This paper compares student evaluation of teaching on the web site MeinProf.de to the standard evaluation procedures at German universities. While MeinProf offers the advantage of a broad, publicly available database, a number of theoretical and econometric problems emerge. Many of these...

Using a new panel dataset comprising publication and appointment data for 889 German academic economists over a quarter of a century, we confirm the familiar hypothesis that publications are important for professorial appointments, but find only a small negative effect of appointments on...

This paper deals with discrete labour supply decisions of different groups of persons in response to a change in net wage rates. The centrepiece of this approach is individuals' switching between working time categories, while facing switching costs that arise when people expand or reduce...

Are preferences exogenously given? Or do individual tastes and values evolve endogenously within a particular socio-economic environment? In this paper, we make use of a natural experiment to analyse the role of inflation experiences and institutions in the formation of individual inflation...

Politicians frequently emphasize the importance of Mittelstand firms for the economy, thereby parti- cularly referring to their enormous engagement in training apprentices. However, there is yet almost no empirical evidence on the question whether Mittelstand firms are in fact excessively active...

Successful innovation is a precondition for economic prosperity. While various potential determinants of innovative activity have been considered, little empirical evidence is yet available for the influence of firm governance issues. This paper aims at filling this gap in the literature by...