The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that empha-size the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the effects of monetary policy on business investment. Important ambiguities with the modeling of investment dynamics and interactions between real and financial decisions suggest modeling investment spending as a VAR. Based on a panel of...

In this paper we estimate a simple New-Keynesian DSGE model with German data for the sample period 1970:q1 to 1998:q4. Contrary to a number of recent similar papers estimated with US and euro-area data, we find that real money balances contribute significantly to the determination of inflation...

We identify investor moral hazard in the German fiscal federation. Our identification strategy is based on a variable, which was used by the German Federal Constitutional Court as an indicator to determine eligibility of two German states (Länder) to a bail-out, the interest payments-to-revenue...

Most bank efficiency studies that use stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) employ each bank's own implicit input price when estimating efficient frontiers. But the theoretical foundation of most studies is a cost minimisation and/ or profit maximisation problem assuming perfect input markets. At...

German banks experienced a merger wave throughout the 1990s. However, the success of bank mergers remains a continuous matter of debate. In this paper we suggest a taxonomy as how to evaluate post-merger performance on the basis of cost efficiency (CE). We categorise mergers a success that...