We evaluate the effect of the federal students' financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990....

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of non-financial firms' leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of...

This paper explores whether more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System...

After a temporary period of a fixed exchange rate regime pegging the Polish zloty to the U.S. dollar, Poland established a preannounced crawling peg regime on October 15, 1991. In this system the zloty is tied to a currency basket and devalued with a preannounced monthly rate (rate of crawl). If...

A small macroeconomic model is constructed to study the transmission of the monetary policy conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank (DBB) since the middle of the 1970s. For this purpose quarterly, seasonally unadjusted data for the period from 1975 to 1998 are used, that is, the period until the...

In einer großangelegten Befragungsaktion hat das Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, Köln, ermittelt, welche Hochschulen besondere und beispielhafte Studiengänge in den Bereichen Wirtschaft, Technik und Naturwissenschaften anbieten. Ob integrierte Auslandssemester, verbindliches...