While works councils provide a highly developed mechanism to promote workplace democracy, research on their consequences has been dominated by economic aspects. This study brings a new perspective to the understanding of works councils by examining their influence on workers' political behavior....

We hypothesize that incomplete integration into the workplace and society implies that immigrants are less likely to be union members than natives. Incomplete integration makes the usual mechanism for overcoming the collective action problem less effective. Using data from the Socio-Economic...

A frequently employed argument against imposing international sanctions is that rival superpowers are likely to bust sanctions to simultaneously shield the target, harm the sender, and make a profit. We evaluate the legitimacy of this concern by studying the effect of US sanctions on trade flows...

In this paper, we analyze whether the complexity of tax bills affects financial markets. Based on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the 32 tax bills identified by Romer and Romer (2010) in the period 1962-2003, we assess the relationship between tax bills' complexity and financial markets using...

Research and public interest on economic inequality have grown over the last years. Family firms and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few wealthy business families have been discussed as both a cause and a consequence of economic inequality. Yet, so far, we lack knowledge...

Due to outdated weighting information, a Laspeyres-based Consumer Price Index (CPI) is prone to accumulating upward bias. Therefore, the present study introduces and examines simple and transparent revision approaches that retrospectively address the source of the bias. They provide a consistent...

This study introduces the urbanicity index of employment. Unlike traditional measures of urbanization (e.g., urbanization rate), the urbanicity index is distance-based and accounts for the scale aspect as well as the concentration aspect of urbanization. The concentration aspect can be...

Die fortschreitende Digitalisierung und die zunehmende Popularität digitaler Zahlungsmöglichkeiten haben zu gravierenden Veränderungen im Zahlungsverhalten geführt. Als Konsequenz erörtert die EZB zurzeit die Einführung eines digitalen Euros. Vorteile bestehen in der Erweiterung...

The empirical literature of stock market predictability mainly suffers from model uncertainty and parameter instability. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel approach that combines the documented merits of diffusion indices, regime-switching models, and forecast combination to predict the...

We estimate a logit mixture vector autoregressive model describing monetary policy transmission in the euro area over the period 2003Q1-2019Q4 with a special emphasis on credit conditions. With the help of this model, monetary policy transmission can be described as mixture of two states (e.g.,...