Interaction effects between dynamic hybrid products and traditional deferred annuities in the German life insurance market

Dynamic hybrid products emerged in 2007 and are now well established in the German life insurance market. In this article, we study interaction effects between dynamic hybrid products and traditional deferred annuity contracts, that are sold by the same insurance company. The key question we investigate is whether the presence of dynamic hybrid products has a negative effect on the payout of traditional insurance products. We do so by using data drawn from a Monte Carlo simulation that is based on a model presented in this article. These data reveal that dynamic hybrid products reduce the payment to policyholders of traditional deferred annuities via the channel of surplus participation.

Making socio-legal Research More Social by Design: Anglo-German Roots, Rewards, and Risks

This Article looks for signs of Anglo-German life in the literature and practice under-pinning the current move to use “designerly ways” in socio-legal research; and asks whether design has a role to play in nurturing a sense of Anglo-German socio-legal community. It argues that a “sociological imagination” is essential if we are to fully understand possible synergies between design and socio-legal research, and the risks and rewards of activating them; and that while we cannot know what socio-legal research will or ought to look like in the coming months and years we must pay more attention to designing those moments that we are lucky enough to share in person.

Rubbing Salt in the Wound

This chapter responds to the prospect opened up by Gottfried Benn. It derives insights from a vision that deals not with the birth of the new man but with the destruction of language as touchstone for authentic being. From whatever spiritual underworld—remote from the World Spirit—that vernacular may emanate, its analysis will carry more conviction than attempts by the Office for Racial Purity to establish “whether there is any trace of Jewish blood.” Verbal analysis will trace those bastardised linguistic forms back through the world of commerce to the point where venerable metaphors are betrayed by a new reality. And for someone intimate with language, no revelation could be more astonishing, nor a spectacle more striking, than the sight of the empty husk of a word suddenly filling again with the blood that was once its content. From there, the chapter considers how the renewal of German life has enabled an old phrase to return to its origin in some dire event in the past, losing its figurative applications.

Shadow Education in Germany: Compensatory or Status Attainment Strategy? Findings from the German LifE Study

In Germany we observe a strong increase in the enrolment in shadow education (‘Nachhilfe’) over the last two decades. To explain this development we draw on social reproduction theories identifying two strategies: (1) families seek competitive advantages for their children to maintain or achieve an advantageous education level (status attainment strategy); and (2) families seek performance improvement for their low performing children in order to meet the high demands in the pursuit of the highest school diploma (compensatory strategy). To test our theoretical ideas, we estimate regression models using data from the 2012 German LifE study. We find that shadow education is primarily used by disadvantaged educational strata to deal with higher demands in school. We conclude that the increased investment in Nachhilfe is an unintended but not yet negative outcome of educational expansion and recent educational reforms in Germany.