Social Content of the International Sphere: Symbols and Meaning in Franco-German Relations, CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 02.2, 2002

“The Franco-German friendship is rich in memories and gestures that are at once important and symbolic, and that characterize the exceptional nature of the relationship between our two countries,” reflects former French economics minister and European Commission President Jacques Delors. Such symbolic acts and joint memories are not primarily about cooperation in specific instances. Rather, more generally, they denote what it means to act together. They lend significance to a relationship; they signify what is “at stake,” or what it is “all about.” They are about a deeper and more general social purpose underlying specific instances of cooperation. They are about the value and intrinsic importance that social relations incorporate. Symbols contribute to the institutionalization of social meaning and social purpose in dealing with one another. In this paper I clarify the concept of “predominantly symbolic acts and practices among states,” systematically explore such acts for the bilateral Franco-German relationship between the late 1950s and the mid-1990s, and scrutinize the specific meaning and effects that these practices have helped to generate and perpetuate.

How European Integration Impacts on National Legislatures: The Europeanization of The German Bundestag. CES Germany and Europe Working Papers, No. 06.2, 2006

In looking at the Europeanization of the German Bundestag, the paper brings together two different debates: the well-established debate on the democratic legitimacy of the European Union sees national Parliaments as guarantor of one branch of a "dual" legitimacy. The more recent debate on "Europeanization" addresses the impacts that European integration has had on its Member States. Analyzing the Europeanization of the German Bundestag, the paper identifies and analyzes three dimensions: legislative Europeanization – the extent to which legislative decision making by the German Bundestag has been influenced by European stipulations over the last twenty years; institutional Europeanization – how the Bundestag as an institution reacted to this loss of function by establishing institutional and procedural provisions for influencing the government's Euro-politics; and strategic Europeanization – the ways in which individual MPs started more recently to develop euro-political strategies that go beyond controlling the national government. The paper shows that the Bundestag only hesitantly reacted to the increasing loss of functions through legislative Europeanization by establishing effective institutional and procedural provisions for controlling the government's Euro-political activities. What is more, the establishment of institutions does not guarantee their effective use. All in all, Euro- politics continues to remain the activity of few MPs. These few, however, have more recently started to europeanize their strategies. The empirical findings support the claim that the traditional concept of chains of legitimacy is inadequate, both in conceptual and in empirical terms. With regard to the democ- ratic legitimacy of EU governance, this indicates that, apart from major reform projects, especially with regard to everyday legislation, not too great a burden should be placed on national Parliaments.

What do Eurozone academics think about EMU reform? On broad support and German exceptionalism. Bruges Political Research Papers 41/2015.

This paper is an empirical contribution to the literature on the formation of policy preferences on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) reform within its Member States. In the aftermath of the euro crisis, many proposals to ‘complete’ EMU have been tabled. However, discord among Member States has led to a piecemeal restructuring of EMU. For this paper, a survey has been conducted among euro area academic experts, gauging preferences on EMU reform. We find that general consensus masks significant discord among academics from different Member States. Our data indicates the existence of conflicting national epistemic communities, bound by shared causal beliefs on macro-economic policy. Academics within the key creditor Member State, Germany, assume an outlier position. Within the sample of German academics, economists are particularly strongly opposed to all moves in the direction of fiscal or social union. As economists are those academic experts most likely to influence the economic policy beliefs dominant among the German policy elite, these results are highly politically salient. We confront these findings with the literature on the exceptionalism of German economics. We contend that our results substantiate the claim that inadequate EMU reform and, more generally, the EU approach to the Eurozone crisis, can be partially explained by the firm grip these economic doctrines hold over the economics profession and policy-making circles in Germany.

German macro: how it's different and why that matters. EPC Discussion Paper, May 2016

Do the macroeconomics of the German political establishment really differ from standard western macroeconomics? That question was the starting point for the seminar on ‘German macro: How it’s Different and Why that Matters’, which was held at Heriot-Watt University in December 2015, with financial support from the Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE) and the Money, Macro & Finance Research Group (MMF). This ebook, edited by George Bratsiotis and David Cobham, is the result of that exercise; six of the papers were presented at the seminar in earlier versions, and the editors sought some additional papers to complete the range of perspectives offered. The authors all sought out to discover whether or not there is something unique about German macroeconomics, and in what ways it differs from standard western macroeconomics; is it true that the former neglects demand management (although it may be quite interventionist in other ways), rejects debt relief and emphasises structural reform designed to improve competitiveness as the (only) key to economic growth? How much of whatever difference exists is due to a well worked out set of ideas in the form of Ordoliberalism? In what way does it relate to Germany’s own experiences in different periods? And how far is this the result of political preferences and how much do the idiosyncrasies of these German views matter, for the development of the Eurozone and indeed the health of the German economy?

Multiple regulatory variants located in cell type-specific enhancers within the PKP2 locus form major risk and protective haplotypes for canine atopic dermatitis in German shepherd dogs.

BACKGROUND Canine atopic dermatitis (CAD) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease triggered by allergic reactions involving IgE antibodies directed towards environmental allergens. We previously identified a ~1.5 Mb locus on canine chromosome 27 associated with CAD in German shepherd dogs (GSDs). Fine-mapping indicated association closest to the PKP2 gene encoding plakophilin 2. RESULTS Additional genotyping and association analyses in GSDs combined with control dogs from five breeds with low-risk for CAD revealed the top SNP 27:19,086,778 (p = 1.4 × 10(-7)) and a rare ~48 kb risk haplotype overlapping the PKP2 gene and shared only with other high-risk CAD breeds. We selected altogether nine SNPs (four top-associated in GSDs and five within the ~48 kb risk haplotype) that spanned ~280 kb forming one risk haplotype carried by 35 % of the GSD cases and 10 % of the GSD controls (OR = 5.1, p = 5.9 × 10(-5)), and another haplotype present in 85 % of the GSD cases and 98 % of the GSD controls and conferring a protective effect against CAD in GSDs (OR = 0.14, p = 0.0032). Eight of these SNPs were analyzed for transcriptional regulation using reporter assays where all tested regions exerted regulatory effects on transcription in epithelial and/or immune cell lines, and seven SNPs showed allelic differences. The DNA fragment with the top-associated SNP 27:19,086,778 displayed the highest activity in keratinocytes with 11-fold induction of transcription by the risk allele versus 8-fold by the control allele (pdifference = 0.003), and also mapped close (~3 kb) to an ENCODE skin-specific enhancer region. CONCLUSIONS Our experiments indicate that multiple CAD-associated genetic variants located in cell type-specific enhancers are involved in gene regulation in different cells and tissues. No single causative variant alone, but rather multiple variants combined in a risk haplotype likely contribute to an altered expression of the PKP2 gene, and possibly nearby genes, in immune and epithelial cells, and predispose GSDs to CAD.

The Performance of Swiss and German Family Firms: Investigating Strategies, Orientations and SEW as Determinants

In this chapter we center our attention on the performance drivers of family firms in Switzerland and Germany and compare the corresponding results with the findings generated in the US. Investigating family firms is justified as this organizational form not only constitutes the majority of all firms globally (Sharma and Carney, 2012), but in particular in Switzerland and Germany. In fact, more than 88 percent of all firms in Switzerland are defined as family firms (Frey, Halter, Klein, and Zellweger, 2004), and numbers for Germany are similar (Klein, 2000). While more than 99 percent of all companies in Switzerland are small and medium-sized (Frey et al., 2004), the share of family firms varies with firm size; more specifically, the share of family firms decreases with increasing firm size, which is in line with findings from Germany (Klein, 2000). The social and economic impact of family firms is remarkable. In Germany for instance, family controlled firms provide 60 percent of all jobs and account for 51 percent of the total sales of the German economy (cf. www.familienunternehmen.de). Even though the interest of both academics and practitioners in family firms has been rising significantly in recent years, the existing body of knowledge in the field is still rather fragmented (Sharma, 2004; Sharma and Carney, 2012).