A four-variable, a five-variable and a six-variable vector autoregression (VAR) is used in the study to test empirically the linkages among changes in money, outstanding public bonds, interest rates, output, real asset prices, and real investment expenditures in West Germany. After estimating...

In this paper we analyse the impact of policy uncertainty on foreign direct investment strategies. The paper follows the real options approach, which allows to investigate the value to a firm of waiting to invest and/or disinvest, when payoffs are stochastic due to political uncertainty and...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on the growth of West German regions. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that emphasize the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we follow the real options approach, which allows us to investigate the...

An important question for the future of European Monetary Union is whether the central banks of the European member states are fundamentally similar or are there real differences between them. Much casual evidence seems to suggest that the Bundesbank is fundamentally different in its method of...

Capital-skill complementarity is tested for two different definitions of skill using data from 32 West German manufacturing industries from 1975-1990. Using the Kmenta approximation for the CES function provides strong support for complementarity between white collar workers and capital. On the...