Using 1985-1999 data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) to analyze wages we confirm the hypothesis that existing computer wage premiums are determined by individual ability or other unobserved individual characteristics rather than by productivity effects. While a rather large...

This paper produces first econometric estimates for Germany of the contemporanous wage gap associated with Temporary Help Service (THS) employment, as well as the long-term effects of THS work on the future earnings of workers. In addition, we present evidence showing that average male real...

Amid lively debate on the consequences of temporary employment, the paper examines the wages and transitions of temporary employees in Germany using socio-economic panel data from the late 1990s. Compared to simple OLS estimates, using a fixed effects model decreases wage differentials between...

This paper investigates the effect of displacement on reemployment wages of socially insured West German workers who became unemployed in 1986. Because detailed information on the cause of job loss is unavailable, displacement status is imputed using a probit estimated on the German...

The estimates of the structural parameters of a job separations model derived from the theory of on-the-job search are reported in this papers. Given that each employer pays the same wage to all observably equivalent workers and that wage dispersion across employers exists in the sense that...

Germany and the United States are generally seen as the two competing systems of corporate governance. In search for a comparative welfare analysis of the financial systems, we are interested in (i) the aggregate value-added of corporate investments in the two countries and in (ii) the...

We reexamine the expectations theory of the term structure focusing on the question how monetary policy actions indicated by changes in the very short rate affect long-term interest rates. Our main point is that the expectations hypothesis implies that very long rates should only react to...

Alternative modeling strategies for specifying subset VAR models are considered. It is shown that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to sequentially eliminating lags that lead to the largest improvement in a prespecified model selection criterion. A...

In this article we model the log of the U.S. and the U.K. real oil prices in terms of fractionally integrated processes with a mean shift. We use different versions of the tests of Robinson (1994), which have standard null and local limit distributions. The results indicate that if we model the...

A new kind of mixture autoregressive model with GARCH errors is introduced and applied to the U.S. short-term interest rate. According to the diagnostic tests developed in the paper and further informal checks the model is capable of capturing both of the typical characteristics of the...