Educational business cycles

Strong institutional constraints and better-informed voters may lead re-election seeking incumbents to shift the use of political business cycle mechanisms away from monetary and fiscal policy towards other policy domains that are more easily manipulable, targetable, and timeable. We investigate teacher employment patterns at the state level in Germany and find strong evidence of cycling mechanisms, in the form of electioneering and honeymooning. Against a backdrop of a continuously shrinking total teachers’ pool, German state-level incumbents accelerate the hiring of new teachers during election periods and partly reverse this during politically safer points in the electoral cycle. Cycles are mediated by issue salience: heightened attention to German public schooling after the notorious PISA-2000 tests further strengthens the manipulation of new teacher hiring for electoral purposes.     

Searching for political business cycles in Germany

One reslt of the revitalised literature on political business cycles is that there are signs in German data that elections and ideology have an impact. However, using monthly data for the period 1950-1989, and standard methods of time series analysis, we reject both the Nordhaus hypothesis of opportunistic cycles and the partisan approaches by Hibbs ans Alesina. We show that some results are sensitive to the assumption of stationarity. There are signs of policy cycles in M1. It is hard, though, to bring this in line with the Rogoff hypothesis of rational opportunistic cycles because of the German institutional setting.     

Radio Silence and Radio Deception: Secrecy Insurance for the Pearl Harbor Strike Force

Despite solid documentation that the Japanese Strike Force maintained strict radio silence, recent revisionists have seriously misinterpreted new US archival releases in an effort to 'prove' that US Officials acquired advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Using twenty-year-old 'remembrances', long dismissed claims that the British also acquired such 'foreknowledge' have been recently resurrected and supplemented with similar Canadian allegations. Instead of code-breaking, it is now is suggested that such 'foreknowledge' was acquired by tracking the Strike Force by direction finder bearings and 'fixes'. However, these revisionist claims are fraught with a wide range of serious errors that render them baseless. Therefore, their allegations of advance knowledge of the attack and suggestions of a deliberate US failure to warn Hawaiian military officials must be completely disregarded as without any foundation whatsoever.     

论试用买卖合同

对于试用买卖合同的性质,国内法学界普遍存在两种意见,一种认为是附停止条件的买卖合同,另一种意见认为试验买卖合同是一种附解除条件的合同。这两种观点的解释都有很多可取之处,无论是附停止条件说还是附解除条件说都有着难以克服的缺陷。通过正反对比,试用买卖合同实质上是一种由两个前后相继的合同所组成的“演化合同”。只有这样,才能科学并合理地解释试用买卖合同的特殊性。