This paper investigates the efficiency of the matching process between job seekers and vacancy posting firms in West Germany, using variation across labour market regions and across time. The results of a stochastic frontier analysis shed new light on the extent of and regional differences in...

Economically highly developed countries are mostly democratic. But does this association constitute a causal relationship according to which democracy is a determinant of economic development? Or is it, conversely, economic development that paves the way for democratization? This paper gives an...

We analyze the effect of industry, region, and time on new businesssurvival rates by means of a multi-dimensional approach. The data relateto West German districts in the 1983-2000 period. The survival chancesof start-ups tend to be relatively low in industries characterized by ahigh minimum...

Many decisions in economics and finance have to be made under severe time pressure. Furthermore, payoffs frequently depend on the speed of decision-making, as, for instance, when buying and selling stocks. In this paper, we examine the influence of time pressure and time-dependent incentive...

Empirical evidence suggests that technological spillovers are limited by distance. The present paper investigates the implications of this observation for the investment decisions of a technologically leading and lagging firm, located in different countries. Technological spillovers may induce...

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature that analyzes the European Union’s policy to eliminate preferential corporate-tax regimes and the proposal to introduce a consolidated EU tax base with formula apportionment for the taxation of multinational firms. Since neither proposal...

Early results on the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, from a survey of people age sixty-five and older who were interviewed just before enrollment started and just after it ended, indicate that Medicare has met its target of 90 percent coverage. Enrollment rates in vulnerable...

This paper develops a theoretical explanation why it may be optimal for higher-level governments to pay categorical block grants or closed-ended matching grants to local governments. We consider a federation with two types of local governments which differ in the cost of providing public goods....

This paper estimates the policy reaction function of the European Central Bank in the first four years of EMU using an ordered probit model which accounts for the fact that central bank rates are set at multiples of 25 basis points. Starting from a baseline model which mimics the Taylor rule,...