Micro-econometric intra-cohort profitability analyses of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension contributions are rare. We use representative employment histories of a birth cohort of German PAYG pension insurants retiring in year 2005 to econometrically examine the determinants of the profitability of...

Despite the ongoing appetite of financial investors for merchant investments into the European electricity network, the EC is reluctant to approve such undertakings, thus implicitly favoring regulated investments. Based on a two-level model, we analyze the impact of profit-maximizing merchant...

Using representative survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for 2006, we show that the magnitude of such health inequality measures as the concentration index (CI) depends crucially on the underlying health measure. The highest degree of inequality is found when...

This documentation describes the data preparation of the new consumption module in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and introduces the content and structure of the generated dataset "hconsum." In 2010, the SOEP for the first time included a detailed consumption module in the...

We propose a novel method to find Nash equilibria in games with binary decision variables by including compensation payments and incentive-compatibility constraints from non-cooperative game theory directly into an optimization framework in lieu of using first order conditions of a...

Before 2004 South Africa was the dominant steam coal exporter to the European market. However a new market situation with rising global demand and prices makes room for a new entrant: Russia. The hypothesis investigated in this paper is that the three incumbent dominant firms located in South...

We consider a model of an information network where nodes can fail and transmission of information is costly. The formation of paths in such networks is modeled as the Nash equilibrium of an N player routing game. The task of obtaining this equilibrium is shown to be NP-Hard. We derive...

In a framework with an upstream monopoly and a downstream duopoly, we analyze the impact of convex costs on the downstream level. In constrast to the case of constant marginal costs, vertical integration does not imply complete market foreclosure. While the nonintegrated downstream ¯rm receives...

This paper investigates the strategic value of the managerial incentive scheme in affecting firms' incentive in R&D investment and their product market activities. Firstly, we find that in Cournot-quantity competition, owners strategically assign a non-profitmaximization objective to their...

This paper addresses the existence of Nash equilibria in one-way flow or directed network 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...