The direct democratic choice of an examination standard, i.e., a performance level required to graduate, is evaluated against a utilitarian welfare function. It is shown that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low if the marginal cost of reaching a higher performance reacts more...

This book provides an up-to-date summary of the consequences of demographic aging for labor markets, financial markets, economic growth, social security schemes and public finances in Germany, essentially reflecting the present state of knowledge in any of these areas. Compared to other...

It is obvious that the German economy exhibits a significant decline in economic growth during the last two decades. Although the German economy has still to overcome the burden of the reunification in 1990 it is shown that this burden might be only one reason of this decline. In this study we...

The paper performs an efficiency analysis of the lower secondary school sector in Norway. The efficiency potential is calculated to 14 percent based on a DEA analysis with grades in core subjects (adjusted for student characteristics and family background) as outputs. The analysis of the...