Subsidies are considered important means to facilitate the provision of public transit, yet the empirical evidence implies that they can have harming effects on costs and possibly also on operators' performance. This paper examines the impacts of deficit-balancing subsidies on the cost...

We estimate the marginal costs of road renewals as part of a social marginal cost scheme for road user charging. Within an analytical approach that mirrors the relationship between road deterioration, traffic load and road renewal, we use an accelerated failure time model for road pavement with...

In this paper, we present a nonparametric comparative efficiency analysis of 179 communal public transport bus companies in Germany (1990-2004). We apply both deterministic data envelopment analysis (DEA) and bootstrapping to test the robustness of our estimates and to test the hypothesis of...

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...

We analyze the technical efficiency of German and Swiss urban public transport companies by means of SFA. In transport networks we might face different network structures or complexities, not observed, but influencing the production process. The unobserved factors are typically modeled as...

In contrast to other countries where official odometer readings are collected when cars are being inspected or whenever there is a change in the registration data, no such information is available in Germany. The published annual figures on mileage of German vehicles result from model...

In 2013, around 121 billion US-Dollar were spend worldwide to promote the investment into renewable energy sources. The most prominent support scheme employed is a feed-in tariff, which guarantees a fixed price for electricity produced by renewable energies sources, usually for around 15 years...

Turning unemployment into self-employment has become a major focus of German active labour market policy (ALMP) in recent years. If effective, this would not only reduce Germany’s persistently high unemployment rate, but also increase its notoriously low self-employment rate. Empirical...