Quality of service is of major economic significance in natural monopoly infrastructure industries and is increasingly addressed in regulatory schemes. However, this important aspect is generally not reflected in efficiency analysis of these industries. In this paper we present an efficiency...

Die Förderung regenerativer Energien in Deutschland durch das Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG) führt zu diversen Verteilungseffekten. Unterschiede in den geografischen und klimatischen Bedingungen sowie den Siedlungs- und Mieterstrukturen haben unter anderem eine erhebliche regionale...

To explain the success of different distribution strategies in the life insurance industry, we analyze the performance of single- and multi-channel distribution firms in the German life insurance industry. We estimate cost and profit efficiency for three groups of life insurers: multi-channel...

A number of initiatives are under way that will either greatly lower Mobile Termination Rates (MTRs ) – the wholesale payments from the originating network operator whose call initiates the call to the terminating network operator whose customer receives the call – or perhaps even eliminate...

By 2050, the European Union aims to reduce greenhouse gases by more than 80 %. The EU member states have therefore declared to strongly increase the share of renewable energy sources (RES-E) in the next decades. Given a large deployment of wind and solar capacities, there are two major impacts...

We explore the hypothesis that export policies and trade patterns of national players in the steam coal market are consistent with non-competitive market behavior. We test this hypothesis by developing an equilibrium model which is able to model coal producing nations as strategic players. We...