Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms....

In this paper, we suggest to estimate the home rents and prices in German regions/cities using the data from Internet ads offering the housing for rent and sale. Given the richness of information contained in the ads, we are able to construct the quality-adjusted rent and price indices using the...

Sub-Saharan Africa ranks among the top regions in terms of growth in the number of mobile phone users. The success of mobile telephony is attributed to the opening of markets for private players and lenient regulatory policy. However, markets may be increasingly saturated and new regulations...

This article investigates the understandings and perceptions of (micro)insurance among low-income people in southern Ghana, using evidence from four focus group discussions. It analyzes how the focus group participants think about various types of insurance - among them a micro life insurance...

Given the growing dissatisfaction with exclusion and long-run restrictions in structural vector autoregressive analysis, sign restrictions are becoming increasingly popular. So far there are no techniques for validating the shocks identified via such restrictions. Although in an ideal setting...

Empirical evidence so far found ambiguous results for the direction of effect of marginal income tax rates on employee remuneration. Based on the GSOEP data from 2002 through 2008 this study analyzes the impact of the marginal tax load on the employee side on the wage rate also allowing average...

In the European Emission Trading scheme the supply of allowances exceeds emissions - cumulating, according to our estimates, in a surplus of 2.7 billion tonnes by 2013/2014. We find that initially the surplus was acquired by power companies so as to hedge future carbon costs. As the surplus...

This study uses a switching regression framework with known sample separation to analyze the effects of corporate income taxation on investment in case of binding and non-binding financial constraints. By employing two different sample splitting criteria, payout behavior and the ratio of...

This paper empirically assesses whether the deployment and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure at the national level affects trade flows within the European Union (EU) and between the EU and its main trading partners. The analysis tests the hypothesis that...

Based on representative data, the German Micro-Census, we provide an overview of the development of self-employment and entrepreneurship in Germany between 1991 and 2010, the first two decades after reunification. We investigate the socioeconomic background of these individuals, their education,...