This paper analyzes wage competition between national trade unions caused by the international mobility of capital. Perfect capital mobility leads to a Bertrand result for the outcome of wage competition: A pure strategy equilibrium implies full employment in all countries. It is shown that such...

This paper analyzes if unemployment can be reduced through labor tax cuts that are financed in a revenue neutral way through energy tax increases. In contrast to other papers on this topic we consider investment behavior of firms in energy saving technologies, irreversibilities, embodied...

Germany’s system of economic and political governance strongly relies on group decision-making and consensus to solve economic issues. This approach relates to a wide spectrum of decisions, including the social partners with the trade unions and the employers’ associations in wage formation,...

Quantitative models for climate policy modeling differ in the production structure used and in the sizes of the elasticities of substitution. The empirical foundation for both is generally lacking. This paper estimates the parameters of two-level CES production functions with capital, labour and...

Previous aggregate studies ignore additional environmental improvements caused by intra industry reallocations to high productivity/ low pollution firms. They also fail to consider potential differences in abatement efforts by exporting status. Our estimation based on UK firm level data from...

Globalization opens new opportunities also for small and medium sized enterprises (SME). However, empirical information on SMEs' international activities is still fragmented. The paper adds another piece of evidence in analyzing how Berlin SMEs are co-operating with partners in transition...

It is often argued that the process of globalization has mainly favoured large-scale multinational companies which are able to organize their business efficiently within internal hierarchies. However, globalization has not only pushed cross-border intra-finn transactions but also other...

We examine the differential effects of financial status and exporting activity on the likelihood of survival for firms in the UK and France - two countries with different financial systems. We aim to answer two main questions: What is the direct impact of financial characteristics and different...

This overview of transaction cost economics is organized around the "Carnegie Triple" – be disciplined; be interdisciplinary; have an active mind. The first of these urges those who would open up the black box of economic organization to do so in a modest, slow, molecular, definitive way, with...

German technology policy has undergone a remarkable change during the last years. The first thing to mention is that technology policy in Germany takes a broader view now, focussing not only on knowledge creation (i.e. the invention process per se) but also on knowledge diffusion and faster...