Legal, compliant and suitable: The ECB‘s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP).BertelsmannStiftung/jacques Delors Centre Policy Brief 25 March 2020

The ECB has announced a 750-billion-euro purchase programme to fight the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But like all ECB programmes in recent years, the new Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) will likely be challenged in court. This policy brief assesses whether the PEPP will likely survive a legal challenge. It argues that the PEPP is compatible with EU law because it meets the three criteria the Court of Justice of the EU has established to check the legality of monetary policy measures: First, the PEPP falls within the ECB’s mandate. Second, it respects the principle of proportionality. And third, it does not violate the prohibition of monetary financing. This assessment even holds if the ECB were to relax some of the constraints in the PEPP like the issuer limit currently applicable to other bond-buying programmes

Job Preferences as Revealed by Employee Initiated Job Changes

Many previous studies try to discover job preferences by directly asking individuals. Since it is not sure, whether answers to these surveys are relevant for actual behaviour, this empirical examination offers a new approach based on representative German data. Employees who quit their job and find a new one, compare the two jobs with respect to eight job characteristics: type of work, pay, chances of promotion, work load, commuting time, work hour regulations, fringe benefits and security against loss of job. It is argued that the observation of many improvements (and few declines) for a certain attribute indicates a particular relevance and high preference for this attribute. It turns out that pay and type of work are most important for employees in this sense. Differences across subgroups of employees with respect to individual characteristics such as sex and age are explored. Those between East- and West-Germany diminish over time.job characteristics, quits, job preferences, job changes

Severance Payments for Dismissed Employees Severance Payments for Dismissed Employees in Germany

This contribution investigates severance payments for dismissed employees in Germany. Particularly, it responds to the following questions: Who receives severance payments? By which characteristics is the level of severance payments determined? Is overcompensation to be considered a relevant issue? Hereby, individual and collective dismissals are distinguished. This is the first study on this issue using individual representative data ­ the German Socio-Economic Panel ­ and multivariate methods. The results indicate that rather women, persons with many years of tenure and working in big firms receive severance payments. There is a huge variance in the size of the payments, which can only partly be explained by tenure, the wage and citizenship. About one quarter of dismissed employees is better off in their following careers independent of having received a severance payment.Severance Payments, Dismissals, Plant closings, Dismissal

The Wage Policy of Firms - Comparative Evidence for the U.S. and Germany from Personnel Data

The wage policy of a German and a U.S. firm is comparatively analysed with a focus on the relation between wages and hierarchies. While prior studies examine only one particular firm, in this paper two plants of the same owners with similar production processes in different institutional environments are inspected. Convex wage profiles over the hierarchy levels of both plants are found. The U.S. plant shows considerably higher intensity of intra-firm competition in terms of higher intra-level wage inequality and yearly promotion rate. In contrast, wages are more distinctly attached to hierarchy levels in the German firm, as wage regressions show. The results are discussed in comparison to prior studies.Hierarchies, Intra-firm wages, Personnel records

Performance Pay and Risk Aversion

A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of data, there has so far been hardly any empirical evidence about the second. Making use of a unique representative data set, we find clear evidence that risk aversion has a highly significant and substantial negative impact on the probability that an employee's pay is performance contingent

The Effect of Reputation on Selling Prices in Auctions

In economic approaches it is often argued that reputation considerations influence the behavior of individuals or firms and that reputation influences the outcome of markets. Empirical evidence is rare though. In this contribution we argue that a positive reputation of sellers should have an effect on selling prices. Analyzing auctions of popular DVDs at eBay we, indeed, find support for this hypothesis. Secondary, we unmask the myth that it is promising for eBay sellers to let their auction end at the evening, when many potential buyers may be online

Exercises to develop skill in map reading in grade four

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Bonus Payments, Hierarchy Levels and Tenure: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Evidence

Using data on executive compensation for the German chemical industry, we investigate the relevance of two theoretical approaches that focus on bonuses as part of a long term wage policy of a firm. The first approach argues that explicit bonuses serve as substitutes for implicit career concerns. The second approach claims that bonuses are used as complements to an executive's internal career. Our data show that bonus payments are mostly prevalent among senior executives at higher hierarchy levels and rather for management jobs than for jobs in research and development. This is true for the whole chemical sector as well as for single large corporations. The findings indicate that the two theoretical views are not mutually exclusive, but are both relevant in practice.bonus payments, chemical sector, hierarchy, tenure, wage policy

"The Further We Stretch the Higher the Sky" - On the Impact of Wage Increases on Job Satisfaction

The impact of wage increases on job satisfaction is explored. First, it is empirically confirmed that current job satisfaction rises with the absolute wage level as well as with wage increases. Second, a basic job satisfaction function is constructed based on the empirical results, and theoretical implications are analyzed. Myopic maximization of such a function directly implies increasing and concave shaped wage profiles. It is shown that employees get unhappier over time staying on a certain job although wages increase, which again is empirically confirmed.Job satisfaction, Wage increases, Habit formation, Wage profiles, Relative utility