ddc:330

This is an electronic reprint of a review of the book "Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture" by Eric L. Jones, Princeton: Princeton University Press that appeared in the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 2007, vol. 163, issue 3, pages 526-529, URL \url{http://www.jstor.org/stable/40752660}.

Combining national forest inventory (NFI) data with digital site maps of high resolution enables spatially explicit predictions of site productivity. The aim of this study is to explore the possibilities and limitations of this database to analyze the environmental dependency of height-growth of Norway spruce and to predict site index (SI) on a scale that is relevant for local forest management. The study region is the German federal state of Bavaria. The exploratory methods comprise significance tests and hypervolume-analysis. SI is modeled with a Generalized Additive Model (GAM). In a second step the residuals are modeled using Boosted Regression Trees (BRT). The interaction between temperature regime and water supply strongly determined height growth. At sites with very similar temperature regime and water supply, greater heights were reached if the depth gradient of base saturation was favorable. Statistical model criteria (Double Penalty Selection, AIC) preferred composite variables for water supply and the supply of basic cations. The ability to predict SI on a local scale was limited due to the difficulty to integrate soil variables into the model.

Global change has become eminent in our everyday lives. Slowly, but noticeably, the faces surrounding us represent the international global community. Climate doomsday is as present as ethnical and religious controversy. The press reports how eastern German women to flee the catastrophic economic conditions that prevail after the fall of socialism, while catastrophic flooding is haunting the eastern German men who quail in solitude and welfare transfers. And to top it all, this flooding – resulting from global climate change – determines the outcome of national elections. Listening to politicians, global terrorism seems to be a worse threat to the wellbeing of the German citizens than demographic change, and the population is still indecisive if some additional days of beer garden weather aren’t worth the little bit of desertification in the third world. In this work I attempt to highlight some of these issues and to catch a glimpse of the local effects of global change. I will particularly focus on industrial water usage and domestic migration. This work has been funded by the German Federal Office for Education and Research as part of the GLOWA project. This interdisciplinary project aims to explore the effects of global change on the water cycles in different regions of the world. This thesis is devoted to the GLOWA-Danube sub-project which investigates the Upper-Danube Catchment Area. Part of the funds are bound to supporting graduate students and should as a result, facilitate the development of the GLOWA project by the successful completion of relevant dissertations.

The three chapters of this thesis look at the interaction of monetary and regulatory policy with financial markets. The first chapter analyses optimal monetary policy in the presence of liquidity constrained consumers, the proportion of which varies with house prices. In the second chapter, the hypothesis that expansionary monetary policy in response to a stock market crash might lead to excessive risk-taking by financial market participants is evaluated empirically. Finally, the last chapter provides a theoretical model to assess the impact of minimum bank capital requirements on the fluctuation of aggregate bank lending when banks hold different levels of capital over and above the required minimum.

The ongoing globalisation has not stopped short of the banking sector. From a political point of view wide voiced concerns about the effect of such banking globalisation have arisen. From a scientific perspective, one of the open points left for dicussion, is the question which factors shape banks' internationalisation strategies. Additionally, a large literature has recently started to discuss optimal entry modes into international markets in general. This thesis offers four chapters for insight on each of these topics. A case study on Bank Austria in Eastern Europe is presented, yielding insights on bank internationalisation strategies. One key finding is, that the optimal entry mode for banks seems to be closely tied to the banking segment (retail versus wholesale banking) the respective bank operates in. Additionally the thesis offers a theoretical chapter on the optimal entry mode of firms into foreign markets in a world of sequential entry. The primary result of the model is, that Greenfield Investment is an undervalued mode of entry, because it reduces the likelihood of further sequential entry. An open question on when banks follow their customers abroad is also discussed with the help of a theoretical model. I find that whether banks follow their customers abroad or not depends on the riskiness of respective customer loans, both from a customer cash flow point of view as well as a political risk of blocked repayment transfers by local governments abroad. A wide-voiced concern that smaller enterprises suffer in their ability to source finance from banks as the banking sector consolidates is finally discussed. Such a threat is indeed found in a theoretical analysis, as increased layers of hierarchy in consolidated institutions lead to a likely stop of loan provision to smaller companies within the bank, while due to the relationship-based lending nature of small firm bank finance, the likelihood that another bank acts as a new lender to the small firm set free is low.