Die jüngere Vergangenheit zeugt von turbulenten Entwicklungen an den deutschen Aktienbörsen. Von einer aufkeimenden Aktienkultur, die ihr Vorbild in den USA sah, über Schwindel erregende Kursbewegungen, plötzlichen Reichtum aufgrund von hohen Aktienkursen, Insolvenzen, Kursbetrügereien bis...

Despite the relatively extensive research on pay levels and the consequences of income disparities, little is known about which reference groups people choose for comparative evaluation of personal income and why different selection patterns emerge. The aim of this paper is to dig deeper for...

This paper presents two new tools for the identification of faking interviewers in surveys. One method is based on Benford's Law, and the other exploits the empirical observation that fakers most often produce answers with less variability than could be expected from the whole survey. We focus...

We evaluate the effect of the federal students' financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990....

This paper analyzes the distribution of technical efficiency within manufacturing industries. Using a representative sample of 35,000 firms in 255 industries of the German cost structure census, technical efficiencies are estimated by applying a deterministic frontier production function with...