Bernd Süssmuth

Induced Civic Pride and Integration

Does a nation’s contingent value of hosting a mega event depend on past experience with implied benefits? Applying data from ex-ante and ex-post queries, we use the FIFA World Cup 2006 to address this question. The ex-post increase in valuation is shown to be owing to citizens requiring an involving experience. We also use the first mega-event hosted by reunified Germany to investigate how the integration of the two parts of Germany progressed after 18 years of reunification. We find that civic pride induced by collective experience can considerably accelerate the convergence of East Germans’ preferences towards those of West Germans.

The Savings-Inflation Puzzle

We find that inflation does not unanimously decrease savings in the US during the postwar period. This result is puzzling as it contradicts the implications of most monetary general equilibrium models.

Managerial Efficiency in German Top League Soccer: An Econometric Analysis of Club Performances On and Off the Pitch

Abstract This study applies stochastic frontier analytic techniques in the estimation of sporting production functions. As ex-ante input factors, we use preseasonal estimates of wage bills of players and coaches that are transformed during the production process of a season into ex-post pecuniary revenues and sporting success. In the case of athletic output we find a robust pattern of technical efficiency over subsequent seasons. Estimates based on economic output, however, do not support an efficiency model. A significant inter-seasonal change in overall technical productivity rather highlights the economic instability of the German soccer industry.

Mega-Sporting Events as Experience Goods

This paper tests the hypothesis that a nation’s hosting of a mega-sporting event is an experience good for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the Soccer World Cup 2006 as a natural experiment. The significant ex-post increase in valuation is shown to be due to adventitious citizens requiring an involving experience, rather than to an updating of a-prior assessment.

A Different Look at Lenin's Legacy: Trust, Risk, Fairness and Cooperativeness in the Two Germanies

What are the long-term effects of Communism on economically relevant notions such as social trust? To answer this question, we use the reunification of Germany as a natural experiment and study the post-reunification trajectory of convergence with regard to individuals’ trust and risk, as well as perceived fairness and cooperativeness. Our hypotheses are derived from a model of German reunification that incorporates individual responses both to incentives and to values inherited from earlier generations as recently suggested in the literature. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we find that despite twenty years of reunification East Germans are still characterized by a persistent level of social distrust. In comparison to West Germans, they are also less inclined to see others as fair or helpful. Implied trajectories can be interpreted as evidence for the passing of cultural traits across generations and for cooperation being sustained by values rather than by reputation. Moreover, East Germans are found to be more risk loving than West Germans. In contrast to trust and fairness, full convergence in risk attitude is reached in recent years.

Beauty in the Classroom: Are German Students Less Blinded? Putative Pedagogical Productivity Due to Professors’ Pulchritude: Peculiar or Pervasive?

Given that instructional student ratings measure differences in pedagogical productivity, this study examines whether perceived attractiveness of German university teachers impact on these differences. Apart from some refinements and adjustments to idiosyncracies of the German system of higher learning, the quantitative analysis widely follows the strategy of the seminal work by Hamermesh and Parker (2005), based on US data. In comparison to findings for the USA, perceived attractiveness of teachers is found to have, if at all, only a weakly significant and quantitatively less important impact on the evaluation outcomes.

Institutional determinants of public debt: a political economy perspective

What militates in favor of public debt? “Hardly anything” we would answer from an economist’s point of view. “A lot” might be the straight answer of a politician. Contemporary conservative politicians frequently claim that every German newborn is burdened with an amount of public debt equalling some (hundred) thousand Euro. A likewise frequently raised argument by their opponents is the necessity of public debt as a means to finance prospective investment in education, infrastructure, etc., i.e. as a means of ensuring intergenerational equity. The aim of the present article is to scrutinize this antagonism and its institutional determinants in representative democracies.

Estimating dynamic asymmetries in demand at the Munich Oktoberfest

This study is the first to analyse economic time series of one of the worlds most pre-eminent traditional events, the most popular beer festival and the largest regular fair in the world: Munich Oktoberfest. People from around the world have attended this cultural festival since the early decades of the 20th century, and so it represents a unique opportunity to analyse elasticities of consumption in the short and medium runs (that is, at business cycle frequencies) and in the long run. Against the backdrop of two secularly increasing demand factors – a rise in real disposable incomes and an increased amount of leisure time – the authors use a novel data set to study elasticities of the consumption of beer and food and the revenues of breweries. To account for asymmetries they apply partial sum decompositions in an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to estimate elasticities for state, national, European and world GDP.

Determinants of Digital Piracy: A Re-examination of Results

Summary This paper empirically investigates determinants of digital piracy in Germany for several types of digitized products. To this end we rely on a survey comprising behavior and attitudes at the individual level. The sample matches some demographic characteristics of the German population with high-speed internet access with regard to gender and age composition. It also maps the share of foreign nationals in Germany. Self-selection in the drawing of our sample is assessed by a control experiment. In contrast to existing studies, we sharply discriminate between frequency and extent of pirating digital media. We find no significant gender difference in the propensity to pirate. However, male individuals are prone to pirate at a significantly larger scale.We attribute this finding to male individuals acting more frequently as hubs in the social prestige enhancing distribution of pirated media. It is particularly important in the light of the recent development of the distribution process from peer-to-peer online networks to offline forms of file swapping. Our findings are confirmed by recent piracy related crime statistics of the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (Bundeskriminalamt).

Some New Results on Industrial Sector Mode-Locking and Business Cycle Formation

Business cycles in different industries have a tendency to synchronize with one another in what appears to be a national business cycle. Using simulation and time series techniques in the time and frequency domain, we offer econometric support for the industrial sector mode-locking hypothesis, extending recent work by Selover, Jensen and Kroll (2003). In addition, we propose an economic motivation of the underlying nonlinear model.