The paper investigates maternity leave behavior in West Germany for females being employed between 1995 and 2006 using data from the German Socio Economic Panel. The observational study focuses on the investigation of individual and family-related covariate effects on the duration of maternity...

The paper investigates maternity leave behavior in West Germany for females being employed between 1995 and 2006 using data from the German Socio Economic Panel. The observational study focuses on the investigation of individual and family-related covariate effects on the duration of maternity...

This paper shows that there are severe measurement errors regarding the occupational affiliations in the German Socio-Economic Panel. These errors are traced back to the survey structure: in years where occupational information is gathered from the entire employed population instead of only from...

This paper shows that there are severe measurement errors regarding the occupational affiliations in the German Socio-Economic Panel. These errors are traced back to the survey structure: in years where occupational information is gathered from the entire employed population instead of only from...

We analyze potential gains from hypothetical mergers in local public transport using the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis with bias corrections by means of bootstrapping. Our sample consists of 41 public transport companies from Germany's most densely populated region, North...

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

The German potable water supply industry is regarded as being highly fragmented, thus inhibiting high potentials for efficiency improvements through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to analyze the potential...

After a summary of the main achievements in microfinance, the thesis provides an overview of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in developing countries between 2000 and 2009. A thorough study of microfinance in sub-Saharan Africa is also proposed. It serves as a prelude to the econometric analysis...