Law, economics, social sciences

The lack of improved water and sanitary infrastructure still kills many people in developing countries each year. This book gives useful insights into how development projects have an impact in practice and why there is a possibility that projects fail to have positive outcomes. In this book, the national water and sanitation program in rural Benin is analyzed. A difference-in-difference analysis is combined with a phasing-in approach to a sample of 200 villages in the departments of Mono, Couffo and...

Parents are responsible for the upbringing of their children according to the Basic Law. In this role, parents act every day in many situations as representatives of their underage offspring. They decide, among other things, about attending a childcare facility, choosing a school, drug treatments and feeding the child. Ultimately, however, it is the child who bears the short- and long-term consequences of their parents' decision-making processes. This book therefore focuses on the parental decision-making process with its various components...

For families in poor countries, risk and shocks such as storms and floods, illness and accidents, unemployment and civil conflict are often part of everyday life. This book provides comprehensive empirical evidence of risk management strategies in developing countries and how they impact on the lives of the poor. Possible strategies include (i) reducing risk factors, (ii) mitigating the impact of risks through formal insurance and insurance substitutes, and (iii) seeking support to better cope with negative shocks. The chapters...

Central banks have an important position in national economies because they influence fundamental economic parameters such as price levels, interest rates and exchange rates with monetary policy decisions. Due to the outstanding position of the central banks and the developments in the course of the financial crisis since 2007, the question arises to what extent monetary policy interventions can create stability and reduce the extent of crises. The present work offers an answer based on a macroeconomic portfolio model, in...

Scientific phenomena are part of children's everyday lives. Since PISA, scientific education has become increasingly important, even in elementary school. At the University of Flensburg, the advanced training concept "Experiment makes you smart" was developed with the aim of further training elementary teachers in the field of natural sciences and technology in order to be able to competently accompany research-based experimentation in day-care centers. This study, as an accepted dissertation at the University of Flensburg, investigates the extent to which...

The World Bank put the concept of vulnerability in the spotlight of poverty research by presenting it in the World Development Report 2000/01 as an important component of combating poverty. The reason for assigning such a prominent position to vulnerability is threefold: It decreases current well-being, it determines future levels of poverty and it may be at the root of long-term hardship. Building on panel data from rural households in Thailand and Vietnam this book contributes to our knowledge and...

The past decade has seen the emergence of a particular sales and distribution model in which companies that manufacture products and sell them directly through proprietary distribution channels open these channels to third parties and often even to competitor products. One of the industries to pioneer this model has been financial services, where the approach is referred to as an “open architecture” offering. The author's research investigates if and how customer reactions are affected when a company sells third-party products...

In recent years, practice has developed a remarkable range of variations in receivables transactions. The aim of the present study is to enable a consistent VAT assessment of these receivables transactions. To this end, the author examines which performance elements characterize the different types of factoring. To this end, he primarily deals with the current case law on factoring and the sale of non-performing loan portfolios. He also includes asset-backed securities transactions and forfaiting transactions in the investigation. With the...

Recently, technical supervision has become significantly more important. The reasons for this include the increasing shifting of non-ministerial tasks to subordinate authorities, the privatization of public tasks and the frequent interdepartmental cooperation between ministries. Ultimately, official technical supervision is increasingly proving to be a management and control instrument in the field of public administration. The author carries out a comprehensive systematization of the technical supervision in the currently existing system, but at the same time shows ways to a new...

Time-continuous stochastic processes have been used in numerous financial market models for decades. In this work, important aspects of application - with regard to the estimation of parameters, evaluation of financial market contracts and recording the efficiency of capital markets - are primarily illustrated using selected examples and then possible solutions or explanations are presented. Details Title: Analysis of Financial Market Models Subtitle: Estimation, Pricing, and Efficiency Author: Dr. Balazs Cserna Edition: 1st edition Published: 1st edition 05.09.2011 Subject: Economics...

The demographic change forced Germany and other industrialized countries to bring their pension systems back on a sustainable track. This development has increased the responsibility of each individual regarding old-age income. The affected individuals are forced to intensify their savings to close the increasing gap between public pension income and the standard of living experienced during one's working life. This book investigates several empirical and methodological aspects of households' saving behavior including some in relation to the background of the...

This book contributes to the empirical literature on poverty, mortality and labor supply in developing countries. Each of the three essays included in this book make use of new household data sets that were collected to innovatively address a well-defined research problem. The first chapter investigates the relationship between undernutrition and child mortality in sub-Sahara Africa and explains why children around Lake Victoria have very low chances to survive up to age 5 despite being extremely wellnourished. The second chapter...