Auditing institutions, such as the German Federal Court of Audit (BRH), provide information on public revenue and public spending. The question of how to increase tax compliance has been of frequent interest. Unfortunately, information from German taxpayers' declaration behaviour (beyond the...

We present a simple classroom principal-agent experiment that can effectively be used as a teaching device to introduce important concepts of organizational economics and contracting. In a first part, students take the role of a principal and design a contract that consists of a fixed payment...

The convergence of estimators, e.g. maximum likelihood estimators, for increasing sample size is well understood in many cases. However, even when the rate of convergence of the estimator is known, practical application is hampered by the fact, that the estimator cannot always be obtained at...

Standard measures of consumer price inflation are based on a bundle of representative goods. It is well known that this approach might overstate inflation for new products and products with fast increasing quality. For this reason, hedonic adjustment methods have been proposed and introduced in...

Threshold Accepting (TA) is a powerful optimization heuristic from the class of stochastic local search algorithms. It has been applied successfully to different optimization problems in statistics and econometrics, including the uniform design problem. Using the latter application as example,...

Individual decisions on education are still an important topic in social sciences research. Our goal is an analysis of the impact of siblings on educational attainment in West Germany. Theories of educational decisions in a family context suggest several possible effects of siblings. During the...

Our paper analyzes the interplay of organizational demography with the propensity to adopt an innovative practice. In particular, we examine how the demographical composition of professional German football teams influenced the adoption of the chain-defense-system (Viererketteʺ) as well as the...

The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter has become a widely used tool for detrending integrated time series in applied econometric analysis. Even though the theoretical time series literature sums up an extensive catalogue of severe criticism against an econometric analysis of HP filtered data, the...