We study the impact of the arrival of macroeconomic news on the informational and noise-driven components in high-frequency quote processes and their conditional variances. Bid and ask returns are decomposed into a common ('efficient return') factor and two market-side-specific components...

We compare the importance of occupational gender segregation for the gender wage gap in East and West Germany in 1995 using a sample of social-security wage records of full-time workers. East Germany, which features a somewhat higher degree of occupational segregation, has a gender wage gap on...

Utilizing a new survey of employers, this paper examines how and why establishments differ in their willingness to permit an older full-time white-collar worker to take phased retirement. Phased retirement means that an older worker remains with his or her employer while gradually reducing work...

Over the last two decades, many countries around the world have been enthusiastically embarking on the path of decentralization. Decentralization has been advocated as a powerful means to improve the provision of health care services and health outcomes in developing countries. However, due to a...

A structural model of entry and fiscal policy is presented. It shows that taxation of variable production costs can increase product prices, lower competition, and reduce the availability of new products in small markets. The model?s test is based on a unique nationwide fiscal experiment. We...

This paper aims to explore the interrelation between health and work decisions of elderly workers, taking the various ways in which health and work can influence each other explicitly into account. For this, two issues are of relevance. Self-assessed health measures are usually at hand in...

We use parametric power ARCH models of the conditional variance of inflation to model the relationship between inflation and its uncertainty using monthly data for Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden over a period ranging from 1962 to 2004.For all three countries inflation significantly raises...

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. Results obtained by a panel model with spatial correlation indicate that the relevance of common business cycle factors is rather stable over the past two decades in the euro area and the US. Ongoing business...