Saturday, April 25, 2009

Comments for RYAN HÜBERT

1 comment:

  1. The paper is well organized and easy to read. Some suggestions: 1) I feel that there are two dependent variables in your arguments. One is whether pension reform can happen or not; the other is whether the reform is structural or parametric. Your 1st hypothesis deals with the former and the 2nd hypothesis relates to the latter. I think your case comparison between Sweden and Germany illustrates how high ambiguity leads to parametric pension reform in Germany while to structural reform in Sweden given similarly low threshold of reforms in these two countries. But an unsolved question risen in this comparison is that how come reform was able to occur in German given its high ambiguity. Likewise, in the case of Norway, it seems that the threshold of reform in Norway was high. According to the 1st hypothesis that reform happens when the sum of uncertainty and ambiguity is smaller than the threshold, does it imply that the relatively high ambiguity in Norway makes pension reforms less likely to happen there than in Sweden? Then, why pension reform occurred in Norway? Another question regarding Norway is whether the pension reform there was hence more parametric than the one in Sweden due to its relatively high ambiguity. It would be great if you could take the possible variance in one dependent variable into account when you interpret the other one; 2) When I read the 1st hypothesis, I expect to see a successful reform occurs in certain condition (the sum of uncertainty and ambiguity is smaller than the threshold) and a failing one in other condition (the sum of uncertainty and ambiguity is not smaller than the threshold). After finished reading the whole paper, I realized that in the cases you actually tried to explain the likelihood and patter of reforms rather than the results of them (successful v.s. failing). I would reword the 1st hypothesis for consistency.

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