Search Publications

The Economics of Migrant Ethnicity

A Cartel Analysis of the German Labor Institutions and Its Implications for Labor Market Reform

This paper offers a cartel explanation for the stability of German collective bargaining institutions. We show that a dense net of legal safeguards has been woven around the wage-setting cartel. These measures make deviation by cartel insiders less attractive and simultaneously erect entry barriers for alternative unions. As we argue, many recent labor policy measures, which make wages more flexible, ...

Ethnic Self-Identification of First-Generation Immigrants

This paper uses the concept of ethnic self-identification of immigrants in a two-dimensional framework. It acknowledges that attachments to both the country of origin and the host country are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There are three possible paths of adjustment from separation at entry, namely the transitions to assimilation, integration, and marginalization. We analyze the determinants ...

Manufacturing Exports, Mining Exports and Growth: Cointegration and Causality Analysis for Chile (1960 -2001)

This study examines the export-led growth hypothesis using annual time series data from Chile in a production function framework. It addresses the problem of specification bias under which previous studies have suffered, and focuses on the impact of manufactured and mining exports on productivity growth. In order to investigate if and how manufactured and mining exports affect economic growth via increases ...

Long-Run Money Demand in the New EU Member States with Exchange Rate Effects

Within a wide range of other economic and financial indicators, money is highly relevant to the two-pillar monetary strategy of the European Central Bank for detecting risks to price stability over the medium term. Money demand models are a natural benchmark for assessing monetary developments. The existence of a well-specified and stable relation between money and prices can be perceived as a prerequisite ...

Budget Processes: Theory and Experimental Evidence

This paper studies budget processes, both theoretically and experimentally. We compare the outcomes of bottom-up and top-down budget processes. It is often presumed that a top-down budget process leads to a smaller overall budget than a bottom-up budget process. Ferejohn and Krehbiel [Ferejohn, J., Krehbiel, K., 1987. The budget process and the sizeof the budget, Amer. J. Polit. Sci. 31, 296-320] showed ...

Competition with Congestible Networks

We analyse competition between two network providers when the quality of each network depends negatively on the number of customers connected to that network. With respect to price competition we provide a sufficient condition for the existence of a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Comparative statics show that as the congestion effect gets stronger quantities will decrease and prices increase, ...

Pets and Human Health in Germany and Australia: National Longitudinal Results

The German and Australian longitudinal surveys analysed here are the first national representative surveys to show that (1) people who continuously own a pet are the healthiest group and (2) people who cease to have a pet or never had one are less healthy. Most previous studies which have claimed that pets confer health benefits were cross-sectional. So they were open to the objection that owners may ...

A Schumpeter-inspired Approach to the Construction of R&D Capital Stock

A new method for constructing R&D capital stocks is proposed and tested. Following Schumpeter, the development of R&D capital stocks is modelled as a process of creative destruction. Newly generated knowledge is assumed not only to add to the existing R&D capital stocks but also, by displacing old knowledge, to destroy part of that capital. This is in stark contrast to the perpetual inventory method, ...

Fiscal Competition and the Composition of Public Spending: Theory and Evidence

We consider fiscal competition between jurisdictions. Capital taxes are used to finance a public input and two public goods: one that benefits mobile skilled workers and one that benefits immobile unskilled workers. We derive the jurisdictions' reaction functions for different spending categories. We then estimate these reaction functions using data from German communities. Thereby we explicitly allow ...