Berufliche Weiterbildung spielt in der modernen Arbeitswelt eine zentrale Rolle bei der Entwicklung der beruflichen Fähigkeiten von Arbeitnehmern und hat daher potentiell grosse Auswirkungen auf deren Chancen im Arbeitsmarkt. Die vorliegende Arbeit bietet eine deskriptive Analyse des...

We provide a Matlab quadratic optimization tool based on Markowitz's critical line algorithm that significantly outperforms standard software packages and a recently developed operations research algorithm. As an illustration: For a 2000 asset universe our method needs less than a second to...

We consider a firm A initially owning a software platform (e.g. operating system) and an application for this platform. The specific knowledge of another firm B is needed to make the platform successful by creating a further application. When B's application is completed, A has incentives to...

The paper provides an up-to-date description of the distribution of female top executives in US corporations. Our data comprise a total of 54'380 observations from 2'489 firms over the time period from 1992 to 2001. Our results suggest that women are working for smaller, faster growing and more...

Income support for working low income families (the "working poor") is on top of the political agenda in Switzerland. The current social assistance system is considered inadequate to support working poor households. Labour unions propose the introduction of a general minimum wage, whereas the...

This paper is a first step toward a more fundamental theory of political economy outcomes. We start from the fundamentals of the economy, given by preferences and technology; further, we specify all available technologies for the control of resources - such as armed forces or bribing. We model...

This paper analyzes the consequences of redistribution of public funds to rent seekers. Therefore, it introduces redistribution to rent seeking agents into Barro's (1990) endogenous growth model with a productive public sector. It shows that the growth rate decreases in the share of the public...

Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgement; under conditional fees the lawyer gets an upscale premium if the case is won which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a framework where lawyers are uninformed about the...

This paper presents a simulation study that assesses the finite sample performance of the subspace algorithm cointegration analysis developed in Bauer und Wagner (2002b). The method is formulated in the state space framework, which is equivalent to the VARMA framework, in a sense made precise in...