Why do some economic systems depend on bank financing while others rely on capital markets and bond financing? We propose a political economy model in which elites favor a bank-based system, which increases their rents due to reduced competition. If suffrage is restricted to the elite, this will...

In this paper, we study how wage mobility in the low-wage sector has changed in Western Germany between 1984 and 2004. Using German individual register data, we document a clear upward trend in the persistence of low-wage employment for both men and women. To explore whether the observed rise in...

We examine patterns of earnings volatility for male employees who are subject to statutory social security contributions in West Germany over the period 1986 - 2005. For this purpose, we analyse individual records covering highly reliable earnings biographies provided by the German Social...

Reference prices constitute a main determinant of patient health care reimbursement in many countries. We study the effects of a change from an "external" (based on a basket of prices in other countries) to an "internal" (based on comparable domestic products) reference price system. We find...

We investigate the accuracy of ex ante assessments of vulnerability to poverty using cross-sectional data and panel data. We use long-term panel data from Germany and apply different regression models, based on household covariates and previous-year equivalence income, to classify a household as...

To explore single mothers labor market participation we analyze specific circumstances and dynamics in their life courses. We focus on the question which individual and institutional factors determine both professional advancement and professional descent. Due to dynamics in women s life course...

While the limiting null distributions of cointegration tests are invariant to a certain amount of conditional heteroskedasticity as long as global homoskedasticity conditions are fulfilled, they are certainly affected when the innovations exhibit time-varying volatility. Worse yet, distortions...

This paper contributes to the literature providing indirect evidence for profit shifting within multinational companies. In contrast to the previous studies we account for the tax responsiveness of the capital stock and analyse the impact of corporate taxes on both pre- and post-tax...

This paper sheds new light on the impact of information risk and market stress on herding of institutional traders from both, a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Using numerical simulations of a herd model, we show that buy and sell herding intensity should increase with information...