Publikationen der Abteilung Unternehmen und Märkte

Regulation of Pharmaceutical Prices: Evidence from a Reference Price Reform in Denmark

Reference price systems for prescription drugs constitute widely adopted cost containment tools. Under these regimes, patients co-pay a fraction of the difference between a drug's pharmacy retail price and a reference price that is set by the government. Reference prices are either externally (based on drug prices in other countries) or internally (based on domestic drug prices) determined. We study ...

Economic Effects of Renewable Energy Expansion: A Model-Based Analysis for Germany

The increasing utilization of renewable energy sources (RES) is a major energy policy strategy in many countries worldwide. Germany is a forerunner in the deployment of RES and has ambitious goals for the future. The support and use of renewables affects the economy: It creates business opportunities in sectors producing renewable energy facilities, but comes with costs related to supporting its deployment. ...

An Empirical Assessment of the 2004 EU Merger Policy Reform

We evaluate the economic impact of the change in European merger legislation in 2004 and propose a general framework focusing on four different policy dimensions: predictability, decision errors, reversion of anti-competitive rents and deterrence. We find that after the reform, the predictability and the accuracy of decisions have improved. Yet, the policy shift away from prohibitions, which entail ...

Intangibles, Can They Explain the Dispersion in Return Rates?

It is proven that the observed return rates on capital have an upward bias if firms are producing with unobserved intangible capital. Using a comprehensive firm level database for Germany, this theoretical preposition is supported empirically. Furthermore, by making unobserved intangible capital observable, dispersion in return rates is dramatically reduced. The results support the assumption that ...

Competition Policy and Productivity Growth: An Empirical Assessment

This paper estimates the impact of competition policy on total factor productivity (TFP) growth for 22 industries in 12 OECD countries over 1995-2005. We find a positive and significanteffect of competition policy as measured by newly created indexes. We provide results based on instrumental variables estimators and heterogeneous effects to support the causal nature of the established link. The effect ...

Firm Size and Efficiency in the German Mechanical Engineering Industry

Research usually finds a positive size-efficiency relationship, but few studies focus on sectors dominated by small and medium-sized firms (SMEs). This paper fills this gap by analyzing this relationship in the German mechanical engineering industry sector, which is both successful and increasingly dominated by SMEs. The analysis, using a large and representative dataset, finds that small and large ...

Renewable Electric Energy Integration: Quantifying the Value of Design of Markets for International Transmission Capacity

Integrating large quantities of variable renewable electricity generation remains a political and operational challenge. One of the main obstacles in Europe to installing at least 200 GWs of power from variable renewable sources is how to deal with the insufficient network capacity and the congestion that will result from new flow patterns. We model the current methodology for controlling congestion ...

The Performance of German Water Utilities: A Semi-Parametric Analysis

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article, we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis to determine the utilities' Technical Efficiency (TE) scores based on cross-sectional data from ...

The Good Governance Indicators of the Millenium Challenge Account: How Many Dimensions Are Really Being Measured?

This paper assesses the validity of the perception-based governance indicators used by the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) for aid allocation decisions. By conducting Explanatory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of data from 1996 to 2009, we find that although the MCA purports to measure seven distinct dimensions of governance, only two discrete underlying dimensions, the perceived "participatory ...

Productivity and Financing of Regional Transport Infrastructure : Introduction