Die Misere an den deutschen Hochschulen wird einmütig beklagt, schon in der Analyse der Ursachen dieser Krise aber scheiden sich die Geister. Woran krankt die deutsche Universität aus ökonomischer Sicht? Muß Hochschulbildung öffentlich bereitgestellt werden, oder ist ein marktorientiertes...

Biotechnology is considered as one of the key high-technology sectors in the future. It has been increasingly accepted that small, innovative businesses were the major stimulus for the development of this emerging industry. Many studies on new entrepreneurial entrants in biotechnology are mainly...

In this paper we develop a business cycle measure that can be shown to have excellent ex-ante forecasting properties for GDP growth. For identifying business cycle movements, we use a semantic approach. We infer nine different states of the economy directly from firms' responses in business...

The former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt holds that despite the huge transfers from West to East Germany the East German economy does not take off as it was widely expected. We argue it is not despite these transfers but because of them. Building on the common features of the extension of the...

In their introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on Great Depressions of the 20th Century (Vol. 5, 2002), Timothy J. Kehoe and Edward C. Prescott argue that in the last few years great depressions have hit two rich countries: New Zealand and Switzerland. We briefly...

The conditions under which European monetary policy is likely to be conducted are investigated by means of multi-variate time series modelling using aggregated data of all eleven European Monetary Union member states. A cointegration analysis identifies two stable long-run relationships, one of...

Sport wird einerseits wie jede andere Tätigkeit in der Gesellschaft mit öffentlichen Abgabelasten beschwert, andererseits im Vergleich zu ähnlichen Tätigkeiten steuerlich geschont und sogar öffentlich unterstützt. Diese Ambivalenz der steuerlichen Behandlung des Sports hat wiederholt...

The paper provides a first ex post analysis of the financial burden and economic benefits of the World Cup in Germany 2006. On the usual cost-benefit measures, the experience of WC 2006 appears to be in line with existing empirical work on large sporting events and sport stadia which rarely...

This paper investigates whether a nation's contingent value of hosting a mega-event depends on past experience with implied public goods benefits for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a natural...