This dissertation consists of six self-contained chapters that are related to the behavior of firms and politicians in a broader sense. After an introduction to the topic, the first part of the dissertation elaborates on how institutional and political framework conditions influence the behavior...

The three essays of this dissertation contribute to the measurement of European economic integration and investigate the welfare effects of the European countries. The first study presents a newly developed index – the EU Index – which measures the extent of economic integration into the...

Over the last four decades, several methods for selecting the smoothing parameter, generally called the bandwidth, have been introduced in kernel regression. They differ quite a bit, and although there already exist more selection methods than for any other regression smoother we can still see...

Privatization is defined as the sale of state-owned assets by governmental agencies to private investors (e.g., Megginson, Nash, Netter, and Poulsen, 2004; Villalonga, 2000). Research on privatization has focused on privatization techniques (e.g., share issue privatization or voucher privatization),...

This thesis aims to study the macroeconomic performance of China. China has been experiencing rapid economic growth and it has been changing gradually from a planned to a market economy since it initiated the well known “open door policy” combined with a “coastal development strategy” in...

Diese Dissertation umfasst drei Beiträge zur ökonometrischen Untersuchung der Wirkungen der Besteuerung von Arbeitseinkommen (Taxonometrics). Der erste Beitrag versucht die Frage zu klären, wie die Besteuerung von Arbeits- und Kapitaleinkommen miteinander kompatibel gemacht werden können....

This dissertation consists of three chapters relating to identification and inference in dynamic microeconometric models including dynamic discrete games with many players, dynamic games with discrete and continuous choices, and semiparametric binary choice and duration panel data...

This dissertation examines the relationship between public infrastructure and regionaleconomic productivity in China. Based on a panel data set for 29 regions of China for a17-year period of 1987-2003, a three-step nonstationary panel analytical procedure isconducted to investigate whether...

Over the last few decades, numerous studies have adopted efficiency and productivity techniques to examine and evaluate the overall performance of banking industries to inform policy effect as well as identify the best practice. The majority of banking efficiency and productivity studies focus...

The opening up process of the central and eastern European (CEE) countries marked new beginnings in terms of greater integration of trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) with Western Europe. Adopting a two-stage out-of-sample gravity equation approach to predicting East West trade patterns,...