Volume 245, Issue 3

This paper studies how the separation of ownership and management affects firms’ location decisions in a model of price competition with concentrated consumer demand. Strategic location decisions are made by the owners themselves, whereas operational price decisions are delegated to managers. It is shown that the impact of manager delegation on locations, prices and profits crucially depends on the shape of the demand distribution. When the distribution is “broad-peaked”, delegation leads to more distant locations, higher prices and profits. However, “narrow-peaked” distributions reverse the delegation effect on location and can even lead to lower prices and profits.

The notion of a nation-specific inflation trauma among the German population is ubiquitous in the public debate in Germany and beyond. According to a widespread reading of history because of its experience with hyperinflation in 1923, the Germans not only fear rising prices but favor a stability-oriented monetary and fiscal policy. The historical origins of this contemporary understanding of the German inflation trauma are controversial. The majority of the literature presumes that a specific traumatic disposition persists since 1923, and as communicative memory has been transposed intergenerationally ( persistence thesis ). Others, however, point to a post-hoc reconstruction of past experiences, explaining it as a distinctly cultural memory that is largely detached from the first-hand experiences of 1923 ( reconstruction thesis ). By drawing on both methods of history and political sciences, we provide new insights on the question of origin. Specifically, we examine the remembrance of hyperinflation in personal memoirs and German Bundestag debates. Doing so, we find plausible support for the logic of reconstruction . We show that individual memories of hyperinflation were ambiguous and hardly ever provided explanations or specific policy lessons. Thus, personal memoirs do not provide any manifest testament for a communicative memory of the German inflation as understood by the persistence thesis. Furthermore, Bundestag speeches in the first decades of the Federal Republic indicate a contested communicative memory of 1923 with conflicting political lessons drawn from the historical experience. As only the Weimar memory transcended into the cultural realm from the 1980s onwards, a process of discursive alignment occurred resulting in the contemporary understanding of the inflation trauma. These findings rebut the persistence thesis and underscore the logic of reconstruction .

The Combined International Trade and Investment Data (CITID) represents a new innovative and comprehensive data landscape that combines firm-level data focused on international trade and investment. The datasets are sourced from both the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, ensuring a reliable and robust data landscape. Within the CITID, multiple individual datasets seamlessly merge, encompassing a wide range of information. These include data on trade in goods, trade in services, inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI), as well as information on international financial and capital transactions along with additional firm-level data. The data enables a holistic understanding of firms’ international integration, previously unattainable, and offers new opportunities for analyzing global trade dynamics. The data will be accessible for research. This paper provides a comprehensive description of the individual datasets, including information about their combinability, the methodology for matching them, the data’s content, and its potential for further research.

The BIBB/BAuA Employment Surveys 2006, 2012 and 2018 are large cross-sections of the working population on qualification and working conditions in Germany and many publications are based on them. The data covers a wide range of topics, including information on occupations, education, job tasks, working conditions, job satisfaction and health status. A new harmonised dataset now compiles these three surveys into one file. The harmonised BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey (H-ETB) simplifies the use of the surveys for analyses over time and analyses of the pooled data. The dataset includes 60,048 cases and all variables that were surveyed in each wave in a harmonised form. The paper outlines the subject and methodology of the BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey as well as the harmonisation.