This study examines the impact of product market competition and corporate governance on productivity growth in German manufacturing. Using a panel of almost 500 firms over the years 1986 to 1994, we find that firms experience higher productivity growth when operating in markets with intense...

Anchoring vignettes are commonly used to study and correct for differential item functioning and response bias in subjective survey questions. Self-assessed health status is a leading example. A crucial assumption of the vignette methodology is ’vignette equivalence’: The health status of...

We present evidence from a laboratory experiment that individuals who feel having been treated unfairly in the interaction with others are more likely to cheat in a subsequent, unrelated game. We interpret this result as showing that the violation of a social norm (fairness) by others can be...

Germany has one of the most generous public pension and health insurance systems of the world, yet private savings are high and remain positive until old age, even for most low income households. How can we explain what we might want to term the \"German savings puzzle\"? We provide a...

This paper discusses the consequences of population aging and a fundamental pension reform - that is, a shift towards more pre-funding - for capital markets in Germany. We use a stylized closed-economy, overlapping-generations model to compare the effects of the recent German pension reform with...

We discuss three methodological issues concerning forecasts of the outcome of financial distress. First, we argue that rather than using a binary model the outcome of financial distress should be modeled using a multinomial specification that distinguishes between failure, survival as going...