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Debating the Shortage of Skilled Workers

It seems to be widely acknowledged that Germany will face a shortage of skilled workers within no more than a few years. However, the extent of the current and future skilled worker shortage is still up for debate among experts. The disagreement begins with the choice of adequate scarcity indicators and model assumptions in long-run projections.

Educational Choice against All the Odds - Personality Traits as a Tool Kit?

Students from a non-academic background have a significant lower probability of receiving tertiary education than their peers from an academic background. This is true even in an educational system where higher education is free of charge and financial constraints play a rather small role. Many theoretical and empirical articles describe reasons for this inequality. While primary effects, as less...

Spite - another aspect of competition?

Abstract: While numerous experiments demonstrate how pro-sociality can influence economic decision-making, evidence on explicitly anti-social economic behavior has thus far been limited. In this paper we investigate the importance of spite in experimental rent-seeking contests. Our social preference elicitations reveal that subjects'investments are driven by spite, not fairness or reciprocity.

The Battle about Electricity: Myths, Power and Monopolies

The 2nd Berlin IO Day

The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop sponsored by Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT, WZB, Humboldt University Berlin, and Technical University Berlin which takes place twice a year, in the Fall and in the Spring. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the heart of Berlin, one of Europe's most vibrant...

Growing out of the Crisis: Hidden Assets to Greece's Transition to an Innovation Economy

Greece's currently planned institutional reforms will help to get the country going with limited economic growth. With an economy based primarily on tourism, trade, and agriculture, Greece lacks an established competitive industry and an innovation-friendly environment, resulting in a low export ratio given the small size of the country and its long-time EU-membership. Instead, Greece exports only ...

Essays on the Migration of Heterogeneous Individuals: Dissertation

This dissertation presents theoretical and empirical analyses in order to provide some new answers to three questions of migration research: What determines migration? Who migrates? How does migration impact on the sending countries? A common feature of the presented analyses is that they consider specific heterogeneities of migrants and non-migrants. The dissertation contains seven analytical chapters ...

The Global Crisis and Equity Market Contagion

We analyze the transmission of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 to 415 country-industry equity portfolios. We use a factor model to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings and residual correlations as indicative of contagion. While we find evidence of contagion from the U.S. and the global financial sector, the effects are small. By contrast, there has been substantial ...

Structural Vector Autoregressive Analysis in a Data Rich Environment: A Survey

Large panels of variables are used by policy makers in deciding on policy actions. Therefore it is desirable to include large information sets in models for economic analysis. In this survey methods are reviewed for accounting for the information in large sets of variables in vector autoregressive (VAR) models. This can be done by aggregating the variables or by reducing the parameter space to a manageable ...

Business Cycles, Unemployment and Entrepreneurial Entry: Evidence from Germany

We investigate whether people are more willing to become self-employed during boom periods or during recessions and to what extent business cycles or unemployment levels influence entries into entrepreneurship. Our analysis for Germany reveals that there is a positive relationship between unemployment rates and start-up activities. Moreover, new business formation is higher during recessions than in ...