This study aims at investigating the order of magnitude of financial burden of the universal service obligation for the universal service provider, Itella, in the Finnish postal sector. It evaluates the difference between universal service provider’s profitability with the universal service...

The paper studies how social connections affect firm-level hiring decisions and performance. We characterize the social connections of firms' employees using register data and for causal identification we use job displacements, which create directed positive shocks towards connected firms by...

We estimate the earnings losses of a cohort of workers displaced during the Great Recession and decompose those long-term losses into components attributable to fewer work hours and to reduced hourly wage rates. We also examine the extent to which the reduced earnings, work hours, and wages of...

In this paper we estimate labour supply using a discrete choice approach for single men, single women and single parents and a joint labour supply equation for couples in New Zealand. The data are based on pooled cross-sectional data from the Household Economic Survey over 2006/07 to 2010/11. We...

The main purpose of this paper is to supplement the existing literature by quantifying the elasticity of New Zealand's current account to changes in the real exchange rate. The unusual composition of New Zealand's current account balance – particularly the large income deficit and the...

This paper discusses methodological problems of standard errors and treatment effects. First, heteroskedasticity- and cluster-robust estimates are considered as well as problems with Bernoulli distributed regressors, outliers and partially identified parameters. Second, procedures to determine...

Im März 2017 wurden die Ergebnisse für das Wirtschaftswachstum im Jahr 2015 auf der Ebene der Bundesländer außergewöhnlich kräftig überarbeitet. Neben den üblichen Anpassungen aufgrund neu verfügbarer Daten dürften hierfür unter anderem Schwierigkeiten bei der Schätzung der...

Die durchschnittliche Bildungsrendite betrug im Jahr 2007 in Westdeutschland 9,9 Prozent und in Ostdeutschland 9,6 Prozent. In den vergangenen Jahren sind trotz der zu beobachtenden Bildungsexpansion die Erträge, die der Einzelne durch Investitionen in seine Bildung erzielen kann, gestiegen....

To explain the growth dynamics in the transition economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union the relative importance of monetary variables is analysed. A theoretical as well as an empirical approach are employed to make predictions about how financial development will affect economic...