Any researcher would certainly agree with Hamermesh’s (1993:34) intuition about separability that the ease of substitution between any two production factors should be unaffected by a third factor that is separable from the others. This paper emphasizes that such a notion of separability needs...

This article examines the likely effects of a draft bill of the German government which aims at restraining multi-unionism in Germany. We argue that since 2010, when the Federal Labour Court eased restrictions on multi-unionism, hardly any signs of adverse effects of this court ruling can be...

As part of its efforts to reach the targets of the Kyoto Protocol, the European Commission published in December 2008 a resolution on a new directive to reduce the per-kilometer CO2 emissions of newly registered automobiles. This paper critically assesses this resolution with respect to its...

We complement the empirical evidence on the sustainability of weight loss achieved through cash rewards and, for the first time, rigorously examine the potential of cash rewards to prevent weight cycling. In a three period randomized controlled trial, about 700 obese persons were first assigned...

We contribute to the empirical literature on the effective incidence of corporate income taxation by using the German Business Tax Reform of the year 2000 (GBTR 2000) as a natural experiment. Its effect on wages in the manufacturing sector is identified by means of a difference-in-differences...

Using the location of baroque opera houses as a natural experiment, Falck et al. (2011) claim to document a positive causal effect of the supply of cultural goods on today’s regional distribution of talents. This paper raises serious doubts on the validity of the identification strategy...