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Personality-Situation Transactions from Adolescence to Old Age

People presumably choose and create their daily environments according to their personality. Prior research shows that, for example, more extraverted people engage more often in social situations, and more conscientious people engage more often in work-related activities compared with less extraverted or less conscientious people, respectively. The current study examined such personality-situation ...

Voters Prefer More Qualified Mayors, but Does It Matter for Public Finances? Evidence for Germany

This paper studies the importance of politicians’ qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and qualification levels of mayoral candidates. We principally use a regression discontinuity design focusing on close ...

A New Look at Intergenerational Mobility in Germany: Compared to the U.S.

Motivated by contradictory evidence on intergenerational mobility in Germany, I present a cross-country comparison of Germany and the U.S., reassessing the question of whether intergenerational mobility is higher in Germany than in the U.S. I can reproduce the standard result from the literature, which states that the German intergenerational elasticity estimates are lower than those for the U.S. However, ...

Productivity in German Manufacturing Firms: Does Fixed-Term Employment Matter?

This study empirically analyses how the use of fixed-term employment affects labour productivity of establishments. To this end, a large data set of German manufacturing establishments and various panel data models are used in order to test the expected non-linear relationship between labour productivity and the use of fixed-term employees. The analysis takes into account the possible distortions that ...

Locus of Control and Mothers' Return to Employment

Is the German Retail Gasoline Market Competitive? A Spatial-Temporal Analysis Using Quantile Regression

We explore whether noncompetitive pricing prevails in Germany’s retail gasoline market by examining the influence of the crude oil price on the retail gasoline price, focusing specifically on how this influence varies according to the brand and to the degree of competition in the vicinity of the station. Our analysis identifies several factors other than cost—including the absence of nearby competitors ...

Voting for Direct Democratic Participation: Evidence from an Initiative Election

We study a constitutional change in the German State of Bavaria where citizens, not politicians, granted themselves more say in politics at the local level through a state initiative election in 1995. This institutional setting allows us to observe revealed preferences for direct democracy and to identify factors which explain these preferences. Empirical evidence suggests that support for direct democracy ...

Effective European Antitrust: Does EC Merger Policy Generate Deterrence?

We estimate the deterrence effects of European Commission (EC) merger policy instruments over the 1990–2009 period. Our empirical results suggest phase-1 remedies uniquely generate robust deterrence as—unlike phase-1 withdrawals, phase-2 remedies, and preventions—phase-1 remedies lead to fewer merger notifications in subsequent years. Furthermore, the deterrence effects of phase-1 remedies work best ...

Equity Premium Prediction: Are Economic and Technical Indicators Unstable?

We show that technical indicators deliver stable economic value in predicting the US equity premium over the out-of-sample period from 1966 to 2014. The results tentatively improve over time, and beat alternatives over a large continuum of sub-periods. In contrast, economic indicators work well only until the 1970s, but lose predictive power thereafter, even when considering the last crisis. Translating ...

Using Person-Fit Measures to Assess the Impact of Panel Conditioning on Reliability

Panel conditioning has posed one of the main challenges to panel studies since their inception in the social sciences. Aside from the risk of reactivity to previous interviews, there is reason to expect that cumulative survey experience increases the reliability of data emanating from panel studies relative to cross-sectional surveys. This positive aspect of recurrent interviewing for data quality ...