Sub-Saharan Africa ranks among the top regions in terms of growth in the number of mobile phone users. The success of mobile telephony is attributed to the opening of markets for private players and lenient regulatory policy. However, markets may be increasingly saturated and new regulations...

In this paper institutions are understood as rules of individual behavior. The focus is on the impacts of institutions on labor market decisions. Particular points are (1) the methods (or rules) that model individual decisions in neoclassical economics (rational choice approach), (2) implicit...

This paper analyzes the early research performance of PhD graduates in labor economics, addressing the following questions: Are there major productivity differences between graduates from American and European institutions? If so, how relevant is the quality of the training received (i.e....

Vor zehn Jahren hat der deutsche Wissenschaftsrat mit seiner Forderung nach einer Verstärkung der akademischen Forschungsleistungen an den deutschen Wirtschaftsforschungsinstituten einen Regimewechsel eingeleitet. Der Anstoß wurde von der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft, der Dachgesellschaft der...

Das Papier zeigt, dass die seit Jahrzehnten andauernde Klagen wissenschaftlich tätiger Ökonomen,dass Öffentlichkeit und Politik nicht genug auf Ergebnisse der ökonomischen Forschung hören,zumindest für Deutschland im Quervergleich zu anderen Wissenschaften in Bezug auf das...

Integrated assessment models lack a microeconomic foundation in modelling environmental damages to the economy. To overcome this, damage coefficients are incorporated in standard microeconomic models. Firms and consumers take both damages and prices as given. Demand, supply, profit and...

We analyse how money as a store of value affects the decisions of a representative household under diversifiable and non-diversifiable risks given that the central bank successfully stabilizes the rate of inflation at a low level. Assuming exponential utility allows us to derive an explicit...

Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

We study political determinants of municipality amalgamations during a boundary reform in the German state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities from 1,489 to 421. The analysis is conducted using data on the political decision makers as well as fiscal and socio-economic...

Do incumbents in an election have an advantage, and if so, are these advantages heterogeneous across parties or government and opposition? We first present a theoretical discussion on the possible heterogeneity of incumbency effects in a pure two-party system. Then, we estimate the incumbency...