During recent years, central banks have increased the levels of their international reserves at an unprecedented pace. In this paper, we introduce new country-specific reserve data and examine determinants of the composition of international reserves. Using a dataset of 36 countries (and the...

Die deutliche Tendenz sinkender Preisprämien im Zeitverlauf stellt differenzierende Unternehmen angesichts begrenzter Möglichkeiten versteckter, d.h. von den Kunden nicht wahrnehmbarer Leistungskürzungen, vor neue Herausforderungen. Am Beispiel der deutschen Automobilindustrie sollen...

With the exception of Ireland most OECD countries can be described by a similar demographic development which forces the welfare state to reform their social security systems and especially their pension systems. The populations of all the member states are shrinking and getting older. This...

In this paper we report the results from a detailed investigation of the shifts of the world production frontier function over the period 1980-2010. Analogous to a radar we implement a novel measurement approach for these shifts using nonparametrically computed productivity measures to scan the...

We apply various refinements of survival regression to assess the results of some basic specifications based on product life cycle theory for the case of a data set of the German automobile industry. The methods applied pay attention to biases in the coefficient estimates and the standard...

Empirical work studying the industry life cycle highlights the role of knowledge in various forms on the durations firms survive in the industry. This research leaves open the influence of historical events, which are reflected in macroeconomic factors like income, inflation, exports and...

In this paper we propose a stochastic formulation of the materials balance condition which imposes physical constraints on production technologies. The estimation of the model involves a composed error term structure that is commonly applied in the literature on stochastic frontier analysis of...

This work seeks to answer the "population question," i.e. the effect of population growth on production per capita. This question has lingered in economic thought for centuries and to this day two general lines of thought can be identified, which might be marked as the "optimist" and the...