In the next years several power plants throughout Europe have to be replaced and the questions is whether to build coal fired power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS). In a study for the city of Kiel in northern Germany only a 800 MW coal power plant reaches a required minimum...

Locational competition means that the immobile factors of production in a country compete for internationally mobile capital and technology. Locational competition influences the restraint set of national players and redefines their opportunity costs. Thus, the bargaining position of the trade...

The paper analyzes how the next financial crisis can be prevented and which role the IMF should play. The paper distinguishes between the improvement of existing instruments and solving the moral hazard problem. Both issues are interrelated. The size of operation of the IMF creates a moral...

Globalization opens new opportunities also for small and medium sized enterprises (SME). However, empirical information on SMEs' international activities is still fragmented. The paper adds another piece of evidence in analyzing how Berlin SMEs are co-operating with partners in transition...

This paper documents the dynamic properties of the current account, trade balance and international capital flows. For this purpose, two approaches are taken: probit and a nonparametric estimation. The probabilistic approach shows that, in general, deficits and net inflows tend to be more...

With twelve new members the decision making in the European Union via intergovernmental cooperation will become ineffective. In order to avoid a Stagno-Europe the EU has a choice: Either it looks for the very essentials in the common institutional frame or the member states agree in ceding...

This paper documents a puzzling fact, namely that there is a significant negative relation between employment protection legislation and the usage of the intensive margin of labor market adjustments. We then make use of a Real Business Cycle model and introduce search and matching frictions as...