In late 2005, the German energy companies E.ON and Wintershall and Russian Gazprom reached an agreement to build a new huge pipeline Nord Stream through the Baltic Sea. This pipeline will provide Russia for the first time ever with the direct access to its Western European customers. This...

Ende 2005 vereinbarten die deutschen Energieunternehmen E.ON und Wintershall gemeinsam mit der russischen Gazprom eine neue Pipeline "Nord-Stream" zu bauen, mit der russisches Erdgas erstmalig direkt durch die Ostsee nach Deutschland geliefert werden kann. Diese Pipeline erhöht die Sicherheit...

To decarbonize the power sector policy-makers need to commit to long-term credible rules for climate and energy policy. Otherwise, time-inconsistent policy-making will impair investments into low-carbon technologies. However, the future benefits and costs of decarbonization are subject to...

In this paper we present a search and matching model in which firms invest in sunk capital equipment. By comparing two wage setting scenarios, we show that a two-tier bargaining scheme, where a fraction of the salary is negotiated at firm level, raises the amount of investment per worker in the...

Based on data from a comprehensive benchmarking study on buyer-supplier relationships in the German automotive industry, we show that more trust in a relationship is associated with higher idiosyncratic investment by suppliers and better part quality - but also with more competition among...

We analyze the provision of infrastructure by a foreign investor when the domestic bureaucracy is corrupt, but puts some weight on domestic welfare. The investor may pay a bribe in return for a higher provisional contract price. After the investment has been sunk, the bureaucracy may hold up the...

Abstract This paper demonstrates that credit constraints can lead to the inability to enforce contracts, thereby creating inefficiency. If time elapses between the contract period and the enforcement period, a credit constrained agent that uses the proceeds of trade to fund consumption faces a...

This paper explores the hold-up problem between two parties (an entrepreneur and an investor) when one of the parties (the entrepreneur) is unable to commit not to repudiate the initial contract. To mitigate hold-up we allow the parties to stage investments over time and derive the optimal...

We consider an economy in which firms need to invest in capital before they can advertise a job, while applicants may have to compete for jobs. Our aim is to investigate how this competition affects the investment decisions of firms. Our first result shows that the economy always generates the...