This dissertation is a collection of four research papers written during my doctoral studies at the University of Konstanz between October 2004 and November 2008. These papers are empirical studies dealing with different aspects in the field of university economics. The focus of the first two...

This thesis is a collection of four stand-alone essays on international competition for human capital, together with a general introduction and some concluding remarks. The first essay deals with decentralized public education and human capital mobility. The international mobility of...

Offshore outsourcing continues to gain prominence as the printing industrystrides into the future. With different segments of the industry looking at reducingcosts and, in exchange providing value-added services, more companies turntowards outsourcing services offshore as a solution. Although it...

The variability of demographic trends at the subnational scale, particularly internal and international migration, renders subnational population forecasting more difficult than at the national scale. Illustrating the uncertainty of the demographic future for subnational regions is therefore a...

Accountable Care Organizations are developing in the United States as a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. A study is needed to evaluate an emerging issue of ACOs, quality improvement infrastructure, and the pharmaceutical industry. The convergence of these topics has not...

Corporate restructuring is normally analyzed with reference to economic imperatives and the inherited geographical structure of production. The economic landscape is assumed to be the consequence of private decisions made in response to these structural factors. If understanding and empirically...

In a previous study of US city inflation, I emphasized the temporal regularities of urban price inflation. But, despite these identified regularities, it is apparent that the process of inflation is rarely so regular and so systematic. Unanticipated shocks in three components, energy food, and...

Cyclical sensitivity in employment, wages, and hours worked are explored with reference to three industries and eleven US cities over the period 1972 - 1980. Conventional neoclassical discrete-exchange models of the labor market are shown to be inadequate because of marked rigidities in the...