," challenge the idea of reparations by creating a debt contract that symbolizes the enduring social debt of slavery within systemic structures, offering tools to transform historical understanding and effect change in the present.

Copyright of Moderne Staat is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Moderne Staat is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Moderne Staat is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The role of finance in the development of trade draws increasing attention from economists and economic historians. Yet empirical studies, especially from an historical perspective, continue to be scarce. This study analyses the role of German and British foreign banks in the internationalisation of trade during the first globalisation. It creates a novel data set on the bilateral trade of Germany and Great Britain with the rest of the world and the number and geographical distribution of German and British foreign banks between 1881 and 1913. Using an augmented gravity model of trade, the article shows that banks had a significant positive impact on exports and imports and that this effect was even more pronounced in case of German banks and trade. Moreover, the effect of German banks on trade is the highest in the years closer to bank entry, supporting the idea of German banks being initiators of trade. In contrast, the effect of British banks seems constant over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet-based crowdinvesting market in Europe has developed significantly since its start in 2007 and has become an alternative source of finance for entrepreneurs to sell securities through the Internet to small investors. This market evidences a great variety in platform design and contract forms used by crowdinvesting platforms. By analyzing more detailed, hand-collected data on the complete set of successful and unsuccessful crowdinvesting campaigns run in Germany, this article tests whether different platform and contractual mechanisms affect crowd participation. The results show that crowd participation is largest when the minimum ticket size is small, the crowd is pooled in a financial vehicle, and the crowd is offered investments in the form of profit-participating loans. Moreover, the very same mechanisms increase the chances of achieving successful campaigns and raising a larger amount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After carrying out an extensive analysis of the political debate in Germany caused by the turning point (zeitenwende) of the new progressive government in matters of security, in the face of the war in Ukraine, the global context in which this takes place is reflected. And so, it is about identifying the most important features of the new geostrategic world in formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of FinanzRundschau is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the impending laboratory reform set to take effect on January 1, 2025 in Germany, highlighting the concerns of the Berufsverband Deutscher Laborärzte (BDL) regarding potential revenue losses for laboratories. It details how the reform, while addressing long-standing requests for increased laboratory base rates and funding for operational costs, imposes a financing model that could lead to reduced compensation for laboratory physicians.

The current study examines the association between earnings quality (EQ) and investment efficiency (IE) using the conditional effect of legal origin. Further, we assess the influence of the institutional ownership (IOW) on the relationship between EQ and IE within different legal environments, using a sample of 22,446 firm-year observations from the US, the UK, Germany and Japan over the period of 2001–2018. In general, the results provide cross-country evidence that a higher EQ enhances IE. Further, the results indicate that higher EQ can mitigate overinvestment and underinvestment problems by ensuring that firms move toward their optimal level of investment. In addition, the findings reveal that a country's legal environment affects IE with EQ having a stronger association with IE in common law countries as compared to code law economies. In terms of the conditional role of IOW, the findings illustrate that the effect of IOW on the relationship between EQ and IE varies within different legal origins. The results are robust to alternative measures for the main variables examined. This study provides policy implications for investors, managers, regulators, and theorists about the role of the institutional settings on the relation between certain properties of EQ and IE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obtaining higher than market returns is a difficult goal to achieve, especially in times of turbulence such as the COVID-19 crisis, which tested the resilience of many models and algorithms. We used a Hidden Markov Models (HMM) methodology based on monthly data (DAX returns, VSTOXX index Germany's industrial production and Germany's annual inflation rate) to calibrate a trading strategy in order to obtain higher returns than a buy-and-hold strategy for the DAX index., following Talla (2013) and Nguyen and Nguyen (2015). The stock selection was based on 26 stocks from DAX's composition, which had enough data for this study, aiming to select the 15 best performing. The training period was January 2000 - December 2015, and the out-of-sample January 2016 - August 2021, including the period of high turbulence generated by COVID-19. Fitting the best model revealed that the following regimes are the most suitable: two regimes for DAX returns, two regimes for VSTOXX and three regimes for the inflation rate and for the industrial production, while the posterior transition probabilities were event-depending on the training sample. Furthermore, portfolios built using HMM strategy outperformed the DAX index for the out-of-sample period, both in terms of annualized returns and risk-adjusted returns. The results were in line with expectations and what other researchers like Talla (2013), Nguyen and Nguyen (2015) and Varenius (2020) found out. We managed to highlight that a strategy calibrated based on HMM methodology works well even in periods of extreme volatility such as the one generated in 2020 by COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are children better off than their parents? This highly debated question in politics and economics is investigated by analysing the trends in absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility for Germany and the US. High quality panel data is used for this purpose; the SOEP for Germany and the PSID for the US. In Germany, 67% of sons born between 1955 and 1975 earned a significantly higher real long-run labour income than their fathers. Those with fathers from the lowest earnings bracket were particularly mobile in absolute terms. In contrast, the fraction of US sons earning more than their fathers is 60% on average for the same cohorts. Their share decreased from 66% in the 1956–60 birth cohort to 48% in the 1971–75 birth cohort, while it changed very little in Germany. Overall, absolute as well as relative labour income mobility is larger in Germany than in the US. This indicates that economic growth has been distributed more broadly in Germany than in the US. While the majority of German males has been able to share in the country's rising prosperity and are better off than their fathers, US males continue to lose ground. Hence, Chetty et al. (Science 356:398–406, 2017) seem to be right when they say that the American Dream is slowly fading away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Survival rates of breast cancer patients are high, and the majority of women is <65 years old when first treated for breast cancer. The aim of our study is to assess work-related life factors and analyze the financial opportunities of breast cancer survivors and how this is reflected in the general quality of their lives. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional, hospital-based monocentric questionnaire study of women diagnosed with breast cancer. Recruitment was carried out from January to March 2011 for women diagnosed with and treated for primary breast cancer between 2005 and 2010 at Charité University Hospital Berlin. Results: The study included 492 breast cancer patients without recurrence. In total, 81.3% of the women returned to work, and 30.2% of the women felt a reduction of financial opportunities. Financial problems were named by at least 20% of the patients as being the main cause for a reduced quality of life. Conclusion: Long-term, disease-free breast cancer survivors reported a significant change in their work-related factors as well as changes in their financial opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Identifying leaders and followers, as well as their interactions, in financing renewable energy deployment. • Detailed analysis of policy similarities and differences that shape finance mobilization. • Finance mobilization should begin with actors who are responsive to policies and willing to be patient. • Finance is easier to mobilize in environments that leverage pre-existing and strong relationships between stakeholders. • A well-designed FiT together with KfW is the key to open the door for the participation of decentralized actors in Germany. • A flawed FiT and the pick-winner strategy of CDB advances big players in China. • RPS plays a vital role in China in encouraging involvement from incumbent power generators. Access to finance is a well-recognized barrier to scaling up renewable energy. Using the case studies of Germany and China, this research explores how governments spur renewable energy deployment by examining the availability, costs, and modes of financing. It compares the major financiers, their interactions, and government policy instruments, around renewable financing in both countries. The research concludes that finance mobilization should begin with actors who are willing to be patient and who are responsive to policies. Finance is easier to mobilize when pre-existing and strong relationships between lenders and borrowers are leveraged. It concludes that a well-designed fiscal subsidy policy together with a national development bank aiming to level the playing field is the key to open the door for the participation of decentralized actors in Germany, whereas a flawed fiscal subsidy policy and the pick-winner strategy of a national development bank advances big players in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many observers have noticed the importance of anger in contemporary politics, particularly with reference to populism. This article addresses the question under which conditions people become angry about a specific aspect of their lives: their personal financial situation. Specifically, it asks if populist anti‐elite rhetoric has a causal influence on anger and if this influence differs across socio‐economic groups. The theoretical expectation is that anti‐elite rhetoric allows people to externalize responsibility for an unfavorable financial situation and thereby to turn negative self‐conscious emotions into anger. The argument is tested with original survey data from France, Germany, and the United States. The empirical analysis yields three main insights. First, negative emotional reactions to respondents' personal finances (and anger in particular) are surprisingly widespread in all three countries. Second, there is a pronounced socio‐economic gradient in the distribution of anger and other negative emotions. Third, and most importantly, randomly exposing participants to populist anti‐elite rhetoric causes considerably higher expressed anger about one's financial situation in France and Germany, but less so in the United States. This suggests a causal role of anti‐elite rhetoric in stirring "pocketbook anger." This is true in particular in the middle classes. The notion that populist rhetoric reduces negative self‐conscious emotions, such as shame, is not supported by the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Panel on Household Finances (PHF) has established itself as one of the leading sources of microdata on households' wealth in Germany since its inception in 2010. Over the last ten years, more than 7,583 households have participated in the surveys in 2010–11, 2014 and 2017, many of them taking part more than once (3,734 households). This paper provides an overview of the contents, main methodological aspects and use of the PHF data. It also highlights differences to other surveys and addresses how the survey may develop in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional banks have a competitive advantage in that short distances to clients enable the use of soft information for superior lending decisions. If the ambition of FinTech start‐ups to create superior screening and monitoring technologies materialises, this advantage would be diminished and regional banks would become superfluous for small firm finance. To explore this claim, the paper in hand analyses qualitative empirical data about the lending processes and rating system use of regional German savings banks. In essence, the results from participant observation and interviews clarify the importance of "real" soft information for critical lending decisions. The context specificity and limited verifiability of "real" soft information hamper it from being hardened through the use of rating systems and other bank‐ICT. Though FinTech's scoring technologies may overcome the first limitation, it appears likely that in the course of scoring development "real" soft information will be systematically crowded out due to the manipulation problem. The paper expects improved access to finance for SMEs if FinTech solutions overcome both limitations of "real" soft information use, or if peer‐to‐peer lending and regional banks coexist. Deteriorated access to finance is expected if FinTech companies displace the relationship banking of regional banks due to enhanced competition, without preserving the advantages of "real" soft information with superior screening and monitoring technologies. The paper concludes with recommendations on how to prevent deteriorated access to finance for small firms by promoting fair competition and FinTech innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although public finance is considered to be part of the state context of finance, it has a quality that transcends the state content of public and eliminates the identity between public finance and finance. Within the scope of this study, it is aimed to reveal the importance of difference between public finance and finance and the importance of public in this context by using a language scientific based evaluation method considering the effect of different languages on the meaning content of words. For this purpose, in order to reveal the meaning content of the words of public and finance, the usage of Turkish, English and German by considering the transformations in the historical process are examined. Etymology dictionaries for Turkish, Divan-u Lugati't Turk, Turkish Dictionary by Turkish Language Association; Merriam Webster and other etymology dictionaries for English; Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm dictionary for Germany has been used. According to the the use of dictionary-based interpretations of different historical periods, it can be implied that the effect of public on finance is not only in the form of public finance as the category of finance, but also more comprehensive, relational meaning that exceeds the content of finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Discourse: Journal of Childhood & Adolescense Research / Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper analyzes the effects of the governmental financing instrument Spitzencluster-Wettbewerb (Leading-Edge Cluster Competition, LECC) on R&D expenditure of firms in Germany. The LECC promotes cooperative research among business firms and research institutions under the umbrella of a common strategy, which is pursued by regional cluster organizations. We measure the effect of LECC funding on private R&D spending as well as the effects of the policy instrument on the composition of R&D (internal vs. external). Our analysis is mainly based on data from the R&D survey for Germany. We combine propensity score matching (to identify statistical twins) with a difference-in-differences estimator in order to measure the causal effects of the LECC. These results are complemented with the findings from expert interviews. Our results show that the LECC significantly increases R&D expenditures in comparison to non-funded firms. On average, we did not find evidence of crowding out. At the same time, we identified a greater leverage effect of the LECC for small and medium-sized firms. A comparison with companies that have been funded in other R&D-programs shows that the LECC leads to a greater increase in R&D expenditure in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The expert interviews in general confirm these results and indicate that there are different patterns at firm level depending on firm size, strategy, and sector. In addition, they reveal that the effect of co-funding rules for R&D expenditure appears to be stronger for SMEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal and relational governance mechanisms are used in strategic alliances to coordinate resources and mitigate the risk of opportunistic behavior. While recent work has shown that these approaches are not mutually exclusive, we understand little about when one approach is superior to the other. Using data on the governance choices and subsequent performance of alliances in the German telecommunications industry, we find that the optimal configuration of formal and relational governance mechanisms depends on the assets involved in an alliance, with formal mechanisms best suited to property-based assets and relational governance best suited to knowledge-based assets. Furthermore, a mismatch between governance mechanisms and asset type can harm the performance of the alliance. Our findings contribute to transaction cost economics, the literature on relational governance, and recent work studying their interaction. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the annual member meetings of the DVS (German Welding Society) district associations in Dresden and Mainz-Wiesbaden, held on November 7, 2023, and October 30, 2023, respectively. It states that the meeting were focused on the election of new board members, updates on financial matters, and plans for future activities within the respective associations.

A number of previous studies have questioned the dominant role of Germany within the European Monetary System (EMS). These conclusions are often based on empirical findings that the interest rates of EMS member countries are not affected by German interest rates, even in the long run. In this study, we demonstrate that intra-EMS interest rate differentials (vis-à-vis Germany) exhibit mean-reverting behavior characterized by long-memory dynamics. In a system incorporating six EMS countries and one non-EMS country (the U.S.A.), estimates from a fractional error correction model suggest the presence of short-run intra-EMS monetary-policy interdependencies but validate the German Dominance Hypothesis in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a moral hazard model to compare monitored (nontraded) bank loans and traded (nonmonitored) bonds as sources of external funds for industry. We contrast the theoretical conditions that favor each system with the historical conditions prevailing when these financial systems evolved during the British and German industrial revolutions. To study persistence, we consider an entry model where financiers take the industrial structure as given when they lend and firms take the financial system as given when they borrow. We show multiple equilibria can exist, compare equilibria in welfare terms, and discuss their robustness to coordination between lenders and borrowers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electronic trading system Xetra of the German Security Exchange provides a unique data source on the equity trades of 756 professional traders located in 23 different cities and eight European countries. We explore informational asymmetries across the trader population: Traders located outside Germany in non-German-speaking cities show lower proprietary trading profit. Their underperformance is not only statistically significant, it is also of economically significant magnitude and occurs for the 11 largest German blue-chip stocks. We also examine whether a trader location in Frankfurt as the financial center, or local proximity of the trader to the corporate headquarters of the traded stock, or affiliation with a large financial institution results in superior trading performance. The data provide no evidence for a financial center advantage or of increasing institutional scale economies in proprietary trading. However, we find evidence for an information advantage due to corporate headquarters proximity for high-frequency (intraday) trading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2008 to 2018, Germany became one of the largest contributors to the United Nations system. Since 2015, its voluntary contributions have increased significantly, but additional funds are directed almost exclusively to humanitarian agencies (e.g. WFP, UNHCR, UNICEF and UNRWA) and UNDP. Germany's increasing engagement is mainly a response to the refugee and migration policy in recent years, and is thus politically fragile. A large share of German contributions is also tightly earmarked, undermining multilateral decision-making. It will depend on political will whether Germany can evolve from being not only a large donor, but also one that supports increased core funding to the UN system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding and quantifying total economic impacts of flood events is essential for flood risk management and adaptation planning. Yet, detailed estimations of joint direct and indirect flood-induced economic impacts are rare. In this study an innovative modeling procedure for the joint assessment of short-term direct and indirect economic flood impacts is introduced. The procedure is applied to 19 economic sectors in eight federal states of Germany after the flood events in 2013. The assessment of the direct economic impacts is object-based and considers uncertainties associated with the hazard, the exposed objects and their vulnerability. The direct economic impacts are then coupled to a supply-side Input-Output-Model to estimate the indirect economic impacts. The procedure provides distributions of direct and indirect economic impacts which capture the associated uncertainties. The distributions of the direct economic impacts in the federal states are plausible when compared to reported values. The ratio between indirect and direct economic impacts shows that the sectors Manufacturing, Financial and Insurance activities suffered the most from indirect economic impacts. These ratios also indicate that indirect economic impacts can be almost as high as direct economic impacts. They differ strongly between the economic sectors indicating that the application of a single factor as a proxy for the indirect impacts of all economic sectors is not appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the annual general meeting 2023 held in Goslar, Germany, on March 4, 2023. It states that the meeting also includes discussions on the cancellation of events due to the pandemic, financial matters, and upcoming projects, such as the Cistercian Conference and Peasants' War Conference, highlighting the association's ongoing commitment to scholarly pursuits and community engagement.