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The purpose of this article is to quantify the employment effects of the recent German welfare reform. The key element of this reform was to merge the coexisting transfer systems Social Assistance (SA) and Unemployment Assistance (UA) into one unified benefit (Arbeitslosengeld II - ALG II). We also consider a second reform scenario that is intended to further improve the labour supply incentives of low-skilled workers. Our methodological contribution is to use an integrated CGE-microsimulation model. In adopting such an approach, we are able to combine the advantages of microsimulation studies by accounting for the large amount of heterogeneity in terms of households' preferences and budget constraints with the advantages of an applied general equilibrium model. The latter permits us to identify potential general equilibrium repercussions through changes in wages and unemployment. The simulations indicate that the introduction of ALG II results in a negligible increase in employment of only 45 000 individuals. In contrast, a cut in benefit levels combined with a decrease in transfer withdrawal is shown to produce somewhat larger employment effects of about 190 000 individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the debate about the relative qualities of floor and electronic trading systems by analysing the effects of bringing forward the Xetra closing time from 8.00 pm to 5.30 pm in November 2003, while the Frankfurt floor remains open until 8.00 pm. This natural experiment provides a ‘cleaner’ institutional setting than in Venkataraman (2001), as it enables us to investigate trading quality on both platforms for the same stocks in the same country before and after the event. The empirical evidence suggests that primarily institutional investors trading in large stocks transfer to the floor when Xetra closes earlier. It appears that investors remain with Xetra for informed trading though. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we investigate the cost efficiency of German local governments in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg in 2004 using a stochastic frontier approach. Besides being the first study on German data, we add two elements to the literature. First, we provide a comparative perspective, allowing us to embed our results in the broader literature. Second, unlike most previous studies, we explicitly account for exogenous or nondiscretionary influences when estimating municipal efficiency scores. The results suggest that disregarding such exogenous factors can lead to significant and systematic bias in the estimated inefficiency levels. Particularly, underestimation of efficiency occurs for municipalities with high tourist activity, while the reverse is true for municipalities with high unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of fiscal convergence in the EU is a relevant issue in the context of economic integration and fiscal harmonization and we report new empirical evidence on this topic using a time series approach. We apply unit root and stationarity tests with an endogenous break for the study of long run, deterministic and stochastic convergence of the national tax burden taking Germany, the United Kingdom and the European average as benchmarks. Only the United Kingdom and Germany show long run convergence and few countries converge despite harmonization efforts and fiscal competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we use a unique rich newly built data set for German manufacturing enterprises to investigate the relationship between product diversification and the stability of sales and employment. We find that contrary to portfolio theoretic considerations, more diversified firms exhibit a higher variability of sales and employment. However, the effects are negligibly small from an economics point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the relationship between transfers arising from EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and convergence in both farmers’ revenues and interpersonal income redistribution using a sample of 26 regions in the state of Hesse, Germany, over the period 1979 to 2004 and 1991 to 2004, respectively. We thereby combine the concept of sigma convergence with Shorrock's inequality decomposition in order to determine the driving forces in distributional dynamics of farmers’ revenues. Additionally, we apply alternative methodologies to investigate how per capita incomes have evolved over time. Explicitly comparing the situations with and without transfers, our results indicate that the CAP tends to smooth differences in farmers’ revenues across regions, but does not impede a strong divergence through time. The latter is mainly driven by increasing structural differences between the regions, while disparities in intensity turn out to be less important. The empirical analysis also shows that CAP transfers reduce income inequality within society as a whole. However, this impact proved to be negligible in explaining distributional dynamics and growth of per capita incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study analyses the treatment effects of public training programmes for the unemployed in Germany. Based on propensity score matching methods, we extend the picture that has been sketched in previous studies by estimating the treatment effects of medium-term programmes for different skill and age groups. Our results indicate that programme participation has a positive impact on employment probabilities and earnings for almost all sub-groups. We find little evidence for the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects, and the magnitude of the differences is quite small. Our results thus – at least in part – conflict with the strategy to provide training increasingly to individuals with better employment prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using a sample of 1485 funded firms in Germany, we analyse the driving forces of Venture Capitalist (VC) syndication and try to disentangle the circumstances under which VCs engage in collaboration with partners. The results indicate that syndication is more pronounced for younger funded firms. For firms where products are far from commercialization, the risks that investors face are more severe. With respect to disentangling the role of diversification and managerial resource motives we analyse the impact of syndication activities on the industry concentration in VC portfolios. The results indicate that (all else equal) more syndication leads to more pronounced concentration on certain industries. These findings are in line with the argument that VCs involve partners to leverage upon their idiosyncratic skills and knowledge to either improve deal selection and/or provide a better quality of managerial advice to the funded firm rather than simply using syndication to diversify portfolios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iyer and Velu (2006) have convincingly argued that contemporary analyses of fertility behaviour fail to explain why a woman (or a couple) will choose to postpone childbirth, and in particular to consider the role of uncertainty in this regard. They have addressed this lacuna in the literature by using a real options approach to model fertility decisions by relating uncertainty experienced by individuals to the likelihood of childbirth. However, they did not present empirical evidence. Since the theory implies the existence of two offsetting effects of uncertainty on fertility decisions, a positive insurance effect and a negative option value effect, it is not easy to reject the theory on the basis of empirical analysis, when one of these effects offsets the other. We construct such a test for East (and also West) Germany during that country's reunification, which takes advantage of the fact that because of the country's strong welfare system, the insurance effect should be dominated by the option value effect, thereby suggesting that the net relationship should be negative. The results provide rather strong support for the real options link, especially for Eastern Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the deficits of the German Lander (regional states) for the period 1960 to 2005 and test a number of hypotheses derived from the literature on the political economy of public deficits. We find evidence for the weak government hypothesis, that is, coalition governments issue significantly more debt than single party governments - a result that is typically explained by the common pool problem. As our data suggest, this result crucially hinges on the position or strength of the finance minister within coalition governments. We find that coalition governments with a strong finance minister are - in terms of borrowing - not significantly different from single party governments. In addition, we find (weak) evidence for an opportunistic political business cycle. As borrowing is significantly lower in pre-election years it appears that German voters favour fiscal discipline. There is no evidence for partisan behaviour, so party ideology seems to play a negligible role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a simple method for screening competition in differentiated products oligopoly with a small number of competitors. In many situations, estimation of price elasticities of demand may be impossible due to difficulties in defining demand or missing data on sales. However, even without information on price elasticities, in certain situations it is possible to test for the static noncooperative Nash-Bertrand equilibrium, which in the case of rejection, may be important screening information for antitrust authorities. The static noncooperative Nash-Bertrand equilibrium may be rejected when demand is linear and in the estimation of best-response functions, the coefficients on the competitors' prices are statistically greater than 0.5. The application of this method is illustrated by the example of German mobile telephony using monthly data between January 1998 and December 2002. According to the estimation results, the observed prices in the segment of low-users cannot be the outcome of a static noncooperative Nash-Bertrand equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using nominal and real exchange rates for Ireland relative to Germany and the UK from 1975 to 2003, this article explores likely sources of nonlinearity in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) relationships and difficulties in employing an I(1)/I(0) econometric framework. Tests for fractional integration and nonlinearity, including random field regression-based procedures, are applied. Results reveal shortcomings in the standard cointegration and smooth transition autoregression approaches to modelling, and point to multiple structural changes models. Such a model for the case of Ireland and Germany suggests that PPP holds not only in the long-run but also in the medium to short term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Targeted wage subsidies paid to employers are an important element of active labour market policies in Germany. This article uses propensity score matching to investigate their effect on the employment and unemployment rates of subsidized hard-to-place workers. In a first scenario, we estimate the average treatment effect of a subsidy on previously unemployed individuals. A second scenario analyses the effects of a subsidy on employment probabilities conditional on taking-up employment. The third scenario investigates the additional effect of a subsidy on individuals, who have participated in a short-term training measure beforehand. Summing up and in line with the literature, the results show that subsidies have a favourable effect on the employment prospects of participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to address the question of convergence across German districts in the first decade after German unification by drawing out and emphasizing some stylized facts of regional per capita income dynamics. We achieve this by employing nonparametric techniques which focus on the evolution of the entire cross-sectional income distribution. In particular, we follow a distributional approach to convergence based on kernel density estimation and implement a number of tests to establish the statistical significance of our findings. This article finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal/bimodal distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has three goals. First, we wish to compare three multidimensional approaches to poverty and check to what extent they identify the same households as poor. Second, we aim at better understanding the determinants of poverty by estimating logit regressions with five categories of explanatory variables: size of the household, age of the head of the household, her gender, marital status and status at work. Third, we introduce a decomposition procedure proposed recently in the literature, the so-called Shapley decomposition, in order to determine the exact marginal impact of each of the categories of explanatory variables. Our empirical analysis is based on data made available by the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We used its third wave and selected five countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In economic, scientometric and innovation research, often so-called specialization indices are used. These indices measure comparative strengths or weaknesses as well as specialization profiles of the observation units with respect to certain criteria, such as patenting and publication or trade activities. They allow question like: is Germany specialized in the export of motor vehicles? Or is the UK specialized in biotech patents? Unfortunately, little is known about their statistical properties, which makes valid inferencing difficult. In this article we prove asymptotic normality for a certain class of scientometric, technological and some economic, though nonmonetary, specialization indices. We provide asymptotic confidence intervals and demonstrate in an example how to obtain statistically sound results. We will also address the problem of normalization of these indicators. All procedures proposed are provided in an add on package for R statistical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we analyse the individual effects of becoming disabled on key aspects of labour market outcomes in Germany. The German Socio Economic Panel (1984-2002) collects socio-economic and health data. This data is organized such that the potential problems for such an estimation that may arise from disability not being a random event are considerably reduced. Using matching methods, we find a reduction of individual employment chances of about 9 to 13%, the level depending on the degree of disability. We find no statistically significant evidence for a reduction in income or an increase in unemployment due to disability. We interpret these findings as an indication that the German social security systems appear to successfully mitigate or at least reduce the economic hardship that comes with the event of disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyse stylized facts for Germany's business cycle at the firm level. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank's balance sheet statistics covering, on average, 55 000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we estimate transition probabilities of a firm in a certain real sales growth regime switching to another regime in the next period, e.g. whether a firm that has witnessed a high growth rate is likely to stay in a regime of high growth or is bound to switch to a regime of low growth in the subsequent period. We find that these probabilities depend on the business cycle position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent empirical studies of the determinants of multinational activity across countries have found overwhelming support for a horizontal rather than a vertical model of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The majority of these studies use data either originating in or targeted at the US. This article presents evidence from a dataset of German inward and outward FDI. The dataset is similar in scope to the widely used US Bureau of Economic Analysis data, making the results comparable to those from previous studies. In addition, a new empirical specification is employed that avoids some of the problems that have plagued these studies. The results provide little indication of vertical multinationals. FDI happens largely between similarly endowed countries. Multinational firms originate in skilled-labour abundant countries, although the evidence is mixed on whether they are also small. A novel result is that German firms invest disproportionately in other European countries, while the reverse is not true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing work incentives for people with low income is a common topic in the policy debate across European countries. The 'Mini-Job' reform in Germany had a similar motivation. We carry out an ex-post evaluation to identify the short-run effects of this reform. Our identification strategy uses an exogenous variation in the interview months in the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which allows us to distinguish groups that are affected by the reform from those who are not. To account for seasonal effects we additionally use a Difference-In-Differences (DID) strategy. Descriptives show that there is a post-reform increase in the number of mini-jobs. However, we show that this increase cannot be causally related to the reform, since the short-run effects are very limited. Only single men seem to react immediately and increase secondary job holding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the tax policy debate, differentiation of value-added taxes (VAT) is often justified by distributional concerns. Our quantitative analysis for Germany indicates that such concerns are misplaced. We find that the abolition of VAT differentiation has only negligible redistributive effects. Instead, reduced VAT rates are found to act as industry-specific subsidies. Whereas the overall welfare effects of pure VAT reforms are very small, a revenue-neutral introduction of a harmonized VAT combined with reductions in the marginal income tax rates or social security contributions turns out to yield substantial welfare gains for all households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to tight public budget constraints, the efficiency of publicly financed universities in Germany is receiving increasing attention in the academic as well as in the public discourse. Against this background, we analyse the efficiency of 72 public German universities for the years 1998-2003, applying data envelopment and stochastic frontier analysis. Contrary to earlier studies, we account for the faculty composition of universities which proves to be an essential element in the efficiency of higher education. Our main finding is that East German universities have performed better in total factor productivity change compared to those in West Germany. However, when looking at mean efficiency scores over the sample period, West German universities still appear at the top end of relative efficiency outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on German panel data between 1984 and 1999, we test for the interaction of social security benefits and private wealth formation. In a simple life-cylce model benefits from public pension systems should displace equal amounts of private retirement accumulation. Our estimate for the offset effect, corrected for several possible measurement biases, is much lower, however, than expected from pure life-cycle considerations and less than comparable estimates for the US and the UK. This result thus supports other evidence on a particular German savings puzzle, which might be due to market imperfections and/or bounded rational behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful innovative activity is a major contribution to the intangible capital of firms. Although its importance is generally acknowledged, the contribution to companies' profits is a priori unclear. We present the results of an empirical study on the effects of the patent stock on profitability. The database is a representative sample of German manufacturing firms and we use a number of control variables including measures of competition and firm governance. It turns out that the patent stock has a strong and robust effect on profitability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a decomposition method for Tobit models is derived, which allows the differences in observed outcome variables between two groups to be decomposed into a part that is explained by differences in observed characteristics and a part attributable to differences in the estimated coefficients. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that in the case of censored dependent variables this decomposition method produces more reliable results than the conventional Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition for linear regression models. Finally, our method is applied to a decomposition of the gender wage gap using German data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the long-run effects of inflation on economic output for 10 sectors of the economy, with a sample of 7 countries. The analysis is done using long-run restrictions in a vector autoregression and reports long-run multipliers with bootstrapped confidence bands. The results suggest that some sectors seem to be affected differently than others, as well as significant heterogeneity across countries. The results suggest the strongest effects in the low inflation countries Germany and Japan as has been found in similar studies. In contrast to research using growth regressions, the evidence suggests a positive long-run effect of inflation on output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores which of two hypotheses, market segmentation or investor sentiment, determines the behaviour of Closed-End Country Funds (CECFs) with the inclusion of risk factors. The risk factors are proxied volatility, as estimated with a Bivariate Markov-switching Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (BSWARCH) model, which simultaneously includes foreign and US markets. Our findings are as follows. On average, a positive response is larger than a negative response in terms of absolute value. And, the market segmentation hypothesis with risk factors gains support in Mexico, where CECF returns are related to a market with low volatility but not to one with high volatility. Third, the investor sentiment hypothesis, which argues that CECF returns are not responsive to foreign markets, is weakly supported in Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia and, to a lesser degree, in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comparative study looks at the international impact of leading economics journals published in Spain, Italy, France and Germany. It also aims to establish whether they play similar roles in these four countries. For this purpose, data were collected on the number of times that articles published in these journals are cited in international journals on the ISI Journals lists. The study focused on the number and characteristics of the citations received during the period 1996 to 2004 by articles published between 1995 and 1999 in a limited number of Spanish, Italian, French and German journals. The international impact of the Spanish journals was found to be similar in size and characteristics to that of Italian publications. However, it differed sharply from the impact of the highest-ranking French and German journals, which received considerably more citations. Moreover, restricting the group of citing journals to the 'blue ribbon journals', the highest-ranking publications in the economics sector, only the leading journals in Germany and France received a significant number of references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the possibilities and restrictions of inter-generational income development for ageing and stagnating economies. In a first step, the basic logic of ageing will be investigated in a simple dynamic model. In particular, the investigation points out the existence of the demographic distribution mass and its meaning for inter-generational income development. It proves that the demographic distribution mass makes it possible for wages and pensions to grow simultaneously in an ageing and stagnating economy. In a second step, the development of wages and pensions is simulated for the German case through to the year 2050. It is demonstrated that (under normal circumstances) it can be expected that the burden from ageing can almost always be over-compensated by the economic growth of the respective year. Against this background, ageing appears to be rather a problem of acceptance and income distribution than that of real income reductions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates tax-planning behaviour by means of inter-company finance and the effectiveness of government countermeasures via thin-capitalization rules. A simple theoretical model which considers the financing decision of a multinational company is used to obtain empirical implications. The empirical analysis, based on German inbound investment data from 1996 to 2004, confirms a significant impact of tax-rate differentials on the use of inter-company debt. The effectiveness of the German thin-capitalization rule is tested by using legal amendments as natural experiments. The results suggest that thin-capitalization rules induce significantly lower internal borrowing. Hence, tax planning via internal finance is effectively limited by thin-capitalization rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how long head coaches survive in the clubs of the first German football league ('Bundesliga'), where the dismissal of a presumably weak coach is a generally adopted procedure in case of a poor sporting performance of the team. We use duration models for repeated events to accommodate the correlation within individuals. We find that the head coaches of successful teams and those working during the more recent 'Bosman Effect' period are more likely to survive in the Bundesliga. Moreover, the head coaches of clubs with relatively high team wage bills are likely to survive for shorter periods of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses on the basis of a multivariate analysis ex post the effects on the jobs market of a soccer World Cup, in this case the 2006 World Cup held in Germany. In addition to three methods already used for other analyses in studies of sporting events, an extended 'Difference-in-Difference' estimate is used in order to compare the development of the numbers of unemployed in the 12 World Cup venues with the development of the numbers of unemployed in 63 other German cities. The results demonstrate that in none of the respective match venues did the effect of the sporting event on unemployment differ significantly from zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncovered Interest Rate Parity (UIP) states that bonds in different denomination should produce the same returns if the maturities of the bonds are the same. Given this, if a foreign bond produces a lower holding period return than a home bond of the same maturity, for their remaining lives the same foreign bond ought to produce a return higher than the home bond. A test is designed according to this relationship. With 1 to 6 year interest rate data of U.S., Britain and Germany from 1979 to 2005, our test shows that this relationship is more reliable for 6-year interest rates than the shorter rates in general. This result lends support to the long-run UIP. A trading strategy is developed by utilizing this idea. We show that positive returns can be achieved by the strategy for bonds of longer horizons. This result also serves as indirect evidence of the long-run UIP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a quarterly regulatory dataset for German banks from 1999 to 2004, this article analyses the effects of banks' regulatory capital on the transmission of monetary policy in a system of liquidity networks. The dynamic panel regression results provide evidence in favour of the bank capital channel theory. Banks holding less regulatory capital and less interbank liquidity react more restrictively to a monetary tightening than their peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a questionnaire and a sample of students and personnel managers we establish the existence of age discrimination in the hiring process in Germany and Norway. As expected, age discrimination is more prominent in Germany where the hiring probability of equally qualified applicants is reduced by about 22 percentage points due to an age differential of 14 years as opposed to only 12 percentage points in Norway. Within both countries the tendency to discriminate does not differ between students and personnel managers and does not depend on the age of the decision maker. 'The phenomenon of unemployment among older workers [...] is characterized less by the risk of becoming unemployed than by the problem of remaining unemployed and failing to find new work.' Frerichs and Naegele (1998, p. 59) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous empirical studies of job creation schemes (JCS) in Germany have shown that the average effects for the participating individuals are negative. However, we find that this is not true for all strata of the population. Identifying individual characteristics that are responsible for the effect heterogeneity and using this information for a better allocation of individuals therefore bears some scope for improving programme efficiency. We present several stratification strategies and discuss the occurring effect heterogeneity. Our findings show that JCS do neither harm nor improve the labour market chances for most of the groups. Exceptions are long-term unemployed men in West and long-term unemployed women in East and West Germany who benefit from participation in terms of higher employment rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the relationship between self-assessed health (SAH) and subsequent mortality in the German Socio-Economic Panel. Specifically, I examine whether socio-economic characteristics of respondents have an effect on mortality, conditional on SAH. Such conditional effects are shown to exist for various covariates, including age, income and wealth. These findings question the comparability of SAH across different socio-economic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether and to what extent employment policy measures (co-) financed by the European Social Fund in Germany meet their objective. Specifically, it is analysed whether qualification programs for employed workers in the German state of Saxony were effective in terms of employment protection. To this end, a control function approach is implemented which utilizes a unique firm-level dataset. This model explicitly accounts for unobserved heterogeneity between participating and nonparticipating companies by modelling the participation decision process. Our results suggest a positive effect of program participation. However, this positive treatment effect varies considerably across different sub-groups of the treatment as well as the comparison group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate the pay-performance relationship of soccer players using individual data from eight seasons of the German soccer league Bundesliga. We find a nonlinear pay-performance relationship, indicating that salary does indeed affect individual performance. The results further show that player performance is affected not only by absolute income level but also by relative income position. An additional analysis of the performance impact of team effects provides evidence of a direct impact of team-mate attributes on individual player performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work examines the behaviour of the input and output measures of the R&D process in the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, in the second half of the 20th century. The researcher and idea stock series can be construed as stationary fluctuations around a trend function, with a main breakpoint at the end of the 1960s. All the countries exhibit slower growth after their last breaks that during the decades preceding its first breaks. In this connection, the United States and Germany appear to represent the end points in the range of incidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study affiliations for the countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) with Germany and the USA, using various business cycle measures derived from quarterly real GDP. These measures are Hodrick-Prescott and Baxter-King filtered series and annual growth rates. By using rolling contemporaneous and maximum (over a short lead/lag interval) correlations, we document increasing correlations of EMU countries with Germany, with these typically being largest during the 1990s. We also document a strong leading role for the USA in relation to these countries in the period since 1993, thereby correcting the fallacy that the European business cycle was disjointed from the USA for most of the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies non-parametric and parametric tests to assess the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in Germany. Traditional issues in electricity sector benchmarking are addressed, such as the role of scale effects and optimal utility size, as well as new evidence specific to the situation in Germany. Labour, capital, and peak load capacity are used as inputs, and units sold and the number of customers as output. The data cover 307 (out of 553) German electricity distribution utilities. A data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied with constant returns to scale (CRS) as the main productivity analysis technique, whereas stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) with distance function is the verification method. The results suggest that returns to scale play but a minor role; only very small utilities have a significant cost advantage. Low customer density is found to affect the efficiency score significantly, in particular in the lower third of all observations. Surprisingly, East German utilities feature a higher average efficiency than their West German counterparts. The correlation tests imply a high coherence of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to analyse the effects of short- and long-term unemployment on health satisfaction. The data source used for the analysis is the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) which, given its longitudinal structure, allows one to better overcome the problem of endogeneity. Three different models are used in order to assess the effect of short and long-term unemployment and reemployment on health satisfaction. The results show that short-term unemployment has only a significant (and negative) effect for men, while for women short-term unemployment does not have a significant effect on health satisfaction. Being unemployed for a long period has a significant and negative effect for both men and women. Finally, it can be also concluded from the empirical analysis that reemployment has a significant and positive effect on health satisfaction for both unemployed men and women, independent of how long individuals have been unemployed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various attempts to assess the performance of German hospitals have generated a wide range of estimates regarding their efficiency. These attempts were based on different, often rather small data sets consisting of heterogeneous hospitals; the techniques applied range from simple benchmarking approaches to studies which employ Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Some studies report ‘dramatic differences in efficiency’ and propose savings potentials of 50%; others find an average efficiency in excess of 95% and characterize almost 75% of their observations as fully efficient. This study presents results for two datasets representative of two segments of the German hospital system. These segments comprise all hospitals that have one internal medicine and one surgery department; the hospitals are located in the old federal states of Germany. None of the hospitals provides tertiary care. DEA can be applied because all hospitals offer a comparable quality and range of services. The results were estimated with a DEA-bootstrapping procedure and suggest an average bias–corrected efficiency of around 80%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-sectional evidence on price levels is scarce for all countries. However, several studies suggest that there might exist considerable differences in price levels within countries, which has obvious welfare implications. A sample of price levels in 50 German cities in 1993 is used to analyse the determinants of inter-city price level differentials. The most important explanatory variables for price level differentials are population size and density and the average wage level. Using this information, the price levels are predicted in all 440 German districts and aggregated to the state level. At the state level convergence of the price levels to a common mean is found, but at a very low speed. The estimated half-life is about 19 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study empirically examines the relationship between public funding and repertoire decisions in the German public theatre sector. A cross-sectional econometric model is constructed to estimate the effects for a sample of 127 public theatres covering the theatre season 1998/1999 using a conventionality index as the dependent variable which has to be calculated first. The empirical results show that public subsidy, subscription income, multiple venues, the existence of other theatres in a community as well as the size and the level of education of a community have a significant impact on repertoire conventionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important aim of severance payments is to reduce the economic disadvantages of dismissed employees. However, it may well be the case that a considerable fraction of employees is actually better off, if they are re-employed shortly after their dismissal. This is the first attempt to estimate the relevance of overcompensation by severance payments. It is found that about 7% of dismissed employees or about one quarter of those with severance payments are overcompensated in Germany. In particular, employees with many years of tenure have chances to receive severance payments as well as wage increases in their new jobs subsequent to dismissal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that instructional student ratings measure differences in pedagogical productivity, this study examines whether perceived attractiveness of German university teachers impact on these differences. Apart from some refinements and adjustments to idiosyncracies of the German system of higher learning, the quantitative analysis widely follows the strategy of the seminal work by Hamermesh and Parker (2005), based on US data. In comparison to findings for the USA, perceived attractiveness of teachers is found to have, if at all, only a weakly significant and quantitatively less important impact on the evaluation outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which dimensions of wage setting differ across establishments applying collective contracts and uncovered establishments? The empirical analysis reported here utilizes German linked employer–employee data for the years 1990, 1995 and 2001 and is restricted to workers without supervisory functions in larger manufacturing firms. Results show that the expected wage of an average worker is higher in firms applying collective contracts, while returns to human capital and the gender wage gap are reduced. Moreover, during the 1990s these effects became stronger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of patents as indicators for innovations and standards on German trade performance are analysed in general and German–British trade in detail. The latter analysis goes a step further than the approach of Swann et al. (1996) and is based on a broader and more detailed database. The results show that Germany's export performance can primarily be explained by its innovative capacity and only to a small extent by its strength in standards. Furthermore, the results underscore the common view of the trade-fostering effect of international standards, while ‘idiosyncratic' standards have ambiguous effects on exports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]