The German potable water supply industry is regarded highly fragmented, thus preventing efficiency improvements that could happen through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we use a cross-section sample of 364 German water utilities in 2006, applying Data...

Der seit der Finanzkrise steile Anstieg der Zinsdifferenzen zwischen europäischen Staatsanleihen bringt mehrere Mitgliedsländer der europäischen Währungsunion (EWU) unter erhebliche Refinanzierungsschwierigkeiten und wirft die Frage nach den Ursachen auf. Dieser Bericht fasst die Ergebnisse...

In this paper, we address the identification and estimation of insurance models where insurees have private information about their risk and risk aversion. The model includes random damages and allows for several claims, while insurees choose from a finite number of coverages. We show that the...

Despite the benefits of education, the learning crisis in the developing world has led the World bank to characterize it as learning poverty. Education is yet to be declared a political priority in most developing countries. Official Development Assistance (ODA), which is a mechanism for...

The aim of this research was to evaluate the impact of the financial aid programme at a private university in Venezuela on the outcome variables of post-graduation or social mobility, such as remuneration at the time of graduation and at present, and the probability of entering the labour...

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a minimum income scheme (MIS) in the Basque Country, one of Spain's 17 autonomous regions. In particular, we assess whether the policy delays entry into employment for recipients, as well as the extent to which activating policies aimed at enabling...

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment...

Equivalence scales are routinely applied to adjust the income of households of different sizes and compositions. Because of their practical importance for the measurement of inequality and poverty, a large number of methods for the estimation of equivalence scales have been proposed. Until now,...

This paper considers estimation and inference for heterogeneous counterfactual effects with high-dimensional data. We propose a novel robust score for debiased estimation of the unconditional quantile regression (Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009)) as a measure of heterogeneous counterfactual...

Nonlinear estimation of the gravity model with Poisson-type regression methods has become popular for modelling international trade flows, because it permits a better accounting for zero flows and extreme values in the distribution tail. Nevertheless, as trade flows are not independent from each...