Reasons for Wage Rigidity in Germany This study investigates institutional and economic reasons for downward wage rigidity regarding three occupational skill groups. Based on a survey of 801 firms in Germany and an econometric analysis, we find strong support for explanations based on the effects of labour union contracts and efficiency wages that differ between skill groups. Survey respondents...

This paper analyzes optimal non-linear portfolio management contracts. We consider a setting where the investor faces moral hazard with respect to the effort and risk choices of the portfolio manager. The manager’s employment contract promises her: (a) a fixed payment, (b) a proportional asset-based fee, (c) a benchmark-linked fulcrum fee, and (d) a benchmark-linked option-type “bonus” incentiv...

The SOAP Service Description Language (SSDL) is a SOAPcentric language for describing Web Service contracts. SSDL focuses on message abstraction as the building block for creating service-oriented applications and provides an extensible range of protocol frameworks that can be used to describe and formally model component composition based on Web Service interactions. Given its novel approach, ...

Design by Contract is a software engineering practice that allows semantic information to be added to a class or interface to precisely specify the conditions that are required for its correct operation. The basic constructs of Design by Contract are method preconditions and postconditions, and class invariants. This paper presents a detailed design and implementation overview of jContractor, a...

Model transformations play an important role in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), and as their size and complexity grow, there is an increasing need to count on tool support for testing their correctness. In this work, we present TractsTool, a tool for specifying and testing several different kinds of model transformations, e.g., model-to-model, model-to-text, and text-to-model transformations, b...

The verification of safety becomes crucial in critical systems where human lives depend on the correct functioning of such systems. Formal methods have often been advocated as necessary to ensure the reliability of software systems, albeit with a considerable effort. In any case, such an effort is cost-effective when verifying safety-critical systems. Safety requirements are usually expressed u...

Design by Contract is a software engineering practice that allows semantic information to be added to a class or interface to precisely specify the conditions that are required for its correct operation. The basic constructs of Design by Contract are method preconditions and postconditions, and class invariants. This paper presents a detailed design and implementation overview of jContractor, a...