The quintessence of recent natural science studies is that the 2°C target can only be achieved with massive emission reductions in the next few years. The central twist of this paper is the addition of this limited time to act into a non-perpetual real options framework analyzing optimal...

The role of product market reforms in achieving the objective of higher employment and growth has recently received much attention amongst academics. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the channels through which cross-market effects come about and to assess their policy relevance. The...

The data indicate that non-wage labour costs in Germany have reached a record high in recent years. From 1972 to 2001, the ratio of non-wage labour costs to direct compensation in West German manufacturing industry rose from 55.6 per cent to 81.2 per cent. The topic of nonwage labour costs is...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we follow the real options approach, which allows us to investigate the...

Macroeconomic shocks and labour-market institutions jointly determine employment growth and economic performance. The effect of shocks depends on the nature of these institutions and the effect of institutional change depends on the macroeconomic environment. It follows that a given set of...

The standard literature on working time has modeled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we consider the impact of uncertainty and real options on the decision of...

The paper studies the return-volatility relationship in a range of commodities. We develop a commodity price model and show that the volatility of price changes can be positively or negatively related to demand shocks. An “inverse leverage effect” – the volatility is higher following...

This paper develops a new theoretical model with an asymmetric informal one-sided exchange rate target zone, with an application to the Swiss franc following the removal of the minimum exchange rate of CHF 1.20 per euro in January 2015. We extend and generalize the standard target zone model of...