Using linked employer-employee panel data for West Germany that include direct information on the competition faced by plants, we investigate the effect of product market competition on the gender pay gap. Controlling for match fixed effects we find that intensified competition significantly...

For a cross-section of 123 European regions, we find evidence for a positive effect of generalized trust on regional innovation activity. We aim to identify causal effects by using instrumental variables from climate and soil data, drawing from recent literature on the effects of climate on...

We introduce a new skewed and leptokurtic distribution derived from the hyperbolic secant distribution and Johnson's S transformation. Properties of this new distribution are given. Finally, we empirically demonstrate in the context of financial return data that its exibility is comparable to...

We experimentally investigate a Bertrand market with homogenous goods where sellers may behave socially responsible by donating a share of their profits to an existing non-profit organization. In our experiment, we find that this Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) component is used...

This paper analyzes the effect of standard deductions on itemized deductions. Using German income tax data, it shows that the distribution of itemized deductions above the level of the standard deduction is positively skewed, with the mode lying somewhat above the standard deduction. This...

The problem of selecting a prior distribution when it comes to Bayes estimation often constitutes a choice between conjugate or noninformative priors, since in both cases the resulting posterior Bayes estimator (PBE) can be solved analytically and is therefore easy to calculate. Nevertheless,...

Nonparametric prediction of time series is a viable alternative to parametric prediction, since parametric prediction relies on the correct specification of the process, its order and the distribution of the innovations. Often these are not known and have to be estimated from the data. Another...

Li, Fang & Tian (1994) assert that special quasi-linear means should be preferred to the simple arithmetic mean for robustness properties. The strategy that is used to show robustness is completely detached from the concepts wellknown from the theory of robust statistics. Robustness of...

J.M. Keynes (1911) shows how distributions look like for which the arithmetic, the geometric and the harmonic mean are most probable values. We propose a general class of distributions for which the quasi-arithmetic means are ML-estimators such that these distributions can be transformed into an...

Most of the bankruptcy prediction models developed so far have in common that they are based on quantitative data or more precisely financial ratios. However, useful information can be lost when disregarding soft information. In this work, we develop an automated content analysis technique to...