This paper explores the robustness of the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) hypothesis.We analyze a panel of OECD countries from 1970 to 2008 and compare three different datasets on sectoral productivity, including a newly constructed database on total factor productivity. Overall, our DOLS estimation...

Regulators and shareholders are calling for independent directors. Independent directors, however, have numerous external professional commitments. Using  To- bin’s Q as an approximation  of market valuation and controlling for endogeneity, our empirical analysis reveals that neither...

This paper empirically examines the impact of trust-based working time on firm performance using panel data from German establishments. Trust-based working time is a human resource management practice that involves a high degree of worker autonomy in terms of scheduling individual working time....

The great financial turmoil that started 2007 has brought bank regulation back into the political debate. There is talk about imposing new regulations on banks and other financial intermediaries. Yet, we are not convinced that it is completely understood how the existing regulation affects...

To gain insights  about  the  quality  of board’s  firing  decisions,  we investigate  abnormal stock returns and operating performance around CEO-turnover announcements in a new hand- collected sample of 208 “clean” turnover events between January 1998 and June 2009. Unlike the ...

There are estimates that up to 30% of hospital costs are due to inefficiently coordinated hospital processes. As a result many hospitals have tried to model and to reengineer their business processes. These efforts have very often been abandoned, because the normally constructed total models of...

A multi-stage model on the course of war is presented: Individual battles are modeled as private value all-pay auctions with asymmetric combatants of two opposing teams. These auctions are placed within a multi-stage framework with a tug-of-war structure. Such framing provides a microfounded...

We evaluate a wage subsidy program that is targeted at long-term unemployed workers in Germany. We use an alternative identification procedure compared to empirical studies con­ducted so far. Exploiting the particular program regulations and large administrative data we estimate the impact of...

This paper studies a Stieltjes-type moment problem defined by the generalized lognormal distribution, a heavy-tailed distribution with applications in economics, finance and related fields. It arises as the distribution of the exponential of a random variable following a generalized error...

Im Rahmen einer Fragebogenuntersuchung werden die Determinanten derKapitalstrukturpolitik bzw. der Finanzierungsentscheidungen bei deutschen,österreichische n und schweizerischen börsennotierten Unternehmen untersucht.Die Ergebnisse decken sich weitgehend mit der Befragungsstudie vonGraham und...