The third generation UMTS auction in Gremany raised an enormous amount of revenue, and the same time achieved a more competitive market structure than other UMTS auctions in Europe. The present paper explains the design of that auction, and presents a game theoretic explanation of observed...

We briefly survey several insights about value and revenue maximization in multi-object auctions and apply them to the German (and Austrian) UMTS auction. In particular, we discuss in detail the exposure problem that caused firms in Germany to pay almost Euro 20 billion for nothing.

This paper considers the arguments for fundamental pension reform in Germany and the United States. The two countries have recently made or are considering reforms that would reduce the generosity of the tradional, pay-as-you-go pension system. Some or all of the lost benefits would be replaced...

This paper deals with the estimation of the output gap. We use uni- and bivariate unobserved components models in order to decompose the observed German GDP-series into trend, cycle and seasonal components. The results show that using the ifo business assessment variable as an indicator for the...

This paper investigates the effects of financing constraints on the dynamics of investment behavior for a sample of German firms. In contrast to most of the literature on this issue we use an indicator for financing constraints which we explain endogenously. The econometric method consists of a...

Anhand einiger zeitreihentheoretischer Überlegungen wird gezeigt, das eine produktivitätsorientierte Lohnpolitik im Sinne der Position des deutschen Sachverständigenrats zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (SVR) Mitte der 80er Jahre langfristig daran scheitern muß, die...

Bei der Klassifizierung der deutschen Konjunkturzyklen stehen die Daten des ifo Konjunkturtests der Verwendung der Daten der Vierteljählichen Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung (VGR) nur wenig nach. Als Beurteilungsmaßstab dienten die Ergebnisse einer multivariaten Diskriminanzanalyse mit...

According to the German disability law, or Schwerbehindertengesetz, either six percent of all jobs in an establishment must be occupied by disabled employees or the firm has to pay a penalty of DM 200 per month for every job under consideration. This note reports results from the first...