Diskussionspapiere

Can EU Conditionality Remedy Soft Budget Constraints in Transition Countries?

Soft budget constraints (SBCs) are a persistent feature of transition economies and have been blamed for i.a. a lack of fiscal consolidation and sluggish growth. EU eastward enlargement has - among other things - been conditioned on tackling SBCs. This paper analyzes such outside conditionality theoretically and empirically. First, modelling the SBC problem as a war of attrition between the applicant ...

National Climate Change Policy: Are the New German Energy Policy Initiatives in Conflict with WTO Law?

This paper addresses German energy policy instruments and their compatibility with WTO rules. Germany and the EU are forerunners in international climate change policy and driving forces behind the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. German energy policy includes approaches to foster electricity generation from renewable resources. Our major question is whether both the policy tools currently applied (standards, ...

E-Business in Service Industries: Usage Patterns and Service Gaps

Private Savings in Eastern European EU-Accession Countries: Evidence from a Dynamic Panel Data Model

After the collapse in early transition years, saving rates in Eastern European EUaccession countries have recovered strongly. Is private saving in these countries now driven by the same forces as in the EU? A GMM estimator is applied to analyze the determinants of private saving in both country groups. Main results are: saving rates are persistent; income growth increases saving, whereas public saving ...

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis

We use fourteen waves of the German panel data to ask whether individuals, after life and labour market events, return to some baseline wellbeing level. Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, significant lag and lead effects are present. Men are more affected by labour market events (unemployment and layoffs) and women by life events (marriage and divorce). ...

Market Structure and the Taxation of International Trade

The paper compares non-cooperative commodity taxation under the destination and origin principles under a variety of different assumptions about market structure. We consider a model of international duopoly with either quantity or price competition of firms and either segmented or integrated markets, and a monopolistic competition model with mobile firms. In each setting the international spillovers ...

On the Choice of Public Pensions when Income and Life Expectancy Are Correlated

The paper presents a model where public pensions are determined by majority voting. Voters differ by age and income. Moreover, life expectancy increases with income. Depending on the strength of the link between contributions and benefits, and the relationship between income and life expectancy, individually optimal tax rates may increase or decrease with income. If they decrease, high tax rates are ...

Nobody to Play with? The Implications of Leisure Coordination

We hypothesize that an individual's time use choices are contingent on the time use choices of others because the utility derived from leisure time often benefits from the presence of companionable others inside and outside the household. We develop a model of time use, and demonstrate that its consistency with the behaviour of British working couples in the 1990s. We present evidence of the synchronisation ...

Income Satisfaction Inequality and Its Causes

In this paper, the concept of Income Satisfaction Inequality is operationalized on the basis of individual responses to an Income Satisfaction question posed in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Income satisfaction is the subjective analogue of the objective income concept and includes objective income inequality as a special case. The paper introduces a method to decompose Income Satisfaction ...

Multinational Companies, Technology Spillovers, and Plant Survival

This paper examines the effect of the presence of multinational companies on plant survival in the host country. We postulate that multinational companies can impact positively on plant survival through technology spillovers. We study the nature of the effect of multinationals using a Cox proportional hazard model which we estimate using plant level data for Irish manufacturing industries. Our results ...

Price Cost Margins and Exporting Behaviour: Evidence from Firm Level Data

This paper examines whether exporting activity matters for firm's price cost margins. The recent literature on exporting and productivity shows that exporters on average are more efficient than nonexporters. If that is the case we may also expect them to have different mark-ups. We investigate this issue using company level data for UK manufacturing industries. The measurement of mark-ups follows the ...

The Measurement of Social Exclusion

This paper develops an axiomatic approach to the measurement of social exclusion. At the individual level, social exclusion is viewed in terms of deprivation of the person concerned with respect to different functionings in the society. At the aggregate level we treat social exclusion as a function of individual exclusions. The class of subgroup decomposable social exclusion measures using a set of ...

Competition and Innovation in a Technology Setting Software Duopoly

Recently the software industry has experienced fundamental changes in market structure through the entry of open source competitors, e.g. Linux's entry into the operating systems market. In a simple model we examine the effects of such a change in market structure from monopoly to duopoly under the assumption that software producers compete in technology rather than price or quantities. The model includes ...

Effekte einer Arbeitszeitverkürzung: empirische Evidenz für Frankreich

In diesem Papier wird an Hand eines Vektorfehlerkorrekturmodells (VECM) für den französischen Arbeitsmarkt untersucht, wie sich die dort Anfang 2000 eingeführte Verkürzung der Regelarbeitszeit in Verbindung mit Subventionen der Sozialversicherungsbeiträge ausgewirkt hat. Theoretisch sind die Effekte der Arbeitszeitverkürzung auf die Beschäftigung nicht eindeutig. Deshalb führen wir mit einem Arbeitsmarktmodell ...

Outsourcing, Foreign Ownership and Productivity: Evidence from UK Establishment Level Data

This paper presents an empirical analysis of "outsourcing" using establishment level data for UK manufacturing industries. We analyse an establishment's decision to outsource and the subsequent effects of outsourcing on the establishment's productivity. We compare outsourcing in domestic with foreign-owned establishments. Our empirical results suggest that high wages are positively related to outsourcing, ...

Provision of Social Goods and Soft Budget Constraints

Firms in socialist and transitional economies are often obliged to provide a social good in addition to a private good, which makes it difficult for a government to commit not to bail out the firm once it is in financial trouble. This creates a soft budget constraint syndrome which causes the firm to underinvest ex ante in order to extract state subsidy and thereby reduces dynamic efficiency. In this ...

Innovation Clusters: Combining Physical and Virtual Links

Innovation is increasingly seen as a collective action which involves many different actors operating in a cluster context. These clusters are usually conceived as local agglomerations. In this paper it will be argued that they are an important tool to study innovation, but the globalisation of companies and markets and the specific requirements of innovation processes require the expansion of cluster ...

Land Access, Tenure and Investment in Post-War Northern Mozambique

The relationship between land investment and tenure security is usually tested in land scarce but peaceful areas. This article examines instead the effects of land abundance and war for investment and tenure security. The paper demonstrates that war enhances land abundance. This implies that farm size for the analysis of land investment and tenure security. The paper formally tests for land abundance ...

Corruption, Growth, and the Environment: A Cross-Country Analysis

The relationship between per capita income and a number of pollution indicators has been found to display an inverted U-shaped or downward-sloping pattern. Corruption may affect this relationship in two distinct ways: by raising pollution at given income levels (direct effect) and by reducing per capita income (indirect effect). The total effect is ambiguous a priori. Using cross section data for several ...

Environment and Happiness: Valuation of Air Pollution in Ten European Countries

This paper uses a set of panel data from happiness surveys, jointly with data on per capita income and pollution, to examine how self-reported well-being varies with prosperity and environmental conditions. This approach permits to show that citizens care about prosperity and the environment, and to calculate the trade-off people are willing to make between them. The paper finds that air pollution ...