Band 7, Heft 4

The management game SINTO-Market was originally developed and programmed by Otwin Becker and Reinhard Selten and is recently performed at the University of Graz. The decisions are made by groups of students, each group represented by one of the three firms. The game SINTO-market puts the players in a competitive situation in the branded food product sector, in which the managers have to find the most successful strategies for advertising expenses, investments, production and price settings. It is interesting to see that much can be learned about human behaviour in complex economic decision situations from experimental research management games. Surprisingly the results presented here show significant differences between genders. Male participants gain higher profits than females, mainly by higher prices. Mixed groups, however, behave in a very similar way as male groups do.

The belief of many economists that their science has a major impact on the discussion of economic and societal problems is largely based on anecdotal evidence or personal experience. In this article it is proposed to measure the importance with market prices like speaking fees. The results show that economists receive significantly lower fees than journalists and politicians. Due to the restricted data the interpretation has to be done carefully. However, the article may serve as a starting point for using market prices for impact measurement.

Economically highly developed countries are mostly democratic. But does this association constitute a causal relationship according to which democracy is a determinant of economic development? Or is it, conversely, economic development that paves the way for democratization? This paper gives an overview of the recent empirical literature that has dealt with this question. The empirical evidence raises doubts about the existence of any direct causation. However, there seem to be indirect causal mechanisms. Democracies seem to implement better conditions for the accumulation of human capital, in particular in terms of a rule of law. On the other hand, democracies do not simply arise as consequence of economic development, but because of an adequate social environment with little inequality, which may be associated with economic well-being.

The present article surveys recent studies which analyse specific aspects of the impact of demographic changes on international capital markets.We first present the most recent population trends in important OECD countries, then we discuss the consequences for aggregate world savings, interest rates, asset prices and capital flows. Overall, the existing theoretical and empirical evidence is highly inconsistent. While it seems to be most likely that population ageing will decrease world interest rates and increase the risk premium, some recent simulation models yield exactly the opposite results. Finally, if Asian countries continue to grow as in the past, they will supply the capital for Europe by the middle of this century.