Volume 60, Issue 1

The regulatory agencies found mobile termination to be monopolistic and adopted a policy of ex ante price regulation in recent years. This paper discusses two structural alternatives putting mobile termination under competitive pressure. The first one is the “receiving-party-pays-principle” where mobile termination is a part of the service bundle puchased by the mobile customer. The second is the proposal of a “mobile termination competition”. It turns mobile termination into a specific competitive market and looks like the optimal economic answer to the mobile termination problem. It works on the consumer as well as on the wholesale level.

Between 1995 and 2005, the German economy has experienced a phase of weak economic growth. We analyze whether this weak growth performance can be attributed to the stance of monetary conditions during that period. We show that the real effective exchange rate did have almost no dampening effects on growth. On the contrary, the introduction of the euro and the single monetary policy for the euro area seem to have contributed significantly to the low trend growth rate in Germany between 1999 and 2005.

The liberalization of the German Markets for postal services which have been realized with the beginning of 2008 was politically combined with the introduction of minimum wage legislation. This minimum wage increases the labour costs of the competitors without reaching the cost level of the incumbent. The industrial economic analysis shows that the minimum wage is able to prevent market entries. But the minimum wage legislation is under attack by administrative courts and some political parties. Hence, it is possible that the minimum wage for postal services will be shortly abolished. An alternative to the minimum wage could be the using of existing economies of scale and scope by the incumbent to squeeze the competitors out of the market.

Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag werden anhand eines einfachen Modells des Steuerwettbewerbs aktuelle empirische Studien zu Steuerwirkungen auf unternehmerische Entscheidungen diskutiert. Insbesondere die Rolle multinationaler Unternehmen steht dabei im Fokus der Untersuchung, sowie die Frage, ob und inwiefern multinationale Unternehmen den Steuerwettbewerb zwischen Staaten verschärfen. Neuere empirische Analysen zeigen, dass sich der Steuerwettbewerb mit der Zunahme international tätiger Firmen eher abschwächen als verschärfen könnte.

This paper employs the χ-value to analyse who benefits from investments in general or in specific human capital, the employer or the employee. Within this framework, we replicate the standard results of human capital theory.