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Short Assessment of the Big Five: Robust across Survey Methods Except Telephone Interviewing

We examined measurement invariance and age-related robustness of a short 15-item Big Five Inventory (BFI-S) of personality dimensions, which is well suited for applications in large-scale multidisciplinary surveys. The BFI-S was assessed in three different interviewing conditions: computer-assisted or paper-assisted face-to-face interviewing, computer-assisted telephone interviewing, and a self-administered ...

Changes in Compulsory Schooling and the Causal Effect of Education on Health: Evidence from Germany

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health-related behavior in West Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach using as natural experiments several changes in compulsory schooling laws between 1949 and 1969. These law changes generate exogenous variation in years of schooling both across states and over time. We find evidence for a strong and ...

Policy Incentives for Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies in Europe: A Qualitative Multi-criteria Analysis

In this paper, we compare different policy incentives for overcoming investment uncertainties that are typical for low-carbon technologies prior to their commercialisation, some of which may be attributable to market failures. The paper focuses on the particular case of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies and conducts a qualitative multi-criteria analysis of different public policy support ...

MIDAS vs. Mixed-Frequency VAR: Nowcasting GDP in the Euro Area

This paper compares the mixed-data sampling (MIDAS) and mixed-frequency VAR (MF-VAR) approaches to model specification in the presence of mixed-frequency data, e.g. monthly and quarterly series. MIDAS leads to parsimonious models which are based on exponential lag polynomials for the coefficients, whereas MF-VAR does not restrict the dynamics and can therefore suffer from the curse of dimensionality. ...

Participation in Micro Life Insurance and the Use of Other Financial Services in Ghana

This article investigates households' decisions to take up micro life insurance and to use other financial services. It estimates a multivariate probit model based on Ghanaian household survey data. The results suggest a mutually reinforcing relationship between the use of insurance and the use of other formal financial services. Risk-averse households and households who consider themselves more exposed ...

Reflections on Implementing EU ETS : Pricing Carbon: The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. A Denny Ellerman ... , Cambridge University Press, New York 2010, 390 pp: Book Review

Maternal Life Satisfaction and Child Outcomes: Are They Related?

This paper investigates the association between maternal life satisfaction and the developmental functioning of 2-3-year-old children as well as the socio-emotional behavior of 5-6-year-old children. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which allows us to control for a rich set of child and parental characteristics and to use the mother's life satisfaction before the birth ...

Detecting Illegal Activities: The Case of Cartels

This paper considers enhancements of a comparatively new method to detect cartels, the System of Cartel Markers (SCM), introduced by Blanckenburg and Geist (Int Adv Econ Res 15(4):421-436, 2009). The aim of SCM is to find illegal collusion on legal markets with observable market data. It uses expected behavior patterns such aslow level of capacity utilization, slackness of price adjustments to exogenous ...

A Dynamic Incentive Mechanism for Transmission Expansion in Electricity Networks: Theory, Modeling, and Application

We propose a price-cap mechanism for electricity-transmission expansion based on redefining transmission output in terms of financial transmission rights. Our mechanism applies the incentive-regulation logic of rebalancing a two-part tariff. First, we test this mechanism in a three-node network. We show that the mechanism intertemporally promotes an investment pattern that relieves congestion, increases ...

Incentives for Transmission Investment in the PJM Electricity Market: FTRs or Regulation (or Both?)

This paper presents an application of a mechanism that provides incentives to promote transmission network expansion in the area of the US electric system known as PJM. The applied mechanism combines the merchant and regulatory approaches to attract investment into transmission grids. It is based on rebalancing a two-part tariff in the framework of a wholesale electricity market with locational pricing. ...