This study analyses the effect of public sector sponsored continuous vocational training and retraining in East Germany after unification with West Germany in 1990. It presents estimates of the average gains from training participation in terms of earnings, employment probabilities and career...

It is an everyday experience that the behavior of individuals belonging to the same social group tends to be correlated. In his seminal work, Manski differentiates two basic types of feedback between group and individual and he maintains that it is not possible to discriminate between the two by...

After unification of the East and West German economies in July 1990 the public sector devoted substantial resources to train the labour force of the former centrally planned East German economy. In this paper we describe the basic trends of the rules and regulations governing these efforts. We...

In economic reality, reactions to external shocks often come with a delay. On the other hand, agents try to anticipate future developments. Both can lead to difference-differential equations with an advancing argument. These are more difficult to handle than either difference or differential...

This paper investigates how the abolishment of a ban on tuition fees affects the quality of higher education with centralized and decentralized decision making. It is shown that tuition fees fully crowd public funds under centralization and quality of university education does not improve....

The process of capital accumulation understood as a rise in the capitallabor ratio steadily raises the scarcity of labor with respect to capital. This movement in relative factor prices may act as an incentive for profit-maximizing firms to direct innovations towards labor saving technologies....

This paper explores the impact of university finance reforms on teaching quality. It is shown that the graduate tax can achieve efficiency with tuition fees administered by the government, while student grants, pure and income contingent loans are bound to fail. All options are inefficient when...

Using panel data for 106 countries in 1971-1997, we estimate generalized least squares regressions to explain IMF lending as well as monetary and fiscal policies in the recipient countries. With respect to moral hazard, we find that a country's rate of monetary expansion and its government...

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 overlapping generations model to predict rates of return over a long horizon, taking demographic...

Individual moral hazard engendered by health insurance and monopolistic production are both typical phenomena of drug markets. We develop a simple model containing these two elements and show that private agents tend to overinsure themselves against health respectively drug expenses if drugs can...