Although there seems to be a broad consensus among economists that purely floating or completely fixed exchange rates (the so-called corner solutions) are the only viable alternatives of exchange rate management. many countries do not behave according to this paradigm and adopt a strategy within...

This paper presents a model of educational production that tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government...

We consider a monopolistic supplier’s optimal choice of wholesale tariffs when downstream firms are privately informed about their retail costs. Under discriminatory pricing, downstream firms that differ in their ex ante distribution of retail costs are offered different tariffs. Under uniform...

Natural disasters affect bilateral trade. We use this fact to generalize the instrumental variables strategy of Frankel and Romer (1999) to a panel setup. This allows revisiting an old question: Does openness cause per capita GDP? We work with a modified gravity framework in which we interact...

In der Fachstudie wurden verschiedene XML-Datenbanken verglichen. Dabei wurden sowohl native als auch \"XML-enabled\" Datenbanken betrachtet. Um einen objektiven Vergleich zu erreichen wurden verschiedene Kriterien ausgearbeitet und geprüft inwiefern diese von den getesteten Datenbanken...

Recent work has started to analyze the choice of international commodity tax base under conditions of imperfect competition. This paper focuses on the effects of changing levels of trade barriers in a model where firms engage in duopoly competition and governments set commodity taxes...

Across Prussian counties and towns, Protestantism led to more schooling already in 1816, before the Industrial Revolution. This supports a human capital theory of Protestant economic history and rules out a Weberian explanation of Protestant education just resulting from industrialization.

Frequently, international environmental negotiations have been analyzed in two-agent (2 × 2) games. Yet, in order to involve additional strategies, (3 × 3) games gained attention recently. We employ such a (3 × 3) game setting in order to depict international negotiations on climate change...