Publikationen

Research in moral education demonstrates the pattern referred to as the happy victimizer (HV) does not only emerge among children and adolescents. Adults also transgress moral rules and, to a considerable extent, they might feel good doing so. However, research also reveals the HV pattern emergence is context specific. In contrast to findings among young children in whom the HV pattern was interpreted as a lack of motivation as a stage of development, it is an open question concerning what HV in adulthood means and how these patterns affect acting. This paper first offers an action-theoretical approach allowing reconstruction of the process of acting as well as a systematic discussion of results from two separate lines of research simultaneously: the research on patterns of moral decision-making as the HV and research on moral disengagement. Second, a survey study provides insights into what kinds of intentions, emotion attributions, and moral disengagement strategies adults display in situations of low moral intensity and whether they indicate consistent or contradictory patterns across situations. Results point to a situational specificity of moral decision-making as well as an application of moral disengagement strategies. Regarding education, it seems necessary to not only focus on struggling to strengthen the moral self or autonomous moral judging but also pay specific attention to acting in morally relevant situations depending on person-situation-interactions. Moral acting may also be fostered by developing supportive environments such as in schools, organisations or society.

The gender stratification hypothesis maintains that higher levels of societal gender equity predict smaller gender gaps in mathematics achievement and attitudes. Using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) across 56 countries, this study aims to provide a thorough empirical test of the gender stratification hypothesis. We employ a novel two-stage empirical strategy to investigate the link between societal gender equities and gender differences in mathematics achievement and attitudes. In the first stage, we use a semiparametric Oaxaca-Blinder (OB) method to decompose the gender gaps in each country into a part that is explained by gender differences in observable characteristics and a part that remains unexplained. In the second stage, we examine the relationships between the unexplained parts of the gender gaps and country-specific gender equity measures. The results highlight the importance of gender equity in the labor market in explaining cross-country variation in the gender math gap. We find that lower gender wage gap is significantly associated with a smaller unexplained part of the gender math gap favoring boys. In terms of the gender gaps in math attitudes, the results yield mixed support for the gender stratification hypothesis.

Objectives
To assess domain-specific effects of physical activity (PA) in the relationship with health care utilization and to investigate whether a measure that aggregates PA across domains (leisure, transport, work) is appropriate.

Methods
Data were retrieved from a longitudinal cohort study conducted in Southern Germany (women n = 1330, men n = 766). The number of physician visits was regressed on total PA and on PA differentiated by the domains leisure time, travel time and working time in a negative binomial model.

Results
For women, no association with physician visits is found for total PA, while high leisure time physical activity (LTPA) is associated with 22% more visits. The effect of high LTPA is statistically different from the effect of high total PA. For men, no significant associations are found for both measures.

Conclusions
The specific, positive effect of high LTPA on physician visits among women shows that using an aggregate measure of PA is inappropriate for analyzing the relation between PA and health care utilization. Further, the positive relationship should be considered in attempts to promote physical activity.

Political coordination and policy outcomes may be the result not only of the position of the ‘median voter’ in a political scale but also of the heterogeneity of preferences around the median. Depending on the level of government and the type of policy, such heterogeneity may lead to lower public spending and redistribution. We assess this issue empirically by analyzing the relationship between the distribution of preferences for redistribution and the amount of public expenditure at different levels of government and for several types of spending in 23 European countries. Our results suggest a negative and significant correlation between heterogeneity of preferences for redistribution and public spending that is stronger at the local level and for redistributive functions, independent of the median individual's preferences.

There is ample evidence that people differ considerably in their preferences. We identify individual heterogeneity in type and strength of social preferences in a series of binary three-person dictator games. Based on this identification, we analyze response times in another series of games to investigate the cognitive processes of distributional preferences. We find that response time increases with the number of conflicts between individually relevant motives and decreases with the utility difference between choice options. The selfish motive is more intuitive for subjects who are more selfish. Our findings indicate that the sequential sampling process and the intuition of selfishness jointly produce distribution decisions, and provide an explanation for the mixed results on the correlations between response time and prosociality. Our results also show that it is important to take heterogeneity of preferences into account when investigating the cognitive processes of social decision making.

Über die Qualifikationen von Lehrenden in der beruflich-betrieblichen Weiterbildung in Deutschland ist bisher wenig bekannt, da sie in den meisten Erhebungen zum Weiterbildungspersonal unterrepräsentiert und/oder als Teilgruppe nicht explizit ausgewiesen sind. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht daher deskriptiv die Qualifikationen von N = 896 Lehrenden in der beruflich-betrieblichen Weiterbildung und vergleicht die Befunde mit den Ergebnissen anderer Studien. Die Lehrenden gaben ähnlich häufig an, einen Hochschulabschluss zu besitzen (70,9 %), allerdings wurden pädagogische Hochschulabschlüsse seltener genannt (16,5 %). Trainerausbildungen und/oder andere Zusatzqualifikationen wurden dagegen häufiger angegeben (86,4 %). Insgesamt scheinen Lehrende in der beruflich-betrieblichen Weiterbildung ein hohes Qualifikationsniveau zu besitzen, wobei es sich jedoch selten um ausgebildete Pädagog/innen handelt. Im Hinblick auf die Professionalisierung im Weiterbildungsbereich erscheint es lohnend, diese Teilgruppe des Weiterbildungspersonals als solche zukünftig genauer zu untersuchen.

This paper takes a closer look at the consequences of using a market index as a proxy for the latent market return in the capital asset pricing model. In particular, the consequences of two major sources of misspecification are analyzed: (i) the use of inaccurate weights and (ii) the use of only a subset of the asset universe to construct the index. The consequences resulting from the use of a badly chosen market proxy reach from inconsistent parameter estimates to misinterpretation of test outcomes indicating the existence of abnormal returns.

A minimum distance approach of estimating the CAPM under measurement error is presented, which identifies the CAPM parameters by exploiting the crossequation cross-sectional restrictions resulting from a common measurement error. The new approach allows for quantifying the impact of measurement error and for testing the presence of spurious abnormal returns. Practical guidelines are presented to mitigate potential biases in the estimated CAPM parameters.

Purpose:
The expectations surrounding innovation as the principal mean by which firms gain a sustainable advantage while simultaneously alleviating social problems are tremendous. However, in the process of developing innovation, many small entrepreneurs, SMEs, as well as large firms struggle to access the necessary finances in order to further develop their innovative projects. The purpose of this paper is to underline some of the most recent tools and practices used to finance novelty.

Design/methodology/approach:
This paper synthetizes some thoughts about the financing of novelty and proposes a research agenda based on trends highlighted in the recent literature.

Findings:
This paper pinpoints recent advances in finance applied to the field of innovation. In particular, this paper highlights both promising developments as well as the need for more research in this area in order to untangle the links between creativity and financial support, the financing of innovation in developing countries, accounting and evaluation of ideas.

Social implications:
The importance of developing innovation and easing access to resources has societal implications. The development of education around finance and entrepreneurship, as well as improving literacy of citizens in these fields could yield a more open view on innovation and financial supports in the future.

Originality/value:
Financing novelty, evaluating projects and facing uncertainty are among the most difficult decisions investors take. This paper combines many dimensions of innovation and finance to construct an overview of current and future practices within both domains.

Sovereign debt crises are often accompanied by deep recessions with sharp declines in external credit to the private sector. In a sample of emerging economies we find that both, sovereign and private interest rate spreads are countercyclical. This paper presents a model of a small open economy that accounts for these empirical regularities. It includes private firms, which finance a fraction of imports by external debt and are subject to idiosyncratic productivity risk, and a government, which borrows internationally and taxes firms to finance public expenditures. The model gives rise to endogenous private and sovereign interest rate spreads and a dynamic feedback mechanism between sovereign and private default risks through the endogenous response of fiscal policy to adverse productivity shocks.

This study contributes to the understanding of how individuals make choices for themselves and on behalf of others in a risky environment. In a laboratory eye-tracking experiment, we investigate whether risk preferences, decision error, and information processing differ between decisions made for oneself and on behalf of others. While we find no differences in risk preferences when deciding for oneself or for someone else, individuals have a greater decision error when deciding for others. Process data partly explains these differences. Individuals spend less time, have less fixations, and inspect less information when deciding for others. We detect similar processing patterns when comparing intuitive and deliberative decision making. We argue that the processing of decisions for oneself is more effortful and involves more extensive deliberation which, in turn, is related to less decision errors.

Identifying trustworthy partners is an important adaptive challenge for establishing mutually cooperative relationships. Previous studies have demonstrated a marked relationship between a person’s attractiveness and his apparent trustworthiness (beauty premium). Kin selection theory, however, suggests that cues to kinship enhance trustworthiness. Here we directly tested predictions of the beauty premium and kin selection theory by using body odours as cues to trustworthiness. Body odours reportedly portray information about an individuals’ genotype at the human leucocyte antigen system (HLA) and thus olfactory cues in body odours serve as a promising means for kin recognition. Ninety men played trust games in which they divided uneven sums of monetary units between two male trustees represented by their body odour and rated each body odour for pleasantness. Half of the odours came from HLA-similar men (suggesting closer kin) and half from HLA dissimilar men (suggesting non-kin). We found that the amount of money the players transferred was not related to HLA-similarity, but to the pleasantness of the trustee’s body odour. By showing that people with more pleasant body odours are trusted more than people with unpleasant body odour we provide evidence for a “beauty-premium” that overrides any putative effect of kin.

We introduce fiscal policy into a sovereign debt model with endogenous default costs and examine the implications for the determination of the output costs of default. We find that the quantitative properties of the output costs of default, and their dependence on primitives such as the elasticity of labor supply, are distinctly different depending on the margin of fiscal adjustment. The consideration of fiscal policy thus has potentially important implications for the quantitative properties of models of sovereign debt and default.

Insights into the processes underlying observed decisions are crucial for a comprehensive understanding of behavior. We investigate how individual social value orientation (SVO) relates to controlled information acquisition and how this relationship may be governed by intuitive versus reflective decision modes. We measure controlled information acquisition with the process tracing tool Mouselab and demonstrate its potential for advancing research on social decision-making. In two experiments, participants worked on two consecutive SVO tasks, in which they allocated points between themselves and others. Information regarding the available distributions of points had to be actively acquired by moving the mouse cursor over corresponding boxes on the screen. We observed a stable relationship between SVO and controlled information acquisition in both experiments: less selfish participants acquired more information and made more other-oriented acquisitions, and this relationship showed up in both an intuitive and a reflective decision mode. However, participants in a reflective decision mode acquired more information, their acquisitions were more strongly other-oriented, and their decisions were more prosocial compared to participants in an intuitive mode. Taken together, our results advance research on SVO by showing that non-selfish individuals invest considerable time and effort to gauge the consequences of their decisions for others, which might underlie the pervasive effects of SVO on many socially relevant behaviors. Moreover, we demonstrate how intuitive versus reflective decision modes can alter controlled information acquisition. Finally, our results illustrate that Mouselab is a simple-to-use and versatile tool for tracing cognitive processes underlying social psychological phenomena.

Do citizens' preferences about education policies differ across industrialized countries? To gain comparative evidence on public preferences for education spending, we conduct representative experiments with information treatments in Switzerland using identical survey techniques previously used in Germany and the United States. In Switzerland, providing information about actual spending and salary levels reduces support for increased education spending from 54 to 40 percent and for increased teacher salaries from 27 to 19 percent, respectively. The broad patterns of education policy preferences are similar across the three countries when the role of status-quo and information are taken into account.

This paper examines whether the introduction of birthright citizenship in Germany affected immigrant children’s educational outcomes at the first three stages of the education system: preschool, primary school, and secondary school. Using a birth date cutoff as a source of exogenous variation, we find that the policy (i) increased immigrant children’s participation in noncompulsory preschool education, (ii) had positive effects on key developmental outcomes measured at the end of the preschool period, (iii) caused immigrant children to progress faster through primary school, and (iv) increased the likelihood of them attending the academic track of secondary school.