Airport capacity and demand calculations by simulation��the case of Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport

Airports are vital parts of traffic infrastructure and networks in global and dynamic economies securing inter- and transcontinental mobility of goods and people in spatially dislocated market structures. The operational capacity of an airport must be dimensioned under a long-term strategic view as its productivity is determined by available infrastructure. Often expansion projects for, e.g., an additional runway require a timeframe of up to twenty years for negotiation, planning and construction. The correction of existing or future bottlenecks will be increasingly difficult, partly due to public and political opposition and environmental awareness. From this point of view we critically examine the published planning figures and forecasts of demand and capacity of the currently constructed Berlin-Brandenburg International airport over a 20-year timeframe. Our methodology is based on a computer simulation of an independent parallel runway in segregated mode. Increasing traffic and changing traffic mix are simulated with the airport and airspace modeling tool SIMMOD, which provides the output data to calculate the capacity utilization and chosen level of service indicator minutes of average delay per flight. The simulation has shown that the practical capacity of 76 flights per hour is the maximum demand to be served under the defined assumptions. We discuss our findings and compare our results with other airports operating a similar runway layout.     

Intra-good trade in Germany: a first look at the evidence

This article contributes to the literature by using newly released comprehensive transaction-level data on all exports and imports to document facts about the amount of intra-good trade – the simultaneous export and import of identical goods by one firm – in Germany. Combined data for trade transactions and for characteristics of a representative large sample of trading firms are then used to report differences between firms that export and import different goods only (inter-good traders) and firms that engage in the simultaneous export and import of identical goods (intra-good traders). We find that the share of intra-good trade in total trade was some 17% in Germany in 2012. Intra-good trade matters. This share differs widely between broadly defined groups of goods and between industries. Controlling for detailed industry affiliation, intra-good traders differ significantly from inter-good traders – they are larger, more human capital intensive, more productive, have a higher R&D intensity and are more profitable. The data, however, are not rich enough to reveal the direction of causality between intra-good trade and firm performance and to investigate empirically the reasons why some firms engage in intra-good trade.     

Biodiversity pressure and the driving forces behind

Since the UNCED Conference in Rio de Janeiro 1992, the need to actively protect biodiversity is universally acknowledged. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) defined biodiversity as comprising ecosystem diversity, species diversity and genetic diversity, and decided for the ecosystem level as the basis for describing biodiversity. However, due to conceptual problems as much as to the lack of data, so far no comprehensive measurements of biodiversity have been developed. A single measure quantitatively describing biodiversity even seems out of reach due to the incommensurability of the three levels. This makes it impossible to directly base policy decisions on existing or future estimates of the “total size” of biodiversity. Instead, it is suggested to analyse the pressures threatening biodiversity, which can usually be measured quantitatively, and act as the interface between the socioeconomic driving forces behind them and the biological impacts. The drivers (physical primary drivers, politics and policies causing them as secondary and institutional structures as tertiary ones) do not only affect biodiversity, but a range of sustainability problems. The analysis permits to integrate biodiversity risks with broader environmental and sustainability policies, and thus to mainstream biodiversity preservation.Such an analysis is presented for Europe, naming pressures and driving forces and illustrating the close links between the causes of biodiversity pressures and other environmental problems. This way, it is possible to develop first ideas how the standard set of environmental policies must be modified and extended to cover the issue of biodiversity.     

Is export diversification good for profitability? First evidence for manufacturing enterprises in Germany

This article uses a tailor-made newly available data set for enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany to investigate for the first time the links between export diversification over destination countries and goods on the one hand and the profitability of the exporting firms on the other hand. We find that profits tend to be larger in firms with less diversified export sales over goods and in firms with more diversified export sales over destination countries.     

Strategic Responses: A Survey Experiment on Opposition to Pension Reforms*

The responses given in opinion polls on future policy reforms reflect both subjective expectations and preferences. We disentangle these factors using data from a controlled survey experiment conducted in Germany. At the time of the experiment, an increased retirement age had been proposed as part of a pension reform. Thus, the survey respondents faced an incentive to give biased responses. By understating their expected work ability at the age of retirement, they could make the increase of the retirement age a less attractive policy option. We find evidence for such strategic response behavior, and this strategic bias appears to be stronger in former communist East Germany.     

Are nascent entrepreneurs ‘Jacks-of-all-trades’? A test of Lazear's theory of entrepreneurship with German data

In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur. The intuition behind this proposition is that entrepreneurs must have sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to put together the many ingredients needed for survival and success in a business, while for paid employees it suffices and pays to be a specialist in the field demanded by the job taken. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing Lazear's hypothesis using a large recent representative sample of the German population. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of becoming a nascent entrepreneur and the regional stratification of the sample into account. The results illustrate the statistical significance and economic importance of the ‘jack-of-all-trades’ theory.     

Regulation of non-marketed outputs and substitutable inputs

We study the regulation of a monopolistic firm that provides a non-marketed output based on multiple substitutable inputs. The regulator is able to observe the effectiveness of the provision, but faces information asymmetries with respect to the efficiency of the firm’s activities. Specifically, we consider a setting where one input and the output are observable, while another input and related costs are not. Multi-dimensional information asymmetries are introduced by discrete distributions for the functional form of the marginal rate of substitution between the inputs as well as for the input costs. For this novel setting, we investigate the theoretically optimal Bayesian regulation mechanism. We find that the first-best solution cannot be obtained in case of shadow costs of public funding. The second-best solution implies separation of the most efficient type with first-best input levels, and upwards distorted (potentially bunched) observable input levels for all other types. Moreover, we compare these results to a simpler non-Bayesian approach, i.e., a single pooling contract, and hence, bridge the gap between the academic discussion and regulatory practice. In a numerical simulation, we identify certain conditions in which a single contract non-Bayesian regulation can indeed get close to the second-best solution of the Bayesian menu of contracts regulation.     

Asset pricing with a reference level of consumption: New evidence from the cross-section of stock returns

This paper presents an empirical evaluation of recently proposed asset pricing models which extend the standard preference specification by a reference level of consumption. We motivate an alternative model that accounts for the return on human capital as a determinant of the reference level. Our analysis is based on a broad cross-section of test assets, which provides a level playing field for a comparison to established benchmark models. The reference level model extended by human capital does a good job in explaining size and value premia. Estimated on Fama and French's size and book-to-market sorted portfolios, it outperforms Lettau and Ludvigson's scaled CCAPM and delivers average pricing errors comparable to the Fama-French three-factor model.