This paper investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that...

We explore the determinants and effects of trust relationships between upstream suppliers and downstream producers. Using unique survey data on individual supplier-buyer relationships in the German automotive industry, we show, by means of different measures of supplier-buyer trust, that higher...

Die im vorliegenden Regierungsentwurf angestrebte Liberalisierung der Stromwirtschaft beinhaltet die Schaffung eines Durchleitungsmodells unter grundsätzlicher Partizipation aller Endkundenkategorien. Widerstand gegen den Regierungsentwurf formiert sich insbesondere in den Reihen der kommunalen...

We show that professional soccer players exhibit reference-dependent behavior during matches. Controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity, we show on a minute-by-minute basis that a player breaches the rules of the game, measured by the referee's assignment of cards,...

German universities are regarded as being under-financed, inefficient, and performing below average if compared to universities in other European countries and the US. Starting in the 1990s, several German federal states implemented reforms to improve this situation. An important part of these...

This study analyses employers' support for the introduction of industry-specific minimum wages as a cost-raising strategy in order to deter market entry. Using a unique data set consisting of 800 firms in the German service sector, we find some evidence that high-productivity employers support...

In this paper, we address the question whether increasing households' financial market access improves welfare in a financial system in which there is intense competition among banks for private households' funds. Following earlier work by Diamond and by Fecht, we use a model in which the degree...