In the German wastewater sector, innovations are often regarded to be the key to both more efficient service provision and reduction of environmental and health-related problems. However, it is unclear what factors foster these innovations. One possible candidate factor is increased competition...

This paper analyses price elasticities in the Austrian market for mobile telecommunications services using data on firm specific tariffs in the period between January 1998 and March 2002. Dynamic panel data regressions are used to estimate short-run and long-run demand elasticities for business...

Traditional specifications of export equations incorporate foreign demand as a demand pull factor and the real exchange rate as a relative price variable. However, such standard export equations have failed to explain the export performance of euro area countries during the crisis period. In...

Relations between economic variables are often characterized by a situation where initial conditions and the past realizations of economic variables matter. I.e. past (transient) exogenous disturbances and past states of the economic system do have an influence on the current economic relations....

A non-linear model is applied where suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the exchange rate go beyond a zone of inaction. We call the latter a “play” area – analogous to mechanical play and implement an algorithm describing path-dependent play-hysteresis into a regression...

This paper deals with the impact of the $/Euro exchange rate on German exports in the period from 1995Q1 to 2008Q4. Our main aim is to identify "pain thresholds" for German exporters. We rely on a non-linear model according to which suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the EXR...

This analysis shows that multivariate generalizations to the classical Heckman (1976 and 1979) two-step estimator that account for cross-equation correlation and use the inverse Mills ratio as a correction-term are consistent only if certain restrictions apply to the true error-covariance...

In this paper, we estimate a small New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model for Germany for the period from 1975 to 1998 and use it to identify the structural shocks, which have driven the business cycle. For this purpose we apply indirect inference methods, that is we...

The existing literature on attitudes towards immigration has not accounted for the potential effect of unobservable home education on attitude formation. Yet, factors such as parents’ knowledge, their morals, and their weltanschauung are likely to influence the attitudes of the next...

In addition to efficiency standards and consumer information, car-related taxes constitute one of three pillars of the European Commission’s strategy to reduce CO2 emissions from passenger cars.A longstanding question concerns the effectiveness of such taxes in determining the car-purchasing...