Externe referierte Aufsätze

Allocative Efficiency Measurement Revisited: Do We Really Need Input Prices?

The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency exploits input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. This paper proves allocative efficiency can be measured as a profit-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit-technical efficiency space. This new approach does not require information on input prices. To validate the new approach, we perform a Monte-Carlo experiment providing ...

Mobile Phone Termination Charges with Asymmetric Regulation

We model competition between two unregulated mobile phone companies with price-elastic demand and less than full market coverage. We also assume that there is a regulated full-coverage fixed network. In order to induce stronger competition, mobile companies could have an incentive to raise their reciprocal mobile-to-mobile access charges above the marginal costs of termination. Stronger competition ...

A Flexible Global Warming Index for Use in an Integrated Approach to Climate Change Assessment

Global Warming Potential (GWP) is an index used to measure the cumulative radiative forcing of a tonne of greenhouse house gas (GHG) relative to that of a "reference" gas (CO2). Under the Kyoto Protocol, GWP can be used as a fixed index to govern the trade-off between different GHGs in a multi-gas approach to GHGs abatement. The use of fixed GWPs has been criticized for not being very cost effective ...

"Marginal Employment": Stepping Stone or Dead End? Evaluating the German Experience

Inducing Imperfect Recall in the Lab

Our paper provides a procedure to induce imperfect recall in the laboratory, even though in the past it has been claimed that this is difficult to achieve in a controlled environment. To accomplish this task we rely on a technique called divided attention to impair subject recollection of previous choices in a version of the absent-minded driver game of Piccione and Rubinstein [Piccione, M., Rubinstein, ...

Existence of Nash Networks in One-Way Flow Models

This paper addresses the existence of Nash equilibria in one-way flow models in a number of different settings. In these models players form costly links with other players and obtain resources from them through the directed path connecting them. We find that heterogeneity in the costs of establishing links plays a crucial role for the existence of Nash networks. The paper also provides conditions ...

Competition Policy in a Concentrated and Globalized Retail Industry

Regional Disparities in the European Union: Convergence and Agglomeration

Economic disparities between the regions of the European Union are of constant concern both for policy and economic research. In this paper, we examine whether there are overlapping trends of regional development in the EU: overall convergence, on the one hand, and persistent or even increasing spatial concentration (agglomeration), on the other. Kernel density estimation, Markov chain analysis and ...

An Economic Analysis of China's Credit Information Monopoly

The Chinese government is building the largest public credit information database on earth. The Credit Registry Center of the People's Bank of China registers more than 600 million consumers of which 110 million have a credit relationship with a financial institution. The Center is a public utility monopoly which collects information from banks and non-bank institutions - a unique approach developed ...

Reforming the German Local Business Tax: Lessons from an International Comparison and a Microsimulation Analysis

The local business tax as the main revenue source of local governments in Germany has been under extensive debate for decades. Proposals for reform range from a pure profit tax to an origin-based value-added tax. Local business taxation systems in OECD countries actually represent the whole spectrum between these two extremes. We use a newly developed microsimulation model for the business sector in ...

Only the Congruent Survive: Personality Similarities in Couples

Numerous studies proved that people tend to select partners that are similar to them with regard to many social and psychological variables. Even though this effect was also found for personality, results are inconsistent and reveal convergence coefficients ranging from negative over zero- to positive correlations. The present study thus aims to investigate personality congruence between spouses and ...

Early Childhood Education and Care in Germany: The Status Quo and Reform Proposals

The Dynamics of European Inflation Expectations

We investigate the relevance of Carroll's sticky information model of inflation expectations for four major European economies (France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom). In contrast to the most rational expectation models, households in the sticky information environment update their expectations occasionally rather than instantaneously due to the costs of acquiring and processing information. ...

Städtebaulicher Investitions- und Förderbedarf 2007 bis 2013 in Deutschland

Redistributive Impacts of Government and Private Household Activities: Trends in Equivalized Household Net Incomes and Intra-household Earnings in Germany, 1985-2005

A Complementarity Model for the European Natural Gas Market

In this paper, we present a detailed and comprehensive complementarity model for computing market equilibrium values in the European natural gas system. Market players include producers and their marketing arms which we call "traders", pipeline and storage operators, marketers, LNG liquefiers, regasifiers, tankers, and three end-use consumption sectors. The economic behavior of producers, traders, ...

Human Capital Externalities: Evidence from the Transition Economy of Russia

The paper tests for the existence of human capital externalities using a micro-level approach: the Mincerian wage regression augmented with the average level of education in cities. To solve identification problems arising from the endogeneity of average education, the study exploits a natural experiment provided by the process of economic transition: average education at the end of communism can be ...

Political Patronage in Ukrainian Banking

This paper empirically investigates the link between political patronage and bank performance for Ukraine during 2003Q3-2005Q2. We find significant differences between politically affiliated and non-affiliated banks. The data suggest that affiliated banks have significantly lower interest rate margins and increase their capitalization. Furthermore, we show that the level of activity of affiliated deputies ...

Regional Income Stratification in Unified Germany Using a Gini Decomposition Approach

Using representative micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this paper delivers new insights into the development of income inequality and regional stratification in Germany after unification. This paper applies a new method for detecting social stratification by a decomposition of the Gini index that yields the obligatory between- and within-group components as well as an 'overlapping' ...

Electricity Wholesale Market Prices in Europe: Convergence?

This paper tests the hypothesis that the ongoing restructuring process in the European electricity sector has led to a common European market for electricity. Based on a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of wholesale electricity prices in 2002-2006, we reject the assumption of full market integration. For several pairs of countries, the weaker hypothesis of (bilateral) convergence is accepted based ...