Using enterprise data for the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, this study examines the effects of corruption on productivity. Corruption is narrowly defined as the occurrence of informal payments to government officials to ease the day-to-day operation of firms. The effects...

Attempts to liberalize shopping hours often fail because of the resistance and arguments of retail sector employees who fear that this would cause their working conditions to deteriorate. This paper presents the results of an empirical study that compared the willingness of sales employees...

Most German states changed their local constitutions during the 1990s in order to become more citizen-friendly. To reach that goal, many local constitutions now allow for the direct election of mayors, initiatives and referenda, and vote-aggregation as well as vote-splitting. Simultaneously, the...

This study investigates the relationship between religiously-induced internalized values of individuals and their specific attitudes regarding the acceptance of corruption. The dataset on which our study is based was collected by the World Values Survey from 141,326 individuals in 78 countries...

The global financial crisis has contributed to the redirection of trade towards new markets outside the OECD area, where both demand patterns and the institutional environment differ from those in the OECD. This study provides an empirical examination of the consequences of this shift, based on...

In many countries on the European continent, it is feared that public funding of tertiary education (university and non-university) leads to an undesirable redistribution of income "from the bottom up". The calculation of private rates of return is one way of answering this and other questions....

With Laspeyres, Paasche and other authors such as Drobisch and Lehr, Germany made quite a promising start in index theory in the last decades of the 19th century. However, it soon lost ground after this period, which is described in this paper. The focus is not on biographies but on...

A method is proposed to measure capital services in production. This means that productive assets are weighted according to their user costs. The user costs of the individual asset classes are estimated based on data from the national accounts and other sources. The results show that, in the...

The System of National Accounts (SNA) as well as the Boskin Report inconclusively discarded the idea of pure price comparison in favour of index formulas for which a meaningful interpretation is difficult to he found. The shortcomings of the "economic theory" approach followed in the Boskin...

Economic researchers often consider quotients like R&D investment divided by sales which could be used to measure “research intensity” of firms if available. However, data on research in particular are highly confidential and would not be released in original form. Therefore scientific use...