The inefficiency of health care provision presents a major health policy concern in Germany. In order to address the issue of efficiency comprehensively - i.e., at the level of the entire system of health care provision rather than individual service providers - empirical analyses are often...

Interest in biofuels is growing worldwide as concerns about the security of energy supply and climate change are moving into the focus of policy makers. With the exception of bioethanol from Brazil, however, production costs of biofuels are typically much higher than those of fossil fuels. As a...

Defense activities exercised in a specific region may alter the region's economic/performances. An accurate assessment of the potential economic impacts of defense activities within a specific area is therefore a valuable undertaking, especially for regional planners who may want to prepare for...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...

This paper examines the long-run money demand function for 11 OECD countries from 1983 to 2006 using panel data and including wealth. The distinction between common factors and idiosyncratic components using principal component analysis allows to detect cross-member cointegration and to...

Recently, building on the highly polarizing Stiglitz report, a growing literature suggests that statistical offices and applied researchers explore other aspects of human welfare apart from material well-being, such as job security, crime, health, environmental factors and subjective...

This paper analyzes changes in wage differentials between white men and white women over the period 1993–2006 across the entire wage distribution using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data. We decompose distributional changes in the gender wage gap to assess the contribution of observed...

Using a linked employer-employee data set of the German manufacturing sector, this paper analyses the role of exporting establishments in explaining rising wage dispersion. Over the period of analysis (1996-2007), the raw wage differential between exporters and domestic establishments increased...

For spatial data with a sufficiently long time dimension, the concept of global cointegration has been recently included in the econometrics research agenda. Global cointegration arises when non-stationary time series are cointegrated both within and between spatial units. In this paper, we...

This paper analyses the impact of public subsidies on private sector research and development (R&D) activity for East German firms. Using propensity score matching, our empirical results indicate that subsidized firms indeed show a higher level of R&D intensity and a higher probability for...