Regionale Verteilungseffekte geldpolitischer Maßnahmen auf dem Immobilienmarkt

For some years now, the ECB is responding to the current deflationary phase and slow economic growth in the Euro zone with a low interest policy and bond purchasing programs. This has led to a surge in real asset prices, such as real estate. Inflation in residential property prices however varies regionally as a result of differences in supply elasticities. Thus, highest growth in prices could be observed in metropolitan areas. This article shows that such developments may lead to an increasing housing wealth inequality due to existing housing wealth distributions, local differences in homeownership, and barriers to entry to the property market. Additionally, these effects might be strengthened by indirect effects, such as filtering, rent-seeking, gentrification, and segregation.     

The Growth Crisis of Germany: A Blueprint of the Developed Economies

Germany has realized tremendous growth rates in the aftermath of the Second World War. Since the early 1970s, growth rates declined and settled down at a more or less constant rate of 2% per year, only to experience a renewed negative trend around the early 2000s. Estimating GMM growth models in a panel of 187 countries between 1970 and 2010, we illustrate that large parts of historical welfare increases have emerged due to conditional convergence, human capital accumulation, and innovation activity. Whereas conditional convergence was the main driver behind the extraordinary postwar growth rates in Germany, human capital accumulation in Germany currently lags behind the average level of most developed countries. While this may explain the moderate position of Germany in the group of the 25 richest countries, the developed countries on their part are experiencing a period of below-average GDP growth. In nearly all advanced economies, growth reveals a downward trend since the turn of the millennium. We argue that this decline must be traced back to a general lack of radically new ideas in the world economy. The explanation of the German growth crisis may thus be considered a blueprint of the situation in developed economies.     

The European single market — How far from completion?

Forum

The European single market — How far from completion?     

Special offers and clustering under symmetric monopoly

A monopolist offerings variants on a Salop circle is analyzed with respect to his choice of product variants and prices. Although we assume a uniform distribution of tastes, the profit-maximizing pattern is not equidistant in variants and prices are not the same for all variants.Instead, under fairly general circumstances, there exists at least one cheap variant (special offer) around which the more expensive ones are clustered. This result depends on the assumption that the market size is not fixed as in most other models of this sort, but depends on prices in a straightforward manner.     

Felix Bernstein

Felix Bernstein was a mathematician and statistician who is remembered for the "Schröder-Bernstein Theorem" of set theory. He was appointed director in 1907 of what he was to develop into the Göttingen Institute for Mathematical Statistics, and in 1911 was involved in the formulation and proof of what became known as the Borel-Cantelli lemmas. Bernstein worked out in 1924 the correct hypothesis for the genetic transmission of human bloodgroups, on the basis of the available statistical material.     

A game-theoretic approach to behavioral food risks: The case of grain producers

Food risks may be caused by malpractice of suppliers who exploit the fact that their production processes and resulting product properties cannot be directly observed by buyers. The probability of malpractice increases with the profits that can be earned through opportunistic behavior. In this paper, we develop a moral hazard model for the empirical analyses of behavioral risks. It accounts for the essential fact that incomplete inspection and tracing increase the profitability of rule-breaking behavior, and that monitoring, tracing and sanctioning are costly. Using the model, we first demonstrate how to design efficient contracts in various situations. In a case study, we then analyze farmers’ incentives with regard to the minimum waiting period after fungicide use. Data are gathered in interviews with three large-scale German farmers and a grain dealer. We find that, while their perception of parameters varies widely, high temptations for rule-breaking arise in some cases. We conclude that empirical moral hazard analyses have significant potential to shed light on behavioral risks.     

Falling Labor Share and Rising Unemployment: Long–Run Consequences of Institutional Shocks?

The literature on unemployment has mostly focused on labor market issues while the impact of capital formation is largely neglected. Job creation is often thought to be a matter of encouraging more employment on a given capital stock. In contrast, this paper explicitly deals with the long–run consequences of institutional shocks on capital formation and employment. It is shown that the usual tradeoff between employment and wages disappears in the long run. In line with an appropriation model, the estimated values for the long–run elasticities of substitution between capital and labor for Germany and France are substantially greater than one.