Economics

Interfirm cooperation has proven to be a strategically promising but also an extremely precarious organizational arrangement. A clear discrepancy between the demand for flexibility, in order to be able to react quickly to complex tasks, and the mechanisms for internal stabilization are typical structural characteristics of interfirm arrangements. In view of this situation, Kai Riemer applies the concept of 'social capital' to explain management challenges of interfirm collaboration in teams and to make practical recommendations for a social capital-oriented management.

Current economic theory does not make it possible to consolidate the individual distribution preferences of a state's citizens with an entire economic preference consistently in order to work out recommendations for the state's distribution or redistribution policies. Werner Steden shows that the individual distribution ideas of the citizens of a model society can be used to deduce the best possible distributive concepts for the collective state bodies.

In a cross-national comparative analysis of central banks, exchange rate regimes, banking sectors, political systems and labor market relations in 47 democracies during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Paul-Günther Schmidt delivers strong empirical support for the basic message of his book that the roots of macroeconomic instability are deeply embedded in adverse and harmful features of the economic and political system of nations.

How can an income tax system cope with aggregate risk, which cannot be avoided by insurance contracts? In case of risky capital income, Dirk Schindler develops a new tax system: The Triple Income Tax.