We analyze the pass-through of cost changes to retail tariffs in the German electricity market over the 2007 to 2014 period. We find an average pass-through rate of around 60%, which significantly varies with demand factors: while the pass-through rate to baseline tariffs, where firms have...

The current economic crisis requires fast information to predict economic behavior early, which is difficult at times of structural changes. This paper suggests an innovative new method of using data on internet activity for that purpose. It demonstrates strong correlations between keyword...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 115 indicators to predict the housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. Above all, we are interested in whether the local business confidence indicators can allow substantially improving the forecasts, given the local nature of the...

We study the impact of broadband availability on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) using German firm-level data between 2010 and 2015. We adopt a control function approach to causally identify and separately estimate productivity for 46 two-digit manufacturing and service sectors. Over...

In this paper we study the economic effects of risk attitudes, time preferences, trust and reciprocity while we compare natives and second generation migrants. We analyze an inflow sample into unemployment in Germany, and find differences between the two groups mainly in terms of risk attitudes...