Most pure public goods like lighthouses, dams, or national defense provide utility mainly by insuring against hazardous events. Our paper focuses on this insurance character of public goods. As for private actions against hazardous events, one can distinguish between self-insurance (SI) and...

Many Western countries face the challenge of reconciling future labor demand with growing public opposition to immigration. The dynamics and underlying processes of setting immigration requirements remain unclear as research so far mainly focuses on context-specific empirical studies. We use a...

We introduce unemployment and endogenous selection of workers into different skill-classes in a trade model with two sectors and heterogeneous firms. This allows us to study the distributional consequences and the skill-specific unemployment effects of trade liberalization. We show that the...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...

I provide evidence that fund managers who overweight firms with the most differentiated products ('monopolies') exhibit a superior risk-adjusted performance. This is consistent with information advantages due to a better understanding of qualitative information on a firm's competitive...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...

The paper analyzes the effects of increasing capital market integration on production and market structures, trade and capital flows as well as national and global welfare. In order to facilitate the analysis of the integration process, three stages of capital market integration are defined....

Die starken Preissteigerungen für Benzin in den letzten 2 Jahren sind häufig auf mangelnden Wettbewerb zurückgeführt worden. Die These wird überprüft, indem die Wettbewerbsstruktur bei Tankstellen und deren Vorleistungsbeziehungen dargestellt werden und ökonometrische Schätzungen über...

Taking a firm's competitive position into account benefits investors who are better at evaluating this qualitative information. I find that fund managers who overweight companies with market power outperform their peers. Placebo exercises and an exogenous shock to product market competition...

We construct a model of trade with heterogeneous retailers to examine the effects of trade liberalization on retail market structure, imports and social welfare. We are especially interested in studying the degree of pass-through of import into retail prices and the effects of retail market...