This paper provides a description and a discussion of some important aspects relating to recent productivity developments in the euro area. Following decades of stronger gains in the euro area than in the US, labour productivity growth has fallen behind that in the US in recent years. This...

Gegenstand des Beitrages sind die Umstrukturierungen der Stromwirtschaft in Kalifornien. Im Gefolge der Entwicklungen auf der Bundesebene - dem Energy Policy Act von 1992 und der neueren Politik der Federal Energy Regulatory Commission - hat die kalifornische Regulierungskommission Maßnahmen...

We study effects of a firm's attempt to optimize an existing incentive scheme to increase sales growth for direct store delivery workers. Before optimization workers reported Ratchet Effects that lowered productivity. The altered incentive plan offered higher compensation for increased sales...

In the first part (in the previous issue of Economic Review) of this two-part study, the authors identified a number of possible benefits from combining banking and commerce, including portfolio diversification, the creation of internal capital markets, and economies of scale and scope. This...

The policy debate on whether to strengthen or to remove the legal barriers between banking and commerce has paid little attention to what the practical effects of removing the barriers would be. To help answer this question, this article, the first part of a two-part study, provides an overview...

In this paper, we examine three famous episodes of deliberate deflation (or disinflation) in U.S. history, including episodes following the Civil War, World War I, and the Volcker disinflation of the early 1980s. These episodes were associated with widely divergent effects on the real economy,...

Die Faszination von Großunternehmen um 1900, ihre rapide Expansion im betrachteten Zeitraum und die Tatsache, daß einzelne Unternehmen durch technologische Neuerungen tatsächlich hochproduktiv waren, haben zu der Annahme geführt, daß Großunternehmen insgesamt produktiver waren als kleinere...