infonet-economy

Using Allensbach survey data about how people look forward to the coming year, we construct true ex-post forecasts and compare them with the forecasts produced by the German Council of Economic Experts and by the Economic Research Institutes. Then we perform rationality tests for these forecast series. The Allensbach forecasts outperform the professional forecasts in many respects....

In this paper, we investigate the German stock market with regard to "negative stub values" or "parent company puzzles". These are situations where a firm's market value is less than the value of its ownership stake in a publicly traded subsidiary. According to MITCHELL/PULVINO/STAFFORD (2002), negative stub values indicate clear arbitrage opportunities,...

Industrial delicensing which began in 1985 in India marked a discrete break from a past of centrally planned industrial development. Similar liberalization episodes are taking place across the globe. We develop a simple Schumpeterian growth model to understand how firms respond to the entry threat imposed by liberalization. The model emphasises that firm responses, even within the...

Awards in the form of orders, medals, decorations and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies andnrepublics, private organizations, not-for-profit and profit-oriented firms. Nevertheless, economists have disregarded this kind of non-material extrinsic incentive.nThe demand for awards relies on an individual’s desire for distinction, and the supply ofnawards on the provision of incentives...

"We study the causal effects of changes in parental leave provisions on fertility and return-to-work behavior. We exploit a policy change that took place in 1990 in Austria which extended the maximum duration of parental leave from the child’s first to the child’s second birthday. As parental leave benefits can be automatically renewed when a new mother is still on leave from a...

Consider the problem of testing s hypotheses simultaneously. The usual approach tondealing with the multiplicity problem is to restrict attention to procedures that controlnthe probability of even one false rejection, the familiar familywise error rate (FWER). Innmany applications, particularly if s is large, one might be willing to tolerate more than onenfalse rejection if the...

Der Wettbewerb zwischen den sozialen Krankenversicherern wird immer mehr zum Kampf um günstige Risiken. Die erhoffte Dämpfung des Prämienanstiegs bleibt dagegen aus. Das ist eine direkte Folge der verfehlten Rahmenbedingungen, die das Kostensparen unrentabel, die volkswirtschaftlich unsinnige Risikoselektion dagegen rentabel machen. Es handelt sich dabei nicht um ein Marktversagen,...

This paper examines one political-economy aspect of the European Communities' (EC) anti-dumping policy that has tended to be overlooked in prior studies; namely, the role that member states play in deciding whether to impose definitive duties on imports that have been found to be dumped and that are deemed to have injured a European industry. We find that, in the late 1990s,...

Eine aktuelle Studie des Instituts für Versicherungswirtschaft und der R&W Consulting zeigt: Eine differenzierte Vertriebssteuerung auf Basis eines Balanced-Scorecard-Ansatzes kann die Effektivität des Vertriebs steigern und gleichzeitig einen zusätzlichen Nutzen für den Kunden generieren. Im Rahmen der Studie "Benchmarking im Versicherungsvertrieb" wurden im Dezember...