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In recent decades, financialization has reworked the ownership, organization and geographies of global brewing. However, the institutional constellations of national, regional and local markets continue to shape and mediate its processes in variegated ways. Presenting a more granular and spatially sensitive conceptualization of financialization, this article adopts a cultural political economy (CPE) framework to analyse its relationships with the German brewing industry. First, the article distils the key elements of firm-level financialization and identifies a range of core constituents which provide the foundations for observing how financialization is enacted as part of wider institutional and political economic contexts. Second, the paper explains how these core constituents unfold as part of the global brewing industry, where the growing importance of mergers and acquisitions (M&As), the cultivation of global brands and the strategic prioritization of value over volume have reconstituted mature beer markets. Analysis then turns to the brewing industry and market in Germany, where regional patterns of production, a localized culture of consumption and various forms of state intervention are shown to constrain the enactment of financialization. Building on this empirical evidence, it is argued that geographically particular social relations, cultural conditions and political economic structures intertwine to shape and mediate processes of financialization, in different ways, with geography both causal and constitutive in its uneven expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many regions have experienced long-run economic fluctuations generated by the life cycles of their dominant industrial clusters. During the downswings in the 1970s and 1980s, proactive structural policies were typically launched in German regions to combat job losses in their core clusters and to create new jobs in new industries. With respect to the German State of Bremen, this paper provides empirical evidence of: (1) a long-run regional downswing; (2) the potential job effects of proactive regional industrial policy programmes in terms of increasing regional employment, by safeguarding jobs in the regional core industries and creating new jobs in new growth industries; and (3) a time pattern in the job effects, which are related to the different generations of programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on various journals related to economics and sociology. The "Economic Journal" contains papers by economist R.L. Wedgwood that discusses the statistics of railway costs. He analyses the recent returns of traffic and receipts, and contends that a more scientific statistical system should be introduced. Economist H.W. Macrosty submits proposals for an economic survey of Great Britain and physician Jacques Dumas discusses the present state of the land system in France. The "International Journal of Ethics" shares the views of economists. Professor J.S. Mackensie gives his opinion that late Edward Cuird has built up a solid treasure-house of wisdom that will outlast many erections in breadth of knowledge, balance and judgment, maturity of insight and power of luminous expression. Professor F. Tidily figures out the late Friedrich Paulsen, as child of a hardy, frugal, clear-headed and warm-hearted seafaring race who gave philosophical expression to the ideals of a stock from which so many intellectual leaders of the old fatherland had sprung, and upon the integrity of which the future glory of Germany depends.

This paper examines the relationship between modernisation, consumption, and society, challenging received ideas about the distinction between 'modern' and 'premodern' geographies of food consumption. While conventional accounts posit a historical progression from premodern to modern forms of consumption, associated with the rise of the supermarket and the demise of the corner store, we argue that such distinctions may, in fact, refer less to a historical process of transition than to a contrast between different forms of contemporary sociality, experienced simultaneously in different sites of consumption. By drawing critically on the work of Augé and his contrast between places and nonplaces, these ideas are then put to work empirically in an examination of contemporary food shopping in Germany, focusing particularly on notions of consumer trust. A practice-based and ethnographically informed account of food shopping in Germany shows how distinctions between 'traditional' and 'modern' forms of consumption involve historicised accounts of contemporary consumption spaces and their associated socialities rather than referring to historical differences per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a long-lasting debate over whether increasing ethnic diversity undermines support for social welfare, and whether this conflict thesis applies not only to the United States, but also to European welfare states. In their 2016 ASR article, Schmidt-Catran and Spies analyzed a panel (1994 to 2010) of regional units in Germany and concluded that this thesis also holds for Germany. We argue that their analysis suffers from misspecification: their model specification assumes parallel time trends in welfare support in all German regions. However, time trends strongly differed between Western and Eastern Germany after reunification. In the 1990s, Eastern Germans' attitudes adapted to a less interventionist Western welfare system ("Goodbye Lenin effect"). When allowing for heterogeneous time trends, we find no evidence that increasing proportions of foreigners undermine welfare support, or that this association is moderated by economic hardship (high unemployment rates). We conclude with some general suggestions regarding the conceptualization of context effects in spatial analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do institutional logics travel within a political economy? Employing insights from historical and ideational institutionalist theory, this article offers a novel understanding of change dynamics as driven by actors' creation of institutional interlinkages. It develops the causal mechanism of "invasion from within," consisting of a three-stage process: the progressive weakening of a policy paradigm within one institutional site coinciding with a strengthening of the policy paradigm in another; the building of a coalition within the exporting field; and the use of framing strategies to "localize" adjacent logics of action and delegitimize adversarial coalitions. The analytical purchase of the argument is corroborated through process tracing of the German pension paradigm shift during the 1990s, showing that ideas about private capital formation developed in finance were redirected toward old-age provision and strategically transferred to the pension arena by a coalition of actors from the German finance domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender pay gaps likely persist in Western societies because both men and women consider somewhat lower earnings for female employees than for otherwise similar male employees to be fair. Two different theoretical approaches explain "legitimate" wage gaps: same-gender referent theory and reward expectations theory. The first approach states that women compare their lower earnings primarily with that of other underpaid women; the second approach argues that both men and women value gender as a status variable that yields lower expectations about how much each gender should be paid for otherwise equal work. This article is the first to analyze hypotheses contrasting the two theories using an experimental factorial survey design. In 2009, approximately 1,600 German residents rated more than 26,000 descriptions of fictitious employees. The labor market characteristics of each employee and the amount of information given about them were experimentally varied across all descriptions. The results primarily support reward expectations theory. Both men and women produced gender pay gaps in their fairness ratings (with the mean ratio of just female-to-male wages being .92). Respondents framed the just pay ratios by the gender inequalities they experienced in their own occupations, and some evidence of gender-specific evaluation standards emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between regional housing market fundamentals and energy consumption. We argue that dwellings, in particularly rental properties, are not only consumer goods, but also constitute financial market assets. Properties are spatially fixed and traded in regional contexts, where real estate market characteristics like vacancy, income levels, and expectations determine rent and prices, which in turn provide incentives to invest in housing quality. The level of housing quality (e.g. windows, building materials, or heating technology) in turn influences the level of energy consumption. While this view is established in the real estate and urban economics literature, it has only recently found its way into the energy debate. As a result, the relationship between regional housing market fundamentals and energy consumption has received little attention. This study provides a first attempt to address this paucity. Utilizing aggregate data on regional space-heating energy consumption from over 300,000 apartment buildings in 97 German planning regions, the study applies structural equation modeling to estimate the influence of housing market fundamentals on the level housing quality, and subsequently on regional energy consumption. Findings provide first evidence that regional differences in housing market conditions have a significant impact on housing quality and energy consumption. Specifically, the results suggest that carbon abatement programs in buildings should focus on regions with weak housing market fundamentals, as market incentives are unlikely to incentivize investors to invest in housing quality attributes. The authors conclude by highlighting important implications for energy research and avenues for further investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how institutional differences matter to the quality of a nation’s jobs; job quality is conceived as a dimension of a national economy’s social performance and thus defined in accordance with civic principles. Focus is on the two archetypical varieties of capitalism, the United States and Germany. Using data from a 2009 telephone survey of U.S. and German workers, we find that the overall attainment of civic principles, as perceived by workers, is no different in Germany than in the United States, even though the German institutional environment should be more conducive to them. This is due to higher worker expectations in Germany and a tendency for employer practices to compensate for the weaker (liberal) institutional environment in the United States. Once these are controlled, German workers report substantially more positive outcomes. We find that institutional differences also matter in how various employer practices are adopted and hence have indirect as well as direct implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

European employers are rediscovering liberalised labour migration and are attempting to lobby governments to modify previously restrictive regulatory approaches. This article analyses these newly embraced interest positions, drawing on empirical evidence from the United Kingdom and Germany. Employers do not simply desire more migrants or are indifferent to their skills profile, but rather seek newcomers who can be easily accommodated and complement existing corporate strategies and skills requirements. However, they may also seek to 'import' missing skills that domestic educational facilities do not generate. The profile of 'desirable' economic migrants varies and is conditioned by production strategies and education and training schemes associated with different varieties of capitalism. This article proposes bridging the gap between comparative political economy and migration studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The surveillance of immigrants from Turkey in Germany functions on two seemingly contradictory levels: on the one hand, it de facto recognizes their inclusion in German society; on the other hand, it serves as an instrument to exclude them as ‘(un)suitable’ foreign subjects within that society. Since 1961, this surveillance has slowly but surely changed its character. The aim of this article is to examine these changes through the lens of the different characteristics of so-called disciplinary and control societies. The article reconsiders the theoretical definitions of discipline and control in light of the German context to develop these as more precise historical categories. The fundamental point is that contact between German society and the social fact of migration and an immigrant population decisively inflected German disciplinary and control societies from the very beginning. This study argues that there has been a gradual shift on the part of the German state from a more limited focus to broader considerations of the issue of migration. This shift reveals more inclusionary measures; yet, dialectically, at the very same time it defines and captures an expanding space of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following Blanchflower and Oswald, a "wage curve" describes the wage level as a down- ward-sloping convex curve of the regional unemployment rate. This article makes two major contributions in the analysis of the wage curve. First, it is recognized that potential endo-geneity of the regional unemployment rate should be subject to testing not only in combination with regional-specific effects but also in combination with time-specific effects. For this purpose, the authors develop a new estimator the spatial first difference 2SLS estimator Second, it is recognized that wages may not only respond to the regional but also to the national unemployment rate. In the empirical analysis, the wage curve for East Germany is estimated using a comprehensive database that provides panel data classified into 114 administrative districts during the 1993 to 1999 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world dominated by oil, each country has to design its own energy policy to cope with increasingly scarce stocks of this fossil fuel. Particularly, the United States, France and Germany engaged into significantly different paths coping with challenging constraints such as ensuring economic growth, security of energy supply, and respect of the environment. The impact of these energy policies on the development of renewable energies has been assessed by analyzing each national policy from the economic, political, and technological standpoints. The results of this study provides some explanations of tactical moves made by these energy hungry economies to cope with the increasing pressure put on the oil supply market and to prepare for a future where green energies are bound to play an increasingly important role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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