Mehrwert durch Transparenz kommunizieren

Die zunehmende Discountausbreitung fordert Hersteller und Detailh?ndler heraus, den Mehrwert ihrer Produkte besser aufzuzeigen. Es braucht Argumente jenseits des Preises. Stellt die Kommunikation transparenzf?rdernde Informationen zur Lieferkette der Produkte in den Vordergrund, werden bislang kaum evidente, aber aus Konsumentensicht entscheidende, Unterschiede aufgezeigt, die Konsumenten helfen, beim Einkauf nicht nur einseitig auf den Preis zu achten.     

How to Handle the Fiscal Crisis in Greece: Empirical Evidence Based on a Survey of Economic Experts

We asked economic experts polled by the CESifo World Economic Survey how to handle the fiscal crisis in Greece in the year 2015. The sample includes about 850 experts from 110 countries. We find systematic differences in experts’ recommendations. Our results suggest that policy advice is related to an expert's personal and country‐level attributes. Country‐level characteristics, especially credit default swaps as a measure of fiscal stability, predict views on whether Greece should exit the eurozone. An expert's educational background, age and professional affiliation predict opinions on the credit programmes of the International Monetary Fund. We propose that policymakers who seek balanced policy advice should consult experts from different countries and personal backgrounds.     

Globalization and labor market institutions: International empirical evidence

A widespread concern is that labor market institutions erode in the course of globalization, which, in turn, decreases employment and wages. By using panel data and cross-sectional data, I investigate the influence of globalization on labor market regulation. I use the indicators of labor market institutions by Gwartney et al. (2012) and the KOF indices of globalization. To deal with potential reverse causality, I employ a system GMM panel estimator and use a constructed trade share as proposed by Frankel and Romer (1999) as an instrumental variable for globalization in cross-sectional models. The results do not show that globalization induced labor market deregulation.     

The Relative Importance of Actual and Potential Competition: Empirical Evidence From the Pharmaceuticals Market

We study actual and potential competition and other factors that determine price paths of brand-name drugs in the Swedish pharmaceuticals market. The results indicate that the price of the incumbent product is lowered by potential competition, entry of (additional) generics, and the introduction of a so-called reference-price system. We also identify a 'ratchet' effect, through which price regulation makes entry-deterring limit-pricing credible.     

The size and scope of government in the US states: does party ideology matter?

We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993–2009 period. We employ the new data on the ideological mapping of US legislatures by Shor and McCarty (Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 105(3):530–551, 2011) that considers spatial and temporal differences in Democratic and Republican Party ideology. We distinguish between three types of divided government: overall divided government, proposal division and approval division. The main result suggests that Republican governors have been more active in deregulating labor markets. We find that ideology-induced policies were counteracted under overall divided government and proposal division.     

Autoregressive conditional tail behavior and results on Government bond yield spreads

Previous evidence in empirical finance indicates the potential usefulness of modeling time variation particularly in the tails of speculative return distributions. Based on results from extreme value theory, the present paper proposes a fixed changepoint Pareto-type autoregressive conditional tail (ARCT) model. Regression-based parameter estimation of the unobservable time-varying tail index is carried out via classical Kalman filtering. A model application highlights the tail index dynamics for daily changes in Government bond yield spreads between the U.S. Dollar and the Euro zone.