Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu Intereconomics 2012 | 2 120 European Railway Policy the European Commission's classifi cation 2 , which differentiates between the full (ownership) "separation model" (OS), the "holding model" (HM), where the infrastructure manager and at least one train operating company are associated under the umbrella of a holding company, and a "hybrid model", where the independent infrastructure manager has delegated functions to one train-operating company. 3 The principal motivation for the cited initiatives at the European level is to foster rail in absolute terms and in comparison to other transport modes. Separating infrastructure from transport is an adequate means if the advantages of vertical separation outweigh potential disadvantages. So far, however, there is little empirical evidence to indicate whether this trade-off favours full separation in the railway sector. For the initiatives to be successful, it is therefore crucial to provide compelling empirical evidence which substantiates the benefi ts of separation. This paper aims at contributing to fi ll this gap. * University of Magdeburg. ** Deutsche Bahn AG, Corporate Strategy. Views and opinions expressed, as well as assumptions made in this article, are not refl ective of the position of Deutsche Bahn AG. The authors thank, without implication, Thomas Ehrmann, Martin Falk, Georg Götz and Marc Ivaldi for comments and discussions, which helped to improve the paper substantially.

Intuition suggests that firms that can apply price discrimination make higher profits than firms that are restricted in their pricing policy. In this paper, we show that, in general, this is not the case. In the framework of a two-dimensional spatial model with elastic demand à la Lösch, we further investigate the interplay of transport costs, competition, and price policy. One of our results is that under realistic specifications of parameters each firm gains a monopolistic area in the center of its market that has the same shape as the entire market, but with a convexly or concavely distorted separating line, depending on the extension of the market.

If we take into account the spatial dimension of markets, prices of incumbent firms may be higher, and consumer surplus may be lower with competition.This result obtains unambiguously, in the supposedly highly competitive case of Bertrand competition. Moreover, we are able to show that consumer welfare may be reduced by competition, if the distance between the firms' sites is sufficiently large.

Existing theoretical literature fails to explain the differences between the pay of workers that are covered by union agreements and others who are not.This study aims at closing this gap by a single general-equilibrium approach that integrates a dual labor market and a two-sector product market. Our results suggest that the so-called 'union wage gap' is largely determined by the degree of centralization of the bargains, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, by the expenditure share of the unionized sector's goods.

This study examines how the size of trade unions relative to the labor force impacts on the desirability of different organizational forms of selffinancing unemployment insurance (UI). For this purpose, we compare the outcome of a model with a uniform payroll tax to a model where workers pay taxes according to their systematic risk of unemployment. Our results highlight the importance of the bargaining structure for the assessment of a particular UI scheme. Most importantly, it depends on the relative size of the unions whether efficiency favors a uniform or a differentiated UI scheme.