This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show that uncertainty reflects change: Planning incorporates higher subjective uncertainty about future sales growth when the firm has just experienced unusual growth, and more so if...

The theory of optimal currency areas states that a currency union may succeed if the participating countries have complementary industry structures. If this is not the case a currency union does not, inevitably, have to fail because market forces will induce adjustments of the industry...

How much retirement income is needed in order to maintain oneś living standard at old age? As it is difficult to find a firm basis for an empirical treatment of this question, we employ a novel approach to assessing an adequate replacement rate vis-à-vis income in the pre-retirement period. We...

Using firm-level survey data for the West German manufacturing sector, this paper revisits the technology-driven business cycle hypothesis for the case of aggregate investment. We construct a survey-based measure of technology shocks to gauge their contribution to short-run investment...

Because of endogeneity problems very few studies have been able to identify the incidence of corporate taxes on wages. We circumvent these problems by using an 11-year panel of data on 11,441 German municipalities' tax rates, 8 percent of which change each year, linked to administrative matched...

When a key responsibility of a manager is to allocate more or less attractive tasks to subordinates, these subordinates have an incentive to work hard and demonstrate their talents. As a new manager is less well acquainted with these talents this incentive mechanism is reinvigorated after a...