The legal regulations require the minimum wage in Germany to be adjusted biennially which gives rise to a policy discontinuity. From the perspective of rational expectations models, such policy features render standard local approximation techniques infeasible. The paper presents a stylised...

We develop an analysis of ex ante monitoring of risky projects in banking. If protected from competition, banks are more concerned about not catching good risk projects when the perceived state of the economy improves, while they are more concerned about being induced to finance bad risk...

Hidden Champions (HCs) are firms unknown to the wider public, but global leaders in the niche markets they serve. This paper looks at distinctive features of these firms, focusing on their dynamic capabilities. Employing a unique data base on German firms, we identify a representative sample of...

The decision to contact a physician and the decision, how often to contact a physician, are based on different decision makers. We introduce a negative binominal distributed hurdle model that specifies the two stages of the decision process as different stochastic processes, and takes also care...

When studying particular subgroups of a population, like for instance lone parents, the econometrician typically has few observations at hand. In such a situation, it is vital to take advantage of any valid complementary information that may be available. In this paper we illustrate, for the...