Experience goods are characterized by information asymmetry and a lack of ex ante knowledge of product quality, such that credible and reliable external signals of product quality are likely to be highly valued. Due to their independence and expert reputations, professional critics therefore...

Customers continuously evaluate the credibility and reliability of a range of signals both separately and jointly. However, existing econometric studies pay insufficient attention to the interactions and complex combinations of these signals, and are typically limited as a result of difficulties...

The strategic importance of rare earth elements (REEs) has become increasingly important because of their relative scarcity and worldwide increasing demand, as well as China’s quasi-monopoly of this market. REEs are virtually not substitutable, and they are essential for a variety of...

Published in China Agricultural Economic Review

Realized kernels introduced by Barndorff-Nielsen et al. (2008) are consistent estimators of the daily integrated volatility in the presence of microstructure noise. A crucial problem by applying realized kernels is the selection of the bandwidth. This paper proposes an iterative plug-in...

This paper discusses the detailed performance of an iterative plug-in (IPI) bandwidth selector for estimating the diurnal duration pattern in a recently proposed semiparametric autoregressive conditional duration (SemiACD) model. For this purpose an alternative formula of the asymptotically...

This paper deals with the effects of implementing a basic income on the labor supply side. The German welfare as well as tax and social contributions system are investigated. The results clarify that the abolishment of the so-called unemployment trap due to a basic income policy is a decisive...

In a median-voter framework with pensions and immigration we show that too few unskilled immigrants are allowed into the country because the unskilled native median voter is concerned with negative effects on his wage. He does not consider the positive effects to other groups in society. When...

This paper introduces a tree-form constant market share (CMS) model for analyzing growth causes in international trade based on multi-level classification. The tree- form CMS is a collection of CMS models at different levels, including the entire, branch- and leaf-models, which consists of a...