This paper intends to further understanding of catastrophic events by reviewing the economic literature on their effects as well as potential means of dealing with the corresponding risks and uncertainties. Since 2000, the world has seen a number of catastrophes including terrorist attacks in...

This paper proposes a new approach for creating country indices and applies it to the construction of an index ranking countries according to their current level of competitiveness in international goods exchange. Existing indices largely assign equal or in some other way arbitrary weights to...

This study analyzes the economic consequences of power rationing at the level of German counties. Based on a common production function approach, it estimates the costs of power outages for firms and households in all counties and uses these estimates to derive hypothetical rationing plans for...

The aim of this study is to quantify the macroeconomic costs resulting from a one hour power outage at the level of German counties. This is done by combining public data from various sources based on a well-established methodology, which both accounts for production losses of firms and losses...

We investigate the performance of the IHK business climate indices as forecasting tools within a growth framework at the level of four federal states in Northern Germany. In doing this, we match quarterly index scores with estimates of quarterly production data, generated through a Chow-Lin...

This paper is a first attempt to construct quantitative forecasts for regional growth in Germany using business survey data (BSD) from the German chambers of commerce. A panel approach is used to model the growth rates of the Bundesländer from the year 2000 onwards. The proposed model does well...

This study investigates the incidence of overeducation among workers in the EU and its underlying factors based on the most recent wave of the European Labor Force Survey (EU-LFS 2013). Its main purpose is to shed light on the interplay of so far neglected explanatory factors such as household...

This paper analyses the macroeconomic implications of a future shift in the age structure of the Swiss population. It estimates the long-run effects for Swiss GDP growth and its components in an Overlapping Generations Model (OLG model). Recent population projections by the Federal Statistical...

The paper at hand discusses the different typologies of combined transportation in Europe. It shows that an improvement of handling infrastructure for combined transport can positively reduce environmental costs of trading between regions. However, the expected emission reduction effects are...

This paper analyzes the future market perspectives for biodegradable bio-based plastics at the global and the European level. Relevant determinants of demand are identified, categorized and used as a basis for own projections. By implementing a system dynamics approach, the evolution of global...