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...

Register data are known for their large sample size and good data quality. The measurement accuracy of variables highly depends on their high importance for administrative processes. The education variable in the IAB employment sub-sample is an example for information that is gathered without a...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of different macro and micro variables on thedistribution of unemployment duration in West Germany using censored quantile regressions. We analyze unemployment periods of more than 91,000 observations from the years 1981 to 1997 drawn from the IAB employment...

We present a new method for imposing and testing concavity of a cost function using asymptotic least squares, which can easily be implemented even for cost functions which are nonlinear in parameters. We provide an illustration on the basis of a (generalized) Box-Cox cost function with six...

In this study we investigate the minimum wage (MW) effects for a German sub-construction sector where the MW bites extraordinary hard by international standards. Within a quasiexperiment we estimate the Quantile Treatment Effects of the MW on the conditional and unconditional distribution of...

Germany taxes electricity use since 1999. The government granted reduced rates to energy intensive firms in the industrial sector for addressing potentially adverse effects on firms' competitiveness. Firms that use more electricity than certain thresholds established by legislation, pay reduced...

Individual sales prices and local vacancy rates in the housing market pose a natural analogy to the wage curve, a popular concept in labor economics that describes how individual wages decrease with higher local unemployment. While housing search and matching models and housing externalities...