Central banks in developing countries, wanting to devalue the domestic currency, usually intervene in the foreign exchange market by buying up foreign currency using domestic money-often backing this up with sterilization to counter inflationary pressures. Such interventions are usually...

This model examines the impact of a fairtrade labelling scheme on global and country-specific welfare in a two-stage north-south trade framework. In the first stage (the producer market) two northern processors buy a commodity from a group of small scale agricultural producers in the south...

This study discusses the concept of sustainability, in particular with respect to the CDM. In addition, based on cross-section interviews, the sustainability criteria for CDM projects in energy sectors in the studied countries are determined. These criteria could serve as a starting point for...

The notion of social entrepreneurship has gained increasing recognition in the last years, both as an increasingly visible mode of economic action, and as an important policy tool. The paper outlines a typology that departs from a Schumpeterian view of entrepreneurship, that centers on the...

Most universities in Germany are public firms but they have many properties of co-operatives. The most important thereof are described and analysed together with the characteristics of state-sponsorship. The real companions of the university as a co-operation are its professors. The same is true...

Intrinsic motivation of workers may arise from different individual motives. While some workers care about the mission of an organization and derive an intrinsic benefit from advancing this mission ("good" workers), others derive pleasure from some form of destructive or anti-social behavior...

We assess the determinants of the wide variation in the efficiency of foreign aid activities across US-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In particular, we analyze whether non-charitable expenditures for administration, management and fundraising depend on the intensity of competition...

This papers sheds light on the puzzling evidence that even though open source software (OSS) is a public good, it is developed for free by highly qualified, young and motivated individuals, and evolves at a rapid pace. We show that once OSS development is understood as the private provision of a...

This paper analyses the development of universities' patent applications in Germany before and after the abolition of the 'professors' privilege' in 2002. By means of a database with all patent applications of German universities with professors among the inventors (1990-2006), systematic...

The question if private donors care about aid effectiveness when they donate to an international charity has received little attention in the literature on private charitable giving as well as in development microeconomics. This discussion is important, because a considerable share of foreign...