Getting a tenured position in economics in Germany is viewed as a random outcome where the probability of tenure depends on the quantity and qual- ity of publications, age and years since PhD. We measure publications both in units of Top 5 journals and in units of the European Economic Review...

Worker movements played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Workplace safety is costly for firms but increases labour supply. A laissez-faire approach leaving safety of workplaces unknown is suboptimal. Safety standards set by better-informed trade unions are output and welfare...

Current explanations why a growing economy necessarily goes through booms and recessions predict countercyclical R&D investment. As this is very controversial from an empirical perspective, a stochastic Poisson model of endogenous business cycles and growth is presented where the determinants of...

A country with Cournot competition and free entry experiences an increase of its market size either due to economic growth or international integration of goods markets. The implied increase in competition leads to shrinking mark-ups and forces firms to reduce overhead costs relative to output....

Cyclical components are analytically computed in a theoretical model of stochastic endogenous fluctuations and growth. Volatility is shown to depend on the speed of convergence of the cyclical component, the expected length of a cycle and on the altitude of the slump. Taxes affect these channels...

Rare and randomly occurring events are important features of the economic world. In continuous time they can easily be modeled by Poisson processes. Analyzing optimal behavior in such a setup requires the appropriate version of the change of variables formula and the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman...

This paper examines the role of bequests and of taxation on bequests for the distribution of wealth. We investigate a model with overlapping generations and heterogenous households where parents derive utility directly from their bequests. Using the coefficient of variation as measure of...

We investigate how continental European unemployment can be reduced without reducing unemployment benefits and without reducing the net income of low-wage earners. Lower unemployment replacement rates reduce unemployment, the net wage and unemployment benefits. A lower tax on labour increases...

One of the main results of the literature on the effects of uncertainty on trade states that uncertainty should not matter in the presence of well developed forward markets. Empirical studies, however, do not support this result. We derive the demand for forward cover in a small open economy...

Getting a tenured position in economics in Germany is viewed as a random outcome where the probability of tenure depends on the quantity and quality of publications, age and years since PhD. We measure publications both in units of Top 5 journals and in units of the European Economic Review...