Though contingent valuation is the dominant technique for the valuation of public projects, especially in the environmental sector, the high costs of contingent valuation surveys prevent the use of this method for the assessment of relatively small projects. The reason for this cost problem is...

Extensive research has been conducted on how firms and regions take advantage of spatially concentrated assets, and also why history matters to regional specialisation patterns. In brief, it seems that innovation clusters as a distinctive regional entity in international business and the...

The notion of a "real rate of interest" has been a centre of confusion in the history of economic thought. In neoclassical economics, real interest rates were designed as relative prices of contemporary and future goods and Böhm-Bawerk believed that misalignments were corrected by market...

Collective bargaining agreements still play an important role in the German wage setting system. Both existing theoretical and empirical studies find that collective bargaining leads to higher wages compared to individually agreed ones. However, the impact of collective bargaining on the wage...

The prevalence of opening clauses in collective bargaining agreements may indicate a tendency to a higher decentralised wage settlement. Increasing competition on international product markets is assumed to be one reason for wage-setting decentralisation, whereas theoretical explanations focus...

Besides material offshoring, economists have started to analyze the impact of service offshoring on domestic employment. Services are of particular interest since their significance has grown in terms of both quantity and quality. One decade ago, most services were considered non-tradable, but...

In the academic literature some criteria have been identified which could have an impact on the success of the transition process, such as macroeconomic stability, microeconomic restructuring and implementation of legal and institutional reforms. The role of the exchange rate system in general...

In this paper we show how citizen expert groups can be used to improve the design of contingent valuation surveys. The concept of citizen expert groups combines the various advantages of focus groups and of participatory approaches like citizen juries and the market stall method. Using an...

This paper gives a detailed analysis of the perspectives of workers with low qualifications in Germany under the twofold pressures of globalization and technological change. First, alter-native explanations for the skill-bias in the development of labour demand are discussed, with particular...

The introduction of opening clauses in collective wage agreements allowing firms to deviate from their collective bargaining agreements has become widely accepted for the last fifteen years. With respect to the flexibility agreed through collective bargaining, the distinctions between single...