Changing product quality poses a challenge for the computation of price indexes, in particular in technologically advanced industries. We assess the differences between traditional and quality-corrected indexes by computing hedonic and matched-model price indexes for personal computer database...

Am Beispiel der Wirtschaftswissenschaften wird untersucht, inwieweit Studierende die Qualität der Fachbereiche bei der Studienortwahl berücksichtigen. Im Rahmen eines Gravitationsansatzes zeigt sich, dass vor allem die Nähe zum Heimatort und die Lebenshaltungskosten am Ort der Hochschule die...

The knowledge produced by academic scientists has been identified as a potential key driver of technological progress. Recent policies in Europe aim at increasing commercially orientated activities in academe. Based on a sample of German scientists across all fields of science we investigate the...

In recent decades, changes in parents' attitudes towards the importance of spending time with children to optimise their future behaviour and cognitive development have greatly affected patterns of time allocation among both working and non-working parents in all developed countries. We compare...

This study investigates whether standard patent measures for the importance and basicness of patents are able to distinguish between “wacky” patents and a control group of randomly drawn patents. Our findings show that forward citations are good predictors of importance. However, the...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

A quota on foreign competition will generally lead to quality-upgrading (downgrading) of the low-quality (high-quality) firm, an increase in average quality, a reduction of quality differentiation, and a reduction of domestic consumer surplus, irrespective of whether the foreign firm produces...