In 2009, Germany introduced a new debt rule in its federal constitution (Grundgesetz). The socalled ‘debt brake' prescribes a balanced budget for both the federal level and the states. However, the states have leeway regarding transposition and specification of the national requirements into...

Despite the high CO2 emission intensity of fossil and especially coal fired energy production, these energy carriers will play an important role during the coming decades. The case study identifies the main technological trajectories concerning more efficient fossil fuel combustion and explores...

Due to potential abuse of the market power at wholesale and retail market level for natural gas the Federal Cartel Office in Germany prohibited further forward integration of gas importing firms with retail incumbents from 2005/2006 to 2010. The Authority argued that the very few dominant gas...

When contributing content on large online platforms, producers of user-generated content have to decide where to contribute. On a complex and dynamic platform like wikipedia, this decision is expected to depend on the way the content is organized. We analyse whether the hyperlinks on Wikipedia...

In this paper, we study how wage mobility in the low-wage sector has changed in western Germany between 1984 and 2004. Using German individual register data, we document a clear upward trend in the persistence of low-wage employment for both men and women. Next to compositional shifts of the...

The scientific literature provides evidence for an impact of company taxes on investments. Practitioners, however, have a skeptical view on the meaning of this effect. This paper builds the bridge between research and the interested practice by providing detailed descriptives and clearly showing...

We use publicly available price data from the German cement industry to estimate the cartel-induced price increase. We apply two different comparator-based approaches – the ‘before-and-after' approach and the ‘difference-in-differences' approach – and especially study the impact of...

Although the pricing dynamics of hardcore cartels have been studied intensively from a theoretical perspective, empirical evidence is still rare. We combine publicly available data with a unique private data set of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German...

This paper provides novel evidence on exchange rate expectations of both chartists and fundamentalists separately. These groups indeed form expectations differently. Chartists change their expectations more often; however, all professionals' expectations vary considerably as they generally...

This paper reports the results from a controlled field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of public recognition on employee performance. We hired more than 300 employees to work on a three-hour data-entry task. In a random sample of work groups, workers unexpectedly received...