The paper examines the effects of demographic change on federal, state and local governments in Germany with a focus on the expenditure side to answer the question, whether demographic change will induce vertical fiscal expenditure imbalances. We present estimates of the impact of demographic...

This paper explores the effects of high skilled immigration to a host country with unionized low skilled labor and an unemployment insurance scheme. We show that such immigration can create a negative immigration surplus due to adverse effects on low skilled employment, provided that the...

To explain the strategic dimension in pricing options, it will be helpful to go back to the heart of the idea behind the concept of an option: options open up the possibility to postpone current decisions to a future point of time. Because of this flexibility additional information and new...

Capital accumulation and creative destruction is modeled together with risk-averse households. The novel aspect - risk-averse households - allows to use well-known models not only for analyzing long-run growth as in the literature but also short-run fluctuations. The model remains analytically...

In the present study we analyse the topic of coalition formation in multi-issue multilateral negotiations under different voting rules when there is the opportunity of logrolling. We have carried out 3 experiments and compare our findings with the standard public choice theory predictions. In...

We examine how labor immigration affects public pensions under centralized wage setting. We show that immigration improves the sustainability of pay-as-you-go pensions if and only if total employment declines. This occurs if the labor demand elasticity exceeds the unemployment rate.

We address the problem how to estimate default probabilities for sovereign countries based on market data of traded debt. A structural Merton-type model is applied to a sample of emerging market and transition countries. In this context, only few and heterogeneous default probabilities are...

Dieser Beitrag geht davon aus, daß Goethes "Faust"-Drama in seinen beiden Teilen nicht bloß ein Bildungsgut aus dem 19. Jahrhundert darstellt, das viel zitiert, aber selten gründlich gelesen wird, sondern daß es eine weitreichende Bedeutung als moderne, ja sogar als hochaktuelle Dichtung...

This study aims at the analysis of the possible self-referential effects of economic theories and models on its own subject and of the mechanisms through which bounded rational actors perceive the self-referential nature of economic theories and might absorb their prescriptions. Thus, the focus...

This paper examines the impacts of globalization on small countries, covering the main features of globalization, the quality of national economic and commercial environment, main characteristics of small countries including important facts and concrete indicators for their development, and...