This paper examines the link between liquidity constraints and investment behavior for German firms of different sizes from 1970 to 1986. Results indicate that medium sized firms appear to be more liquidity constrained in their investment behavior than either the smallest or largest firms in the...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

During the next decades the populations of most developed countries will grow older as a result of the low level of birth rates since the 1970s and/or the continuously increasing life expectancy. We show within a Generational Accounting framework how unsustainable the public finances of France,...

The neoclassical model of the production function, as applied by Robert Solow to build the neoclassical model of growth, linked labor and capital to output. More recently, Romer and others have expanded the model to include measures of knowledge capital. In this paper we introduce a new factor,...

In this paper we analyze exemplarily the volatility of the internal rates of return of the German pension system over the life-cycle of an individual born in 1957. The outcome is compared to an alternative defined-contribution or defined-benefit policy. Based on the actual data, our resultsshow...

This article surveys the literature on selection effects in retirement behavior. More specifically, we consider early retirement schemes with actuarially fair adjustments based on average life expectancy. To this end, we recapitulate the theoretical literature on selection effects and resulting...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

The literature focusing on the geography of entrepreneurship has developed some-thing of a schizophrenic approach. On the one hand is a series of studies, which have tried to identify characteristics specific to particular regions that account for inter-spatial variations in entrepreneurship. On...