We use a simple framework where firms in two countries serve their respective domestic markets and a world market to analyse under which conditions cost-reducing mergers will be beneficial for the merging firms, the home country, and the world as a whole. For a national merger, the policies...

Besides costs and benefits, fairness aspects tend to influence negotiating parties’ willingness to join an international agreement on climate change mitigation. Fairness is largely considered to improve the prospects of success of international negotiations and hence measures raising fairness...

High-performance work systems give workers more discretion, thereby increasing effort productivity but also shirking opportunities. We show experimentally that screening for work attitude and labor market competition are causal determinants of the viability of high-performance work systems, and...

The crisis on international financial markets that started in 2007 has shown the potential links between the financial sector and the real economy. Exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) have declined, presumably not only because of a lack of demand, but also because of restricted access of...

Zentrale Abschlussprüfungen lassen sich im Rahmen von Prinzipal-Agenten-Modellen als \"Accountability\"-Maßnahme verstehen, die Schüler und Schulen für ihre erbrachten Bildungsleistungen verantwortlich macht. Umfassende Regressionsanalysen anhand der Schülerindividualdaten von vier...

Contingent ownership structures are prevalent in joint ventures. We offer an explanation based on the investment incentives provided by such an arrangement. We consider a holdup problem in which two parties make relationship-specific investments sequentially to generate a joint surplus in the...

This paper explores whether the cost channel solves the price puzzle. We set-up a New Keynesian DSGE model and estimate it for the euro area by adopting a minimum distance approach. Our findings suggest that - under certain parameter restrictions which are not rejected by the data - the cost...

We analyze the German ecotax package in a model of overlapping generations and majority voting. The package consists of the ecotax rate and the budgetary rule which assigns a fraction of the tax revenue to the reduction of pension contributions while holding pension benefits constant. The old...