Modernization of European data protection law at a turning point

CLSR welcomes occasional comment pieces on issues of current importance in the law and technology field. In this note Dr Ulrich Wuermeling of Latham & Watkins LLP, Frankfurt offers a personal viewpoint on the EU data protection reform package.     

Does transformational leadership stimulate user orientation? Evidence from a field experiment

While doing good for specific citizens and users is often considered a powerful motivator among public service employees, little research has rigorously evaluated how public managers can promote individualized prosocial motivation. We follow recent studies on the behavioural implications of ‘user orientation’ to explore how public managers can use a specific leadership strategy—transformational leadership—to reinforce employees' individualized prosocial motivation. Combining a field experiment with 80 childcare centre managers and survey reports from their 590 preschool teachers, we assess the effect of a transformational leadership training programme on user orientation. The results show a positive effect on user orientation three months after the training programme but no persistent effect 15 months after the intervention. This implies that, at least in the short term, public managers can use transformational leadership behaviours to stimulate user orientation.     

Lessons of the European crisis for regional monetary and financial integration in East Asia

The debt crisis in several member states of the euro area has raised doubts on the viability of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the future of the euro. While the launch of the euro in 1999 stirred a lot of interests in regional monetary integration and even monetary unification in various parts of the world, including East Asia, the current crisis has had the opposite effect, even raising expectations of a break-up of the euro area. Indeed, the crisis has highlighted the problems and tensions that will inevitably arise within a monetary union when imbalances build up and become unsustainable. This article discusses the causes of the current European crisis and the challenges that EMU countries face in solving it. Based on this analysis, it derives five lessons for regional financial and monetary cooperation and integration in East Asia.     

Public interest versus interest groups: a political economy analysis of allowance allocation under the EU emissions trading scheme

In a theoretical analysis, we use a common agency model to show that lobbying by energy-intensive sectors covered under an emissions trading scheme (ETS) shifts the regulatory burden of an economy-wide emission constraint to sectors outside the ETS. The emission tax on the latter becomes inefficiently high such that lobbying does not only induce burden shifting but also efficiency losses. A complementary empirical analysis for a cross section of German firms under the EU emissions trading scheme supports our theoretical result on the role of lobbying on allowance allocation.     

Mechanical tolerance of tentorium cerebelli (author's transl)]

In some cases of accidents primary traumatic brain stem hemorrhages are seen in conjunction with lesions of the tentorium cerebelli. In order to decide, whether accelerations of the infra- or supratentorial brain tissue are actually capable of causing tentorium lesions, burst and teartests of tentorium tissue were conducted. The mean dynamic biaxial tearing force was found to be about 4 bar. This value supports the hypothesis that a main injury causing factor of the tentorium in cases without skull fracture could be the relative motion between the tentorium and the brain hemispheres. The mass of the cerebellum however seems to be insufficient to cause such injury producing deceleration forces on the tentorium.