A core political strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from road transportation in Germany is to incentivize the purchase of motor vehicles with relatively low tailpipe CO2 emissions. Consequently, since mid-2009, owners of new cars in Germany face an annual vehicle circulation tax that...

We analyze the performance of firms in the German business-related services sector. A quarterly business survey provides the panel data base of our study. Firm performance is measured by the survey respondents' ordinal indication of their changes in total sales. We use a firstorder Markov chain...