This paper investigates the wage convergence between East German workers and their West German counterparts after reunification. Our research is based on a comparison of three groups of workers defined as stayers, migrants and commuters to West Germany, who lived in East Germany in 1989, with...

At the start of the German unification process it was a commonly held view that east German living conditions will converge to west Geman levels within a few years. This view was not only held by notoriously optimistic politicians but also by a great many of professional economists. With...

We analyze wage developments in the East German transition process both at the macro and at the microeconomic level. At the macroeconomic level, we draw special attention to the important distinction between product and consumption wages, describe the development of various wage measures, labor...

We estimate the effects of R&D on firms' credit ratings and on financial distress. The main purpose is the comparison of firms in Western Germany and Eastern Germany as a transitional economy. Innovative activity has a positive impact on firm value proxied by ratings in Western Germany, but a...

Firms are affected by the product demand. This leads to employment adjustments. In the literature we find only very few contributions investigating the issue whether internal adjustments are linked and which relationships exist with external adjustments. Are they of a complementary or...

Given the ubiquitous scarcity of resources an economic approach is necessary in order to determine an optimal strategy of adaptation to climate change. In this paper we develop an economic framework for the study of adaptation which allows us to distinguish between decentralized adaptation by...

Adaptation to climate change is gaining increasing relevance in the public debate of climate policy. However, detailed and regionalised cost estimates as a basis for cost-benefit-analyses are rare. We compose available cost estimates for adaptation in Europe, and in particular Germany, Finland...

Reputation indexes of employment protection have proven popular constructs in studies of the covariation of labor market institutions and macroeconomic outcomes. Portugal occupies an unenviable rank order in such measures of the stringency of employment protection. We critique this reputation in...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether labour mobility is likely to act as a sufficient adjustment mechanism in the face of asymmetric shocks in Euroland. To this end, we estimate the elasticity of migration with respect to changes in unemployment and income on the basis of regional...