East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wagesspecified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wagegap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

With adverse selection, diseconomies of scale associated with hierarchies may induce the implementation of a second-best technology. This occurs whenever rents to lower tiers of the hierarchy increase faster than total surplus. This is more likely with longer hierarchies.

The current study investigates a tripartite incentive contract between an innovator supplying an intellectual asset, a professional assigned to productive tasks, and a consulting firm specializing in matching ideas and professionalskills. A rather simple pure tripartite partnership implements...

In this paper, we provide an outlook for further research on the topic of governance. We review four different approaches on the theory of the firm and discuss implications for governance, namely; nexus of contracts / agency theory, property rights /incomplete contracts, adaptation, and nexus of...

We use a static framework characterized by both moral hazard and holdup problems. In the model the optimal allocation of bargaining power balances these frictions. We examine the impact of improved monitoring on that optimal allocation and its impact upon effort, investment, profits and rents....

We compare the effect of legal and institutional competition for the design of labor institutions in an environment characterized by holdup problems in human and physical capital. We compare autarky with the two country case, assuming that capital is perfectly mobile and labor immobile. We...

We give an explicit PDE characterization for the solution of the problemof maximizing the utility of both terminal wealth and intertemporal consumption under model uncertainty. The underlying market model consists of a risky asset, whose volatility and long-term trend are driven by an external...

By using a unique data set of single-family house transactions, we examine theaccuracy of the cost and sales comparison approach over different forecast horizons. We find that sales comparison values provide better long-term forecaststhan cost values if the economic loss function is symmetric. A...

According to housing investment models, house prices and replacement costshould have an equilibrating relationship. Previous empirical work|mainlybased on aggregate-level data|has found only little evidence of such a relationship.By using a unique data set, covering transactions of...

We analyze the stochastic control approach to the dynamic maximization of the robust utility of consumption and investment. The robust utility functionals are defined in terms of logarithmic utility and a dynamically consistent convex riskmeasure. The underlying market is modeled by a diffusion...