Volume 9, Issue 3

We use parametric power ARCH models of the conditional variance of inflation to model the relationship between inflation and its uncertainty using monthly data for Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden over a period ranging from 1962 to 2004. For all three countries inflation significantly raises inflation uncertainty as predicted by Friedman. Increased uncertainty affects inflation in all countries but not in the same manner. For Sweden we find a negative impact in accordance with the Holland hypothesis, whereas for Germany and the Netherlands we find the opposite in support of the Cukierman-Meltzer hypothesis. In a sensitivity analysis we show that an arbitrary choice of the heteroscedasticity parameter influences this relationship significantly.

We consider lifetime health insurance contracts in which ageing provisions are used to smooth the premium profile. The capital stock accumulated for each individual can be decomposed into two parts: a premium insurance and an annuitized life insurance, only the latter being transferable between insurers without triggering premium changes through risk segmentation. In a simulation based on German data, the transferable share declines in age and falls with an increasing age of entry into the contract. In spite of different benefit profiles, it is almost identical for women and men.

Rising wage inequality in the United States and Britain and rising continental European unemployment have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the unskilled, combined with flexible wages in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but wage rigidities in continental Europe (‘Krugman hypothesis’). This paper tests this hypothesis based on seven large person-level data sets for the 1980s and the 1990s. I use a more sophisticated categorization of low-skilled workers than previous studies, which exhibits differences between German workers with and without apprenticeship training, particularly in the 1980s. I find evidence for the Krugman hypothesis when Germany is compared with the United States. However, supply changes differ considerably between countries, with Britain experiencing enormous increases in skill supply explaining the relatively constant British skill premium in the 1990s.

We analyze a situation where a principal wants to induce two firms to produce an output, for example electricity from renewable energy sources. Firms can undertake non-contractible investments to reduce production cost of the output. Part of these investments spills over and also reduces production cost of the other firm. Comparing a general price subsidy and an innovation tournament, we find that the principal’s expected cost of implementing a given expected output is always higher under the tournament, even though this scheme may lead to more innovation.

We analyse whether the determinants of capital found in the previous literature hold for the special German banking sector comprising three characteristic banking groups including savings banks, cooperative banks and other banks, which differ regarding their ownership and their access to the capital market. Through the use of accounting data from German banks between 1992 and 2001 we find evidence in accordance with the buffer theory of capital for all German banking groups. Furthermore, we also detect some remarkable differences between the three banking groups regarding their determination of capital due to institutional characteristics.

Rank-order tournaments are usually implemented in organizations to provide incentives for eliciting employees’ effort and/or to identify the agent with the higher ability, for example in promotion tournaments. We close a gap in the literature by experimentally analyzing a ceteris paribus variation of the prize spread - being the major design feature of tournaments - in a symmetric and an asymmetric setting. We find that effort significantly increases with the prize spread as predicted by standard theory. However, only for sufficiently large prize spreads weak players competing against strong players strain themselves all the more and sorting of agents is feasible.