External refereed essays

The Microeconometric Estimation of Treatment Effects: An Overview

The Making of Entrepreneurs in Germany: Are Native Men and Immigrants Alike?

This paper uses a state of the art three-stage estimation technique to identify the determinants of the self-employed immigrant and native men in Germany. Their making is surprisingly alike. Employing data from the German Socioeconomic Panel 2000 (GSOEP) release we find that self-employment is not significantly affected by exposure to Germany or by human capital. But this choice has a very strong intergenerational ...

Buyer Power and Supplier Incentives

This paper analyzes the origins and welfare consequences of buyer power. We show that if suppliers are capacity constrained or have strictly convex costs, there are two different channels through which large buyers can obtain more favorable terms from their suppliers. In particular, we show how the presence of large buyers can then erode the value of suppliers' outside option. Somewhat surprisingly, ...

Reference Groups and Individual Deprivation

We provide an axiomatization of Yitzhaki's index of individual deprivation. Our result differs from an earlier characterization due to Ebert and Moyes in the way the reference group of an individual is represented in the model.

Modeling Inflation Dynamics in Transition Economies: The Case of Ukraine

This paper explores the dynamics of inflation in Ukraine in a period of relative macroeconomic stability. The analysis of the interrelationship among inflation, money growth, wage growth, and devaluation expectations is based on impulse responses and variance decomposition of a vector autoregression model. We find that changes in devaluation expectations appear to be the most important factor driving ...

Fiscal Competition, Capital-Skill Complementarity, and the Composition of Public Spending

Following Keen and Marchand (1997), the paper analyzes the effect of fiscal competition on the composition of public spending in a model where capital and skilled workers are mobile while low-skilled workers are immobile. Taxes are levied on capital and labor. Each group of workers benefits from a different kind of public good. Mobility of skilled workers provides an incentive for jurisdictions to ...

Geography of the Family

We study the residential choice of siblings who are altruistic towards their parents. The firstborn child's location choice influences the behavior of the second-born child and can shift some of the burden of providing care for the parents from one child to the other. These strategic considerations lead to an equilibrium location pattern with firstborn children locating further away from their parents ...

European Labour Mobility: Challenges and Potentials

European Union economies are pressed by (i) a demographic change that induces population ageing and a decline of the workforce, and (ii) a split labour market that is characterized by high levels of unemployment for low-skilled people and a simultaneous shortage of skilled workers. This lack of flexible high-skilled workers and the aging process has created the image of an immobile labour force and ...

An Adjustment Process for Nonconvex Production Economies

We prove the existence of a path of market conditions, i.e. combinations of market prices and production quantities, that links any arbitrarily chosen market condition with an equilibrium, in a general equilibrium model with possibly nonconvex production technologies based on Villar [Villar, A., 1994. Equilibrium with nonconvex production technologies. Economic Theory 4, 629-638] and Villar [Villar, ...

Modeling the Impacts of International Climate Change Policies in a CGE Context: The Use of the GTAP-E Model

The anticipated implications of international environmental policy strategies are critical for the success or failure of international negotiations on climate change policies. In this paper, we discuss the complex modeling issues related to the incorporation of international environmental policy measures in one of the popular applied general equilibrium models for international trade, the so-called ...

Creating Low Skilled Jobs by Subsidising Market-Contracted Household Work

The paper analyses the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and several control variables for household composition. It is found that the demand for household work ...

Do Eurozone Countries Cheat with Their Budget Deficit Forecasts?

The authors assess the political economy determinants of budget deficit forecast errors. Their econometric analysis indicates that Eurozone governments have manipulated deficit forecasts before elections since the introduction of the Stability and Growth Pact. The left-right position and the institutional design of governments also affect the quality of deficit forecasts.

Wie wirkt sich Outsourcing auf den Unternehmenserfolg aus? Neue Evidenz

Neue Produkte, Unternehmenserfolg und Entlohnung: Auswertungspotentiale der Mikrodaten der amtlichen Statistik durch Nutzung der Forschungsdatenzentren

Unpaid Overtime in Germany: Differences between East and West

Declining Output Volatility in Germany: Impulses, Propagation and the Role of Monetary Policy

The decline in output volatility in Germany is analysed. A lower level of variance in an autoregressive model of output growth can be either due to a change in the structure of the economy (a change in the propagation mechanism) or a reduced error term variance (reduced impulses). In Germany the decline output volatility is due to a decline in the persistence of the growth process. This is in contrast ...

Measuring and Predicting Turning Points Using a Dynamic Bi-Factor Model

In this paper a dynamic bi-factor model with Markov-switching is developed to measure and predict turning points. Both common factors, namely composite leading index (CLI) and composite coincident index (CCI) respectively, have their own cyclical dynamics, and their lead-lag relationships are reflected in the transition probabilities matrix. The model is applied to four coincident and four selected ...

Ökonomie(sierung) und Bildung: Plädoyer für ein entspannteres Verhältnis

Panel Seasonal Unit Root Test: Further Simulation Results and an Application to Unemployment Data

On the Forecasting Properties of the Alternative Leading Indicators for the German GDP: Recent Evidence

In this paper we perform a comparative study of the forecasting properties of the about 30 alternative leading indicators for Germany using the growth rates of German real GDP. In addition to them, we have constructed a diffusion index based on the principal component analysis and including 145 component series that reflect all the facets of German economy. We use the post-unification data which cover ...