Commodities do not only serve the purpose of satisfying direct needs in the production and con-sumption process. Some of them can also be used to display social status and to affect the position of an individual in society. This paper addresses the question under which circum-stances...

Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich systematisch mit dem Komplex der Rationalisierung medizinischer Leistungen. Als Ergebnis ergibt sich, daß explizite Rationierung der impliziten vorzuziehen ist und die Rationierungen möglichst ex ante auf der Makro-Ebene erfolgen sollten, ohne Gefährdung...

The paper surveys economic aspects of sustainability and the use of complex ecological systems. In a first step, an economist's view of the concept of sustainability is presented. Then, a simple model of the economic use of a dynamic ecological system is discussed. It is shown how economically...

Endogenous firm location is analyzed in a discrete two-region-two-firm model of product differentiation. In a non-cooperative game, two regional governments first decide on the imposition (or lifting) of domestic production standards; firms then choose technology (clean or polluting), location...

The anomalous inverse concentration-price relationship observed by some researchers in the newspaper market has been attributed to scale economies. In this paper we suggest that the newspaper's (or magazine's) double-product feature (i.e., news supplied to readers and advertising space supplied...

Strong lending relationships between banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in the bank-based financial system of Germany. So far, they have been mainly described by the notion of an housebank and transactional features of long-term bank-customer relationships. The...

This paper analyzes the relationship between endogenous growth and unemployment. It provides knowledge diffusion as the link between innovation-based growth through creative destruction and the labor market outcome. Three dimensions of knowledge are considered: human capital (general skills),...

We simulate a two-sectoral, three-period OLG-model with endogenous fertility and endogenous education. Parents receive utility from quantity and quality (education) of their offspring, generating a trade-off between the former and the latter. Since education governs efficiency in production,...