In Germany, donations to charitable institutions can be deducted from the taxable income. The government subsidizes each donated Euro by the household's marginal tax rate. Unfortunately, this system has some serious shortcomings. Therefore, the existing tax deduction of donations should be...

Despite major recent advance in the literature on financial crises, the key role of central banks in the dynamics of financial crises are still not well understood. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of financial crises by explicitly modeling the strategic options...

We investigate the economic impact of stochastic endogenous extreme events and insurance in a growth model. Our analytical results and computational experiments show that i) transparency of the insurance sector is the decisive requisite for abatement activities, implying substantial policy...

Textbooks of macroeconomics regularly remind their readers that they should not interpret the macroeconomic price variable as some sort of average price. Instead it represents some price index indicating the average of the individual items' price changes between the period considered and some...

This paper focuses on the German labor market for older workers. It does so in comparison with other countries and with a unique focus on the role of employer incentives for retaining and hiring older workers. It argues that while employment of older German workers has improved due to changes in...

We analyze the impact of the pro-Russian conflict on stock returns in Russia and the Ukraine during the period November 21, 2013 to September 29, 2014. We utilize a newly created indicator for the degree of (de-)escalation based on an Internet search for conflict-related news. We find that...

In this paper, we analyze the pricing of cash flow rights in startup companies based on a unique dataset of crowdinvesting backers. Our sample consists of 44 campaigns and includes 1,450 bids made by 499 backers during the period from November 6, 2011 to March 25, 2014 on the German...

Using German establishment data, this study finds that the share of blue-collar workers, an outdated production technology and a high-wage policy increase the probability that employers regard the threat of dismissal as a suitable incentive. A participatory HRM policy, the incidence of a works...

In this paper, we analyze the effect of US economic sanctions on the target countries' poverty gap during the period 1978-2011. Econometrically, we employ a nearest neighbor matching approach to account for differences in the countries' economic and political environment and the likelihood of...

In this paper, we derive a modification of a forward-looking Taylor rule, which integrates two variables measuring the uncertainty of inflation and GDP growth forecasts into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model. We show that certainty-equivalence in New Keynesian models is a consequence of...