New evidence on the dynamic wage curve for Western Germany: 1980–2004

Blanchflower and Oswald [Blanchflower, David G. and Oswald, Andrew J., 1994a, The Wage Curve, (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press), Blanchflower, David G. and Oswald, Andrew J., 1994b, Estimating a Wage Curve for Britain 1973–90, The Economic Journal 104, 1025–1043. Eine praktische Einführung, Nürnberg] reported that they have found an ‘empirical law of economics’ — the Wage Curve. Our paper reconsiders the western German Wage Curve using disaggregated regional data and is based on almost one million employees drawn from the Federal Employment Services of Germany over the period 1980–2004. We find that the wage equation is highly autoregressive but far from unit root. The unemployment elasticity is significant but relatively small: only between ? 0.02 and ? 0.04. We also check the sensitivity of this elasticity for different population groups (young versus old, men versus women, less educated versus highly educated, German native versus foreigner), confirming that it is stronger the weaker the bargaining power of the particular group.     

Developing Equity Release Markets: Risk Analysis for Reverse Mortgages and Home Reversions

Equity release products are sorely needed in an aging population with high levels of home ownership. There has been a growing literature analyzing risk components and capital adequacy of reverse mortgages in recent years. However, little research has been done on the risk analysis of other equity release products, such as home reversion contracts. This is partly due to the dominance of reverse mortgage products in equity release markets worldwide. In this article we compare cash flows and risk profiles from the provider's perspective for reverse mortgage and home reversion contracts. An at-home/in long-term care split termination model is employed to calculate termination rates, and a vector autoregressive (VAR) model is used to depict the joint dynamics of economic variables including interest rates, house prices, and rental yields. We derive stochastic discount factors from the no arbitrage condition and price the no negative equity guarantee in reverse mortgages and the lease for life agreement in the home reversion plan accordingly. We compare expected payoffs and assess riskiness of these two equity release products via commonly used risk measures: Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR).     

The Productivity Effects of Worker Mobility Between Heterogeneous Firms

We analyze the effect of worker inflows on establishments’ productivity, using German data. Previous studies for other countries have found positive effects of hiring workers from superior (more productive or higher paying) firms. Ranking establishments by their median wage, we find that inflows from inferior establishments seem to increase hiring establishments’ productivity. Further empirical analyses suggest our findings are due to a positive selection of such inflows from their sending establishments. These workers might have to find a better job match in order to advance their careers, an interpretation supported by the finding that the effect is driven by workers with short tenure at their previous employer. Our findings reflect the increasingly assortative pattern of worker mobility in Germany found in a related strand of literature.     

Does Economics and Business Education Wash Away Moral Judgment Competence?

In view of the numerous accounting and corporate scandals associated with various forms of moral misconduct and the recent financial crisis, economics and business programs are often accused of actively contributing to the amoral decision making of their graduates. It is argued that theories and ideas taught at universities engender moral misbehavior among some managers, as these theories mainly focus on the primacy of profit-maximization and typically neglect the ethical and moral dimensions of decision making. To investigate this criticism, two overlapping effects must be disentangled: the self-selection effect and the treatment effect. Drawing on the concept of moral judgment competence, we empirically examine this question with a sample of 1773 bachelor’s and 501 master’s students. Our results reveal that there is neither a self-selection nor a treatment effect for economics and business studies. Moreover, our results indicate that—regardless of the course of studies—university education in general does not seem to foster students’ moral development.     

Ideenwettbewerbe als innovatives Markenbindungsinstrument

Onlinebasierte Ideenwettbewerbe mit Web 2.0-Funktionalit?ten bieten neue innovative M?glichkeiten im Online Marketing. Sie tragen dazu bei, die Bekanntheit und positive Wahrnehmung einer Marke in der ?ffentlichkeit zu st?rken. Konsumenten setzen sich intensiver mit einer Marke auseinander, was schlie?lich zu einer st?rkeren Identifikation mit der Marke und Bindung führt. Auch Swarovski, dem Kristall-Weltmarktführer, gelang durch diese Einbindung von Konsumenten der Erfolg.     

Does the Law of One Price Hold within the EU? A Panel Analysis

This paper empirically tests the law of one price by applying unit root tests to three panels consisting of data on 90 consumer price indices for the EU-25, the EU-15 and the 10 new EU member countries that joined the EU in 2004. The four major findings of this paper are: (1) panel unit root tests find evidence of price convergence for about 70% of all product groups, (2) the results are sensitive to the choice of the numeraire country implying that any conclusions must be based on all bilateral combinations, (3) the average half life across all product groups is 2.0 years, (4) the overall evidence for the law of one price is weaker in the 10 new EU member countries than in the EU-15.

Beyond plain vanilla: Modeling joint product assortment and pricing decisions

This paper investigates empirically the product assortment strategies of oligopolistic firms. We develop a framework that integrates product choice and price competition in a differentiated product market. The present model significantly improves upon the reduced-form profit functions typically used in the entry and location choice literature, because the variable profits that enter the product-choice decision are derived from a structural model of demand and price competition. Given the heterogeneity in consumers’ product valuations and responses to price changes, this is a critical element in the analysis of product assortment decisions. Relative to the literature on structural demand models, our results show that incorporating endogenous product choice is essential for policy simulations and may entail very different conclusions from settings where product assortment choices are held fixed.

Factors driving aggregate mortality rates in postwar Germany

Using German data over the period 1956–2006, this study provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of factors driving aggregate mortality rates over time. It differs from previous contributions in this field by simultaneously considering an extensive set of macroeconomic, socioeconomic, and ecological factors as explanatory variables. Our regression analysis shows that sex- and age-specific mortality rates vary substantially in their response to external factors. Strongest associations are found with changes in real GDP, flu epidemics, and the two lifestyle variables—alcohol and cigarette consumption—in both univariate and multivariate setups. Further analysis indicates that these effects are primarily contemporary, whereas other indicators, such as weather conditions, exert lagged effects. We derive optimal multivariate models for every age group that provide a good fit to the observed variation in annual mortality rates, and thereby confirm the relevance of the identified factors.     

For how long do IMF forecasts of world economic growth stay up-to-date?

This study analyses the performance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook output forecasts for the world and for both the advanced economies and the emerging and developing economies. With a focus on the forecast for the current year and the next year, we examine the durability of IMF forecasts, looking at how much time has to pass so that IMF forecasts can be improved by using leading indicators with monthly updates. Using a real-time data set for GDP and for indicators, we find that some simple single-indicator forecasts on the basis of data that are available at higher frequency can significantly outperform the IMF forecasts as soon as the publication of the IMF’s Outlook is only a few months old. In particular, there is an obvious gain using leading indicators from January to March for the forecast of the current year.