Mirroring the railroad industry of the 1940’s and 1950’s, the trucking industry today appearsto be achieving impressive productivity gains. But it is easy to confuse true productivityadvances in transportation industries with changes in ton-miles per unit of input that are duesimply to changes...

In their quest to become highly efficient and professional asset managers in maintaining their roadnetworks and delivering a programme of network improvements some road administrations haveundergone significant changes in the way they operate in order to become more efficient and provide amore...

Das neue, von Dr.-Ing. Ansgar Woltering, DB Systel GmbH, verfasste Arbeitspapier befasst sich mit der bedarfs- und marktgerechte Ausgestaltung und Bereitstellung von Services in Bezug auf Informations- und Telekommunikationstechnik (ITK). Insbesondere wird auf das Instrument des Benchmarking...

This paper discusses the role of so-called national champions within the context of the EU's ambitious goal to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economic region in the world by 2010. We find football to be a useful analogy in our discussion of national champions. There are...

This paper extends a well-established vertical product differentiation model toan international duopoly with two segmented countries, where firms compete inquality and price. The framework is used to analyse governments’ incentives forunilateral minimum standard-setting as well as the scope...

Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are commonworldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. Weexploit multiple changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to supportmanufacturing jobs...

The study of natural catastrophe models plays an important role in the prevention and mitigation of disasters. After the occurrence of a natural disaster, the reconstruction can be financed with catastrophe bonds (CAT bonds) or reinsurance. This paper examines the calibration of a real...

It is widely recognized that "market failure" prevents efficient risksharing in natural disaster insurance. As a consequence, many countriesadopted institutional frameworks presenting public sector participation,often praised as public-private partnerships. We define risk selection asa situation...

This paper explores implications of climate change for fiscal policy by assessing theimpact of large scale extreme weather events on changes in public budgets. We applyalternative measures for large scale extreme weather events and conclude that thebudgetary impact of such events ranges between...

Environmental policy often has to be devised under informational constraints,like uncertainty and asymmetric information. We consider an environmentalpolicy that aims at reducing the welfare losses caused by asymmetricinformation while being sufficiently simple for implementation. Inthis policy,...