Labour market reforms that are designed to stimulate labour supply at the lower end of the wage distribution can never be precisely restricted to affect only the target group. Spillovers to and feedback from other segments of the labour market are unavoidable and may counteract the direct...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...

Public procurement has been at the centre of recent discussions on innovation policy on both European and national levels (e.g., Aho-Report, Barcelona Strategy). It has a large potential to stimulate innovation since it accounts for 16% of combined EU-15 GDP. We embed public procurement for...

We present evidence for a highly significant interaction between state dependence in individual unemployment risk and the business cycle. The disadvantage from having been unemployed in the previous period is smaller in times of relatively high unemployment and larger in times of low...

Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the enterprise level for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of...

With the purpose to reduce winter unemployment and to promote all-season employment in the constructions sector, Germany maintains an extensive bad weather allowance system. Since the mid 1990s, these regulations have been subject to several reforms that resemble the range of approaches for...

On the basis of a theoretical model, we argue that higher aggregate unemployment affects individual returns to education. We therefore include aggregate unemployment and an interaction term between unemployment and the individual education level in a standard Mincer equation. Our results show...

We study the performance of conditional asset pricing models in explaining the German cross-section of stock returns. Our test assets are portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market as in the paper by Fama and French (1993). Our results show that the empirical performance of the Capital Asset...