Diskussionspapier / Helmut-Schmidt-Universität / Fächergruppe Volkswirtschaftslehre

Diese kleine Arbeit liefert einen vollständigen Überblick über die Möglichkeiten, ökonomische Methoden zur Analyse militärischer Fragen einzusetzen. Entwickelt wird eine Taxonomie von Ansätzen, wobei jeder Ansatz durch ein holzschnittartiges Beispielmodell illustriert wird. Dieses kann als Grundlage für die Gestaltung einer Teildisziplin Militärökonomik verstanden werden.

We investigate if four leading, electronic news gathering organizations in the US - ABC News, CBS News, FOX News, and NBC News - fulfill their role as the fourth estate in the US democracy. Our analysis, using the Political Coverage Index (PCI) introduced by Dewenter et al (2020), is based on the tonality of their political coverage using 815,000 human-coded news items from 2001 through 2012. For our econometric analysis, we use panel regressions with media and time fixed effects. To account for endogeneity, we cut time spans around national elections out of our data. In the remaining data, elections can be seen as a purely exogenous event. Focusing on the entire media set, we find robust empirical results for an anti-government bias in media reporting: Under Republican presidents, political coverage tends to be more liberal, whereas it tends to be more conservative if the president is a Democrat. However, when focusing on each single news organization, interesting differences emerge: For CBS News and NBC News, we find robust empirical evidence of anti-government-bias. In contrast, FOX News is always much more critical of Democrats than of Republicans. Hence, FOX News can be seen as a more loyal servant to one party rather than acting as the fourth estate. In addition, we find no evidence that ABC News significantly changes its position depending on the presidency. Although descriptive statistics show a certain tendency toward government-critical reporting by ABC News, the variation is not statistically significant.

In this paper, we analyse the final decisions for merger cases prepared by the European Commission (EC) since 1990 and build a unique subsample for all non-cleared cases. These incorporate all merger notifications which were either withdrawn by the notifying parties or have been prohibited by the European Commission.We find a sudden decline in prohibitions and withdrawals of cases since 2002 and explore three judicial defeats of the European Commission as determining factors behind these developments. We also find a higher likelihood of withdrawal or prohibition if cases are registered in sectors which incorporate firms in the business of information and communication or transportation and storage. When classifying the documents with a supervised machine learning algorithm, we are able to automatically identify the cleared versus the non-cleared cases with over 90% accuracy. Finally, we find that network effects, high market shares and the risk of collusion are the main competitive concerns which contribute to prohibition decisions in the information and communications sector.

Der Beitrag vermittelt einem wissenschaftlich gebildeten Publikum diesseits der medienüblichen Virologinnen den Mechanismus epidemiologischer Modelle. Daneben wird die Politik in einem epidemiologischen Standardmodell endogenisiert und die zentrale Hypothese anhand von RKI-Daten überprüft. Es zeigt sich, dass durch die Erweiterung des SIR-Modells um eine politische Feedback-Schleife eine "zweite Welle" endogen enstehen kann. Eine vorläufige empirische Analyse deutet auf eine gewisse Plausbilität des postulierten Mechanismus hin.

Market delineation is a fundamental tool in modern antitrust analysis. However, the definition of relevant markets can be very difficult in practice. This preliminary draft applies a new methodology combining a simple price correlation test with hierarchical clustering -a method known from machine learning- in order to analyze the competitive situation in the German retail gasoline market. Our analysis reveals two remarkable results: At first, there is a uniform pattern across stations of the same brand regarding their maximum daily prices which confirms the claim that prices are partly set centrally. But more importantly, price reactions are also influenced by regional or local market conditions as the price setting of gasoline stations is strongly affected by commuter routes.

Natural disasters are a challenge for good governance - this is the result of recent research investigating the effects of natural disasters on one important antagonistic force to good governance, public corruption. However, a specific analysis of droughts is so far neglected in this young strand of the literature. This paper fills that gap by analysing the short- and long-term influence of droughts on corruption within a unified panel estimation approach for 122 countries during the years 1985 to 2013. Relying on a meteorological drought index, we show that higher drought exposure is followed by increases in corruption. This effect holds true for subgroups of poor and rich countries although its timing and intensity is different. In addition, we identify drought-induced corruption as a phenomenon of countries yielding high per capita income in the agricultural sector.

This study examines the effects of adult and non-adult mortality on the long-run level of income in a heterogeneous dynamic and cross-sectionally dependent panel. Employing data for 20 countries between 1800 and 2010, it is found that (i) while non-adult mortality has no long-run effect on GDP per capita, reductions in adult mortality lead to statistically and economically significant increases in the long-run level of per capita income; (ii) there are no significant differences in the long-run effects of adult mortality and non-adult mortality on GDP per capita before and after the onset of the demographic transition; and (iii) mortality in middle adulthood has the greatest impact on economic development, whereas early adulthood mortality and mortality in later adulthood have little to no impact on the long-run level of per capita income.

Platform markets are characterized by the existence of indirect network effects that connect two or more market sides through a platform that internalizes these feedback effects. Conventional instruments of market definitions which consider price levels cannot easily applied in case of two-sided platform competition, as price structure of those markets are non-neutral. Instead of using prices, we use time series of quantities and simple correlation analysis to evaluate the substitutional relationship within two-sided media markets. As a benchmark model, we simulate a Cournot duopoly on order to calculate correlation coefficients for varying degrees of product differentiation and indirect network effects.

The present paper proposes a myopic, boundedly rational heuristic for individual decision-making in differential game settings. I demonstrate that this type of behaviour converges to Nash equilibrium in infinitely repeated stage games without a state variable if the stage game is strategically symmetric. Two examples are used to illustrate the application of the heuristic in differential games.