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...

Mit der Lieferung der SOEP-Erhebungsdaten 2006 stehen erstmals im SOEP Daten eines verlässlichen Gesundheitsmaßes zur Verfügung, das nicht auf selbstberichteten Angaben beruht. Die in dem Bericht dokumentierten Daten werden in einem speziell aufbereiteten Datenfile im Rahmen eines gültigen...

Innovation is at the basis of economic development and as such, it is instrumental for developing countries. We review the literature on innovation from the perspectives of four select branches of economics to build a conceptual framework of innovation applicable to developing countries. The...

Using life satisfaction as a direct measure of individual utility has become popular in the empirical economic literature. In this context, it is crucial to know what circumstances or changes the measure is sensitive to. Is life satisfaction a volatile concept that is affected by minor changes...

This paper develops a two-country DSGE model for a monetary union in which each country is populated by two types of households - savers and borrowers - and two types of production sectors - a consumption goods sector and a housing sector. Households trade nominal private debt in equilibrium,...

This paper argues that counter-cyclical liquidity hoarding by financial intermediaries may strongly amplify business cycles. It develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which banks operate subject to financial frictions and idiosyncratic funding liquidity risk in their...

During the last years, gravity equations have leapt from the trade literature over into the literature on financial markets. Martin and Rey (2004) were the first to provide a theoretical model for cross-border asset trade, yielding a structural gravity equation that could be tested empirically....

Government interventions into the financial system in the form of bail out operations or liquidity assistance are often justified with the systemic importance of large banks for the real economy. In this paper, we test whether idiosyncratic shocks to loan growth at large banks have effects on...

This paper investigates to what extent the R&D behavior of manufacturing companies was influenced by the 2008/09 crisis. Based on a broad official data set for German manufacturing companies, only a few companies that engaged in R&D during 2008 gave it up in the following year. Some companies...

We explore the impact of large banks and of financial openness for aggregate growth. Large banks matter because of granular effects: if markets are very concentrated in terms of the size distribution of banks, idiosyncratic shocks at the bank-level do not cancel out in the aggregate but can...