External refereed essays

Efficiency Analysis of East European Electricity Distribution in Transition: Legacy of the Past?

This paper provides a cross-country efficiency analysis of electricity distribution companies in the East European transition countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. We use common nonparametric efficiency measurement such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Free Disposal Hull (FDH) under different assumptions and apply recent developments of statistical inference in nonparametric ...

Long-Term Contracts and Asset Specificity Revisited: An Empirical Analysis of Producer-Importer Relations in the Natural Gas Industry

This paper discusses long-term contracts as a particular organizational form situated somewhere between full vertical integration and short-term, market-based trading in the natural gas industry. We focus on the determinants of the duration of contracts under changing technical, economic, and institutional conditions. Using 311 long-term contracts we find that duration decreases as international market ...

Sticky Information Phillips Curves: European Evidence

We estimate the Sticky Information Phillips Curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, while in Italy, about once each 6 months.

Shocking! Do Forecasters Share a Common Belief?

We evaluate the interaction of inflation and growth forecast errors based on 17 distinct forecasts for the German economy for the period from 1970 to 2004. The forecasts were produced by 14 institutions. Our findings show that, in general, the forecasters did not share a common belief about the shocks driving the economy at the time at which they made their forecasts. We use a standard textbook aggregate-demand/aggregate-supply ...

Allocative Efficiency Measurement Revisited: Do We Really Need Input Prices?

The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency exploits input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. This paper proves allocative efficiency can be measured as a profit-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit-technical efficiency space. This new approach does not require information on input prices. To validate the new approach, we perform a Monte-Carlo experiment providing ...

Mobile Phone Termination Charges with Asymmetric Regulation

We model competition between two unregulated mobile phone companies with price-elastic demand and less than full market coverage. We also assume that there is a regulated full-coverage fixed network. In order to induce stronger competition, mobile companies could have an incentive to raise their reciprocal mobile-to-mobile access charges above the marginal costs of termination. Stronger competition ...

A Flexible Global Warming Index for Use in an Integrated Approach to Climate Change Assessment

Global Warming Potential (GWP) is an index used to measure the cumulative radiative forcing of a tonne of greenhouse house gas (GHG) relative to that of a "reference" gas (CO2). Under the Kyoto Protocol, GWP can be used as a fixed index to govern the trade-off between different GHGs in a multi-gas approach to GHGs abatement. The use of fixed GWPs has been criticized for not being very cost effective ...

"Marginal Employment": Stepping Stone or Dead End? Evaluating the German Experience

Inducing Imperfect Recall in the Lab

Our paper provides a procedure to induce imperfect recall in the laboratory, even though in the past it has been claimed that this is difficult to achieve in a controlled environment. To accomplish this task we rely on a technique called divided attention to impair subject recollection of previous choices in a version of the absent-minded driver game of Piccione and Rubinstein [Piccione, M., Rubinstein, ...

Existence of Nash Networks in One-Way Flow Models

This paper addresses the existence of Nash equilibria in one-way flow models in a number of different settings. In these models players form costly links with other players and obtain resources from them through the directed path connecting them. We find that heterogeneity in the costs of establishing links plays a crucial role for the existence of Nash networks. The paper also provides conditions ...

Competition Policy in a Concentrated and Globalized Retail Industry

Regional Disparities in the European Union: Convergence and Agglomeration

Economic disparities between the regions of the European Union are of constant concern both for policy and economic research. In this paper, we examine whether there are overlapping trends of regional development in the EU: overall convergence, on the one hand, and persistent or even increasing spatial concentration (agglomeration), on the other. Kernel density estimation, Markov chain analysis and ...

An Economic Analysis of China's Credit Information Monopoly

The Chinese government is building the largest public credit information database on earth. The Credit Registry Center of the People's Bank of China registers more than 600 million consumers of which 110 million have a credit relationship with a financial institution. The Center is a public utility monopoly which collects information from banks and non-bank institutions - a unique approach developed ...

Reforming the German Local Business Tax: Lessons from an International Comparison and a Microsimulation Analysis

The local business tax as the main revenue source of local governments in Germany has been under extensive debate for decades. Proposals for reform range from a pure profit tax to an origin-based value-added tax. Local business taxation systems in OECD countries actually represent the whole spectrum between these two extremes. We use a newly developed microsimulation model for the business sector in ...

Only the Congruent Survive: Personality Similarities in Couples

Numerous studies proved that people tend to select partners that are similar to them with regard to many social and psychological variables. Even though this effect was also found for personality, results are inconsistent and reveal convergence coefficients ranging from negative over zero- to positive correlations. The present study thus aims to investigate personality congruence between spouses and ...

Early Childhood Education and Care in Germany: The Status Quo and Reform Proposals

The Dynamics of European Inflation Expectations

We investigate the relevance of Carroll's sticky information model of inflation expectations for four major European economies (France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom). In contrast to the most rational expectation models, households in the sticky information environment update their expectations occasionally rather than instantaneously due to the costs of acquiring and processing information. ...

Städtebaulicher Investitions- und Förderbedarf 2007 bis 2013 in Deutschland

Redistributive Impacts of Government and Private Household Activities: Trends in Equivalized Household Net Incomes and Intra-household Earnings in Germany, 1985-2005

A Complementarity Model for the European Natural Gas Market

In this paper, we present a detailed and comprehensive complementarity model for computing market equilibrium values in the European natural gas system. Market players include producers and their marketing arms which we call "traders", pipeline and storage operators, marketers, LNG liquefiers, regasifiers, tankers, and three end-use consumption sectors. The economic behavior of producers, traders, ...