This study analyzes the causal effect of an increase in the retirement age on health. We exploit a sizable cohort-specific pension reform for women using two complementary empirical approaches - a Regression Discontinuity Design and a Difference-in- Differences approach. The analysis is based on official records covering all individuals insured by the public health system in Germany and including all ...
2021| Mara Barschkett, Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Anna Hammerschmid
We examine whether the financial strength of companies, in particular, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is causally linked to the award of a public procurement contract (PP), especially in the environmentally friendly “green” area (GPP). For this purpose, we build a combined procurement company data set from the Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) and the SME database AMADEUS, which includes ten ...
2021| Christopher F. Baum, Arash Kordestani, Dorothea Schäfer, Andreas Stephan
We consider a Green Public Procurement setting where the procurer provides a bid discount to environment-friendly technologies to foster their use. We assume that, before the auction, firms may switch to green technology via a publicly observable costly investment. We show that investment acts as a signaling device. This mitigates the effect of incomplete information on firms’ costs, thereby triggering ...
It is striking that economists in particular firmly believe in the benefits of rule-binding, even though this belief runs counter to the standard assumption of economic theory that we humans are self-interested and therefore extremely resourceful when it comes to circumventing inconvenient government regulations, e.g. taxes. In Public Choice Theory, politicians are even assumed to have nothing but ...
This paper investigates the impact of natural disasters on price stability in the euro area. We estimate panel and country-specific structural vector autoregression (VAR) models by combining estimated damages of disaster events with monthly data for the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) for all euro area countries over the period 1996-2021. Besides estimating the effect on overall headline ...
2021| John Beirne, Yannis Dafermos, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Nuobu Renzhi, Ulrich Volz, Jana Wittich
Using machine learning methods in a quasi-experimental setting, I study the heterogeneous effects of introducing waste prices - unit prices on household unsorted waste disposal - on waste demands and social welfare. First, using a unique panel of Italian municipalities with large variation in prices and observables, I show that waste demands are nonlinear. - find evidence of constant elasticities at ...
Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for 1,014 mergers affecting 12,325 antitrust markets scrutinized by the European Commission between 1990 and ...
2021| Pauline Affeldt, Tomaso Duso, Klaus Gugler, Joanna Piechucka
Early retirement options are usually targeted at employees at risk of not reaching their regular retirement age in employment. An important at-risk group comprises employees who have worked in demanding jobs for many years. This group may be particularly negatively affected by the abolition of early retirement options. To measure differences in labor market reactions of employees in low- and high-demand ...
2021| Johannes Geyer, Svenja Lorenz, Thomas Zwick, Mona Bruns
Wir untersuchen anhand von repräsentativen Daten für die Privatwirtschaft (Verdienststrukturerhebung 2018) Anteile und Höhe von umgewandelten Entgelten nach verschiedenen individuellen und betrieblichen Merkmalen von Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmern in Deutschland für das Jahr 2018. Deskriptive wie multivariate Regressionsanalysen weisen sowohl auf eine selektive Teilnahmebereitschaft zur Umwandlung ...
The energy transition requires substantial amounts of metals such as copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium. Are these metals a key bottleneck? We identify metal-specific demand shocks, estimate supply elasticities and pin down the price impact of the energy transition in a structural scenario analysis. Metal prices would reach historical peaks for an unprecedented, sustained period in a net-zero emissions ...
2021| Lukas Boer, Andrea Pescatori, Martin Stuermer
Grandparents act as the third largest caregiver after parental care and daycare in Germany, as in many Western societies. Adopting a double-generation perspective, we investigate the causal impact of this care mode on children's health, socio-emotional behavior, and school outcomes, as well as parental well-being. Based on representative German panel data sets, and exploiting arguably exogenous variations ...
2021| Mara Barschkett, C. Katharina Spieß, Elena Ziege
From standard portfolio-choice theory it is well-understood that background risk, overwhelmingly due to wage risk, is one of the central determinants of individuals’ portfolio composition: higher background risk reduces risky investments. However, if background risk is negatively correlated with financial market risk, higher background risk implies more risky investment. We quantify the influence of ...
Habit formation theory and the transformative voting hypothesis both imply that voting has downstream consequences for turnout and political involvement. Although several studies have applied causal research designs to study this question, the long-run evidence is extremely limited, especially for potentially transformative effects. We jointly examine the short- and long-term impact of earlier voting ...
Welfare is traditionally understood through social security decommodifying labor markets or social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes’ fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this paper introduces a novel yearly database of 37 countries between 1910 and 2020 to uncover the “hidden welfare state” of ...
2021| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Sebastian Kohl, Artem Korzhenevych, Linus Pfeiffer
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the introduction of mandatory face mask usage triggered a heated debate. A major point of debate is whether community use of masks creates a false sense of security that would diminish physical distancing, counteracting any potential direct benefit from masking. We conducted a randomized field experiment in Berlin, Germany, to investigate how masks affect distancing and ...
2021| Gyula Seres, Anna Balleyer, Nicola Cerutti, Jana Friedrichsen, Müge Süer
Children with lower socioeconomic status (SES) tend to benefit more from early child care, but are substantially less likely to be enrolled. We study whether reducing behavioral barriers in the application process increases enrollment in child care for lower-SES children. In our RCT in Germany with highly subsidized child care (n > 600), treated families receive application information and personal ...
2021| Henning Hermes, Philipp Lergetporer, Frauke Peter, Simon Wiederhold
We compute participation tax rates across the EU and find that work disincentives inherent in tax-benefit systems largely depend on household composition and the individual's earner role within the household. We then estimate participation elasticities using an IV group estimator that enables us to investigate the responsiveness of individuals to work incentives. We contribute to the literature on ...
Offizielle Daten des Digitalen Impfquoten-Monitoring (DIM) des RKI erlauben es nicht, anhand von sozio-demografischen und sozio-ökonomischen Merkmalen Personengruppen mit einer vergleichsweise geringen Impfquote zu identifizieren und dadurch eine gezielte Ansprache für eine Impfung zu initiieren. Diese Studie untersucht anhand von Daten der COMPASS-Befragung den Zusammenhang zwischen dem Impfstatus ...
Conditional on a contractionary monetary policy shock, the labor share of value added is expected to decrease in the basic New Keynesian model. By providing firm-level evidence, we are first to validate this proposition. Using local projections and high dimensional fixed effects, we show that a one standard deviation contractionary monetary policy shock decreases firms' labor share by 0.4 percent, ...
This paper examines the role of sovereign default beliefs for macroeconomic fluctuations and stabilization policy in a small open economy where fiscal solvency is a critical problem. We set up and estimate a DSGE model on Turkish data and show that accounting for sovereign risk significantly improves the fit of the model through an endogenous amplification between default beliefs, exchange rate and ...