Previous empirical evidence which evaluated the accuracy of management earnings or sales forecasts consistently revealed these forecasts to be on average significantly overoptimistic. However, all studies analyzed forecasts from public disclosures, which are an important signal to investors and...

I analyze the accuracy of firms' forecasts of their own future sales (and workforce numbers), which German companies provided secretly to the IAB Establishment Panel. Previous empirical evidence, using forecasts from public disclosures, revealed that managers' earnings or sales forecasts on...

Petrol prices tend to be subject to regular changes, often changing more than once a day in many countries, and the number of changes appears to increase. For example, a recent sector inquiry by Germany's competition authority has found that the number of price changes has almost tripled between...

Die Steuerbelastung privater Haushalte ist auch nach der Bundestagswahl 2013 ein wichtiges Thema der wirtschaftspolitischen Diskussion in Deutschland. Die Autoren untersuchen, wie sich die Einkommensteuerbelastung im Laufe der Jahrzehnte entwickelt hat.

This thesis covers several aspects of competition economics which are analyzed empirically or experimentally. It can be divided into two parts. Chapters 2 and 3 study how competition outcomes (in contests, respectively consumer markets) are affected by the design of the competitive environment....

Facing the general election in 2013, the level of the income tax is a major issue of the economic policy debate in Germany. The paper presents data on the income tax burden in the period 1958–2012. The data refer to specific levels of real income as well as to specific levels of income in...

We analyze competitions where the contestants evaluate each other and find the first contestant to be disadvantaged. We suspect that this is due to information diffusion, Bayesian belief updating taking place in course of the contest and initial uncertainty about a contestant's relative quality....

Economic theory suggests that gasoline retail markets are prone to collusive behavior. Oligopoly market structures prevail, market interactions occur frequently, prices are highly transparent, and demand is rather inelastic. A recent sector inquiry in Germany backed suspicions of tacit collusion...