This paper attempts to discern the effectivess of abatement policy and the status of current water quality in Brazil. It presents the results of a study on indicators of water quality for 13 states where systematic monitoring is undertaken. A regional, sectorial and sustainability analysis of...

This paper aims at characterizing water demand by Brazilian manufacturing plants located in São Paulo and at assessing the potential impacts of environmental policies on industrial water use. We first show that the price elasticity of the water demand, -1.0 on average, is high enough for a...

In this paper we discuss determinants of firm survival and growth in Germany within its pre-1989 boundaries. We develop our central hypotheses on the basis of a simple theoretical model describing the self-selection of heterogeneous entrepreneurs into particular legal forms, and the implications...

Unemployment duration data derived from retrospective surveys often show an abnormal concentration of responses at certain durations. This common kind of measurement error is known as "heaping" in the statistical literature. Although heaping effects may lead to severe biases in estimated...

This paper analyses the developments in the returns to education in West Germany for the period from 1984 to 1997. Based on simple Mincer-type wage equations, we estimate a return of about 8% for men and 10% for women, and these returns have remained remarkably stable over the period. On the...

Using a Mincer-type wage function, we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for West German workers born between 1925 and 1974. The main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort, experience, and possibly also age effects in the returns. For women,...