The principal justification for minimum wage legislation resides in improving the economic condition of low-wage workers. Most previous analyses of the distributional effects of minimum wages have been confined to simulation exercises employing rather restrictive assumptions that guarantee the...

This paper analyses the extent to which gender differences in human capital contribute to explaining the observable wage differential in favour of men and its reduction since the mid-eighties among West German full-time employees in the private sector. Based on a simple analytical framework, the...

What happens to demand if a magazine launches a website? This question is empirically analyzed for the German women's magazine market, a particularly large segment of the German magazine where fierce competition is reigning. Models for differentiated product demand are estimated on panel data...

I derive and estimate a model for cover price setting in print media markets where actors are faced by two interrelated demand curves: the demand for the print medium and the demand for advertising space. Publicly available data on German women's magazines observed between 1998 and 2001 are used...

Fuel poverty may become an increasingly severe problem in developed countries in cases when real prices for fossil fuels increase at high rates or when real energy prices increase due to policies for greenhouse gas abatement. Fuel poverty measurement consists of two largely independent parts,...

We analyze the potential influence of a number of factors on the distribution of equivalized net incomes in Germany over the period 2005/2006 to 2010/11. While income inequality considerably increased in the years before 2005/2006, this trend was stopped after 2005/2006. Among many other...

This paper asks whether the gap in subjective happiness between spouses matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first...

Energy poverty, long considered a problem limited to developing countries only, is now widely acknowledged as a challenge for advanced OECD countries as well. How energy poverty is perceived depends on the conceptualization and assessment of the underlying phenomena: inappropriately high costs...

This North-South model of Schumpeterian endogenous growth combines a market, productivity and knowledge effect. A set of various convergent and divergent growth paths is derived that is much richer than in the literature so far. South-North convergence based on North-South technology diffusion...

Measures of affordability are applied in practice, e.g., to assess the affordability of energy services, water or housing. They can be interpreted as measures of deprivation in a specific domain of consumption. The large body of literature on affordability measure has little overlap with the...