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...

Today, more than 70% of the world's total electricity production is supplied by power plants using conventional fossil fuels. Coal accounts for more than half of the fossil fuel combustion in electricity plants. Future mega trends give reason to believe that electricity demand will double until...

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...

Empirical work on continuing training in Germany provides surprisingly divergent evidence on the incidence of training. This makes comparison of econometric analyses of the impact of training on labour market outcomes di±cult. Three large German data sets are used here to bring to light the...

In recent years, coinciding with the discussion led in many OECD countries, Germany has started to contract out placement services for the unemployed to private agencies. Whereas in the Netherlands and Australia the whole system of employment services was reorganized at once, making an...