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Refereed essays Web of Science
Turning unemployment into self-employment has become a major focus of German active labour market policy (ALMP) in recent years. If effective, this would not only reduce Germany's persistently high unemployment rate, but also increase its notoriously low self-employment rate. Empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such programmes is scarce. We evaluate the effectiveness of two start-up programmes ...
In:
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics
70 (2008), 3, S. 347-373
| Hans J. Baumgartner, Marco Caliendo
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Refereed essays Web of Science
We analyze the effects of three different proposals to introduce a family tax-splitting system in Germany. The empirical analysis is based on a behavioral microsimulation model, which integrates an empirical household labor-supply model into a detailed tax-benefit model. Our results show that, under each reform, the lion's share of the reduction in taxes would accrue to families in the upper part of ...
In:
Finanzarchiv
64 (2008), 1, S. 115-142
| Viktor Steiner, Katharina Wrohlich
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Germany is known to have one of the lowest fertility rates among Western European countries and also relatively low employment rates of mothers with young children. Although these trends have been observed during the last decades, the German public has only recently begun discussing these issues. In order to reverse these trends, the German government recently passed a reform of the parental leave ...
In:
Population Research and Policy Review
27 (2008), 5, S. 575-591
| C. Katharina Spieß, Katharina Wrohlich
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Refereed essays Web of Science
We use nonparametric production-frontier methods to decompose the growth of labor productivity of Chinese provinces in the post-reform period. These techniques, combined with kernel density estimates, allow us to decompose the shift in the distribution of labor productivity without the need for many assumptions common in the empirical growth literature. We find that (1) the distribution of output per ...
In:
Journal of Macroeconomics
29 (2007), 3, S. 569-594
| Daniel J. Henderson, Kiril Tochkov, Oleg Badunenko
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Competition is claimed to be beneficial in development projects promoting micro and small enterprise finance although there are still doubts as to whether these loans can be developed into a profitable business. Our research sheds new light on the question of how many MSE banking units should optimally be created and supported in a certain region. We employ a unique data set from the European Bank ...
In:
Applied Economics
42 (2010), 6, S.701-716
| Dorothea Schäfer, Boriss Siliverstovs, Eva Terberger
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This study examines the relation between corporate governance practices measured by the Transparency Disclosure Index (TDI) and dividend payouts in Poland. Our empirical approach lies in constructing measures of the quality of the corporate governance in 110 non-financial companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange between 1998 and 2004.We find evidence that an increase in the TDI or its sub-indices ...
In:
Post-Communist Economies
20 (2008), 2, S. 203-218
| Oskar Kowalewski, Ivan Stetsyuk, Oleksandr Talavera
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Refereed essays Web of Science
We investigate the effects of regional and industrywide foreign presence and foreign direct investment (FDI) on the export volumes of Ukrainian manufacturing firms using unpublished panel data from 1996-2000. Foreign presence through FDI may have negative competition effects on domestic firms' performance; at the same time, domestic firms' productivity may be increased by technology transfer or training ...
In:
Emerging Markets, Finance & Trade
44 (2008), 5, S. 82-98
| Stefan Lutz, Oleksandr Talavera, Sang-Min Park
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms' short-term leverage and macroeconomic and idiosyncratic sources of uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts a negative relationship between uncertainty and optimal levels of borrowing. This proposition is tested using a panel of nonfinancial U.S. firms drawn from ...
In:
Economic Inquiry
47 (2009), 2, S. 216-225
| Christopher F. Baum, Andreas Stephan, Oleksandr Talavera
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of non-financial firms' liquid assets and uncertainty. We develop a partial equilibrium model of precautionary demand for liquid assets showing that firms alter their liquidity ratio in response to changes in either macroeconomic or idiosyneratic uncertainty. We test this hypothesis using a panel of non-financial US firms drawn from the COMPUSTAT ...
In:
Economic Modelling
25 (2008), 5, S. 833-849
| Christopher F. Baum, Mustafa Caglayan, Andreas Stephan, Oleksandr Talavera
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Refereed essays Web of Science
We investigate the impact of measures of uncertainty on firms' capital investment behavior using a panel of U.S. firms. Increases in firm-specific and CAPM-based measures have a significant negative effect on investment spending, while market-based uncertainty has a positive impact
In:
Economics Letters
98 (2008), 3, S. 282-287
| Christopher F. Baum, Mustafa Caglayan, Oleksandr Talavera
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Refereed essays Web of Science
During the two decades between 1980 and 2000, there was no clear overall trend of economic convergence or divergence among West German regions. However, a number of regions that were already rich - generally large agglomerations - had succeeded in further distancing themselves from the rest. At the same time, knowledge-intensive services are identified as industries whose geographical concentration ...
In:
Regional Studies
42 (2008), 3, S. 413-421
| Kurt Geppert, Martin Gornig, Axel Werwatz
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Refereed essays Web of Science
In Eastern Germany, wage differentiation between firms has clearly grown, parallel to individual wage differentials. Nevertheless, the wage spread between firms is still much less than in Western Germany. In this paper, a non-parametric decomposition is used to analyze the difference between the wages spread in the two parts of Germany. Only part of the difference can be explained by different economic ...
In:
Economics of Transition
16 (2008), 2, S. 273-292
| Bernd Görzig, Martin Gornig, Axel Werwatz
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Subjective well-being (SWB) has two components: affective well-being (AWB) and cognitive well-being (CWB). The present study demonstrated that AWB and CWB have are influenced by different factors in a nationally representative sample in Germany (N = 1053). Neuroticism was a stronger predictor of AWB than CWB. Unemployment and regional differences between the East and West of Germany were stronger predictors ...
In:
Social Indicators Research
89 (2008), 1, S. 41-60
| Ulrich Schimmack, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This study used a nationally representative sample of young people in Germany from the German Socio-Economic Panel to examine how demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the young persons and their parents, personality traits of the young persons, quality and quantity of relationships, the parent's level of life satisfaction, and other measures of satisfaction for the young person are related ...
In:
Social Indicators Research
87 (2008), 1, S. 83-109
| Eileen Trzcinski, Elke Holst
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Refereed essays Web of Science
While several European and national studies have dealt with the acceptability of road pricing schemes for passenger transport, only sparse research is available on this issue for freight transport. Against this background, the paper deals with the acceptability of the German road user-charging scheme for heavy goods vehicles by the road haulage industry. It presents the findings of an internet-based ...
In:
Transport Reviews
28 (2008), 2, S. 141-158
| Heike Link
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Using cointegration techniques, we find that in the US, outward FDI has positive long-run effects on domestic investment. In Germany, this complementary relationship exists only in the short run. In the long run, outward FDI substitutes for German domestic investment.
In:
Economics Letters
99 (2008), 1, S. 139-143
| Dierk Herzer, Mechthild Schrooten
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Recent rounds of GATT and later WTO have advocated widespread tariffication, meaning that existing non-tariff barriers be converted into import equivalent tariffs. From an economic point of view, the effects of such tariffication are not entirely clear. The paper presents a trade model with monopolistic competition to examine the welfare effects of tariffication. The ranking of pre- and post-tariffication ...
In:
Open Economies Review
18 (2007), 4, S. 479-498
| Jan G. Joergensen, Philipp J. H. Schröder
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper presents a model of the European natural gas supply, GASMOD, which is structured as a two-stage-game of successive natural gas exports to Europe (upstream market) and wholesale trade within Europe (downstream market) and which explicitly includes infrastructure capacities. We compare three possible market scenarios: Cournot competition in both markets, perfect competition in both markets, ...
In:
Energy Economics
30 (2008), 3, S. 766-788
| Franziska Holz, Christian von Hirschhausen, Claudia Kemfert
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This article questions the perceived wisdom that migrants are more risk-loving than the native population. We employ a new large German survey of direct individual risk measures to find that first-generation migrants have lower risk attitudes than natives, which only equalize in the second generation.
In:
Applied Economics Letters
16 (2009), 15, S. 1581-1586
| Holger Bonin, Amelie Constant, Konstantinos Tatsiramos, Klaus F. Zimmermann
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Refereed essays Web of Science
The premium rates paid for statutory health insurance in Germany play a key role in the competition among health care funds. With the most recent health care reform (GKV-Wettbewerbsstärkungsgesetz GKV-WSG), a range of new products have been introduced that could erode the advantageous selling proposition of the premium rates. In addition to the pure monetary incentive to change health insurance provider, ...
In:
Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik
227 (2007), 5/6, S. 429-450
| Hanfried H. Andersen, Markus M. Grabka, Johannes Schwarze