We analyze a client's choice of contract in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for cases. The distinguishing feature is that lawyers may submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer: an hourly rate, a fixed fee or a \mixed fee," which is a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly rate for...

Measures of affordability are applied in practice, e.g., to assess the affordability of energy services, water or housing. They can be interpreted as measures of deprivation in a specific domain of consumption. The large body of literature on affordability measure has little overlap with the...

Sleep is an important part of life, with an individual spending an estimated 32 years of her life asleep. Despite this importance, little is known about life satisfaction and sleep duration. Using German panel data, it is shown that sleep is an important factor for life satisfaction and that...

We study political determinants of municipality amalgamations during a boundary reform in the German state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities from 1,489 to 421. The analysis is conducted using data on the political decision makers as well as fiscal and socio-economic...

The gender wage gap is a persistent labor market phenomenon. Most research focuses on the determinants of these wage differences. We contribute to this literature by exploring a different research question: if wages of women are systematically lower than male wages, what are the distributional...

This paper proposes an incentive mechanism for transmission expansion planning. The mechanism is a bilevel program. The upper level is a profit-maximizing transmission company (Transco) which expands its transmission system while endogenously predicts and influences the generation investment....

Germany experienced a unique rise in the level of self-employment in the first two decades following unification. Applying the non-linear Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique, we find that the main factors driving these changes in the overall level of self-employment are demographic...

The paper analyses the empirical relationship between bank risk and sovereign credit risk in the euro area. Using structural VAR with daily financial markets data for 2003-13, the analysis confirms two-way causality between shocks to sovereign risk and bank risk, with the former being overall...

Das Papier zeigt, dass die seit Jahrzehnten andauernde Klagen wissenschaftlich tätiger Ökonomen,dass Öffentlichkeit und Politik nicht genug auf Ergebnisse der ökonomischen Forschung hören,zumindest für Deutschland im Quervergleich zu anderen Wissenschaften in Bezug auf das...

The German support for renewable energies in the electricity sector is based on the feed-in tariff for investors that grants guaranteed revenues for their renewable energy supply. Corresponding to differences of granted tariffs and respective market values, a surcharge on consumption covers...