This paper presents an infinite-horizon version of intergenerational utilitarianism that is both satisfactorily complete and consistent. By studying discounted utilitarianism as the discount factor tends to one, we obtain a welfare criterion --- limit-discounted utilitarianism --- that combines...

This paper provides axiomatic descriptions of social welfare relations, defined on infinite streams of utility, that are consistent with the utilitarian criterion on subsets where maximizing aggregate utility has a clear interpretation: the streams, or their differences, are summable. Besides...

This paper uses a tailor-made newly available data set for enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany to investigate for the first time the links between export diversification over destination countries and goods on the one hand and the profitability of the exporting firms on the...

Das Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre der Universität Lüneburg legt hiermit seinen achten eigenständigen Forschungsbericht vor.1 Wir möchten mit unserem Bericht alle Interessenten an unserer wissenschaftlichen Arbeit in kompakter Form über die von uns bearbeiteten Forschungsthemen und die...

A stylized fact from the emerging literature on the micro-econometrics of international trade and a central implication of the heterogeneous firm models from the new new trade theory is that exporters are more productive than non-exporters. However, many firms from the lower end of the...

In this paper, we study the intertemporal relations within two phases of the venture creation process based on data from administrative data sources. By distinguishing a pre- and post-period, we address two major issues: (1) we identify which factors make people wait to start a venture, and (2)...

This study uses tailor made enterprise level data from various sources for firms from manufacturing industries to test for the link between credit constraints, measured by a credit rating score provided by a leading credit rating agency, and imports in Germany for the first time. We find...

Based on dual labor market theory, fixed-term contracts (FTCs) as an important feature of labor market flexibility are analyzed to test the following hypothesis: Firms in the manufacturing sector in Egypt use FTCs to adjust the level of employment to the profit maximizing level in case of demand...

This note uses a tailor-made new data set to investigate for the first time the link between the quality of a firm's exports and the distance to destination countries for Germany. To anticipate the most important result, it is shown that the quality of exported goods and the distance to...

This note uses a new tailor-made data set to investigate the link between firm age and the extensive and intensive margins of exports empirically for the first time for Germany. Results turn out to be fully in line with the theoretical considerations. Older firms are more often exporters, export...