Recent healthcare reforms have sought to increase efficiency by introducing managed care (MC) as an alternative to conventional care. This article proposes an institutional change designed to let German consumers choose between the two settings through directing payments from the Federal Health...

In contrast to the United States, Germany decided to add margin squeeze as a legal offense to German competition law. In response to this, the problems in the gasoline market have caused major debates. This paper examines the pricing strategies by gasoline retailers and discusses the...

This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to test the hypothesis that the increase in the per-shipment costs of imports from Japan due to the Fukushima disaster in 2011 lead to an increase in the lumpiness of imports from Japan. Using China and the USA as control groups it is found...

Do we have effective competition between the gasoline's big five oligopolists (Aral, Shell, Esso, Total and Jet) and fringe gasoline stations? Using 2014 Market Transparency price data from 66 cities with populations between 60,000 and 100,000, we analyze which brands lead price increases, the...

This paper contributes to the literature by using newly released comprehensive transaction level data on all exports and imports to document facts about the amount of intra-good trade - the simultaneous export and import of identical goods by one firm - in Germany. Combined data for trade...

Das Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Lüneburg legt hiermit seinen siebten eigenständigen Forschungsbericht vor. Wir möchten mit unserem Bericht alle Interessenten an unserer wissenschaftlichen Arbeit in kompakter Form über die von uns bearbeiteten Forschungsthemen und die...

This paper looks at a hitherto neglected extensive margin of international trade by investigating for the first time the frequency at which German exporters and importers trade a given good with a given country. Imports and exports show a high degree of lumpiness. In a given year about half of...

This paper uses information on export transactions by German firms from 2011 to document the role of characteristics of destination countries for export scope, where export scope is defined as the number of different products a firm exports to a destination market. It demonstrates that in line...