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The Impact of Socio-economics and Climate Change on Tropical Cyclone Losses in the USA

Tropical cyclones that make landfall on the coast of the USA are causing increasing economic losses. It is assumed that the increase in losses is largely due to socio-economic developments, i.e. growing wealth and greater settlement of exposed areas. However, it is also thought that the rise in losses is caused by increasing frequency of severe cyclones resulting from climate change, whether due to ...

Stability and Change of Well Being: An Experimentally Enhanced Latent State-Trait-Error Analysis

This study uses longitudinal panel data and short-term retest data from the same respondents in the German Socio-economic Panel to estimate the contribution of state and trait variance to the reliable variance in judgments of life satisfaction and domain satisfaction. The key finding is that state and trait variance contribute approximately equally to the reliable variance in well being measures. Most ...

Les descendants de migrants maghrébins en France et turcs en Allemagne: deux types de mise à distance sociale

Telling the Truth May Not Pay Off: An Empirical Study of Centralized University Admissions in Germany

Matching university places to students is not as clear cut or as straightforward as it ought to be. By investigating the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions in medicine and related subjects, we show that a procedure designed to give an advantage to students with excellent school grades actually harms them. The reason is that the three-step process employed ...

Start-ups by the Unemployed: Characteristics, Survival and Direct Employment Effects

Fostering and supporting start-up businesses by unemployed persons has become an increasingly important issue in many European countries. These new ventures are being subsidized by various governmental programs. Empirical evidence on skill-composition, direct job creation and other key variables is rather scarce, largely because of inadequate data availability. We base our analysis on unique survey ...

A Natural Experiment on Sick Pay Cuts, Sickness Absence, and Labor Costs

This study estimates the reform effects of a reduction in statutory sick pay levels on sickness absence behavior and labor costs. German federal law reduced the legal obligation of German employers to provide 100% continued wage pay for up to six weeks per sickness episode. In 1996 statutory sick pay was decreased to 80% of foregone gross wages. Within the reform's target group - private sector employees ...

A Positive Theory of the Earnings Relationship of Unemployment Benefits

In a wage bargaining model, a stronger earnings relationship of unemployment benefits may reduce wages. Therefore, the benefit structure significantly influences profits and trade union utility, raising the question as to how the benefit structure is determined in the political process. We consider a government that chooses the earnings relationship in order to maximize its political support. Our model ...

M3 Money Demand and Excess Liquidity in the Euro Area

Recent empirical studies have found evidence of unstable long run money demand functions if recent data are used. If the link between money balances and the macroeconomy is fragile, the rationale of monetary aggregates in the ECB strategy has to be doubted. In contrast we present a "stable" long run money demand relationship for M3 for the period 1983-2006. To obtain the result, the short run homogeneity ...

Optimal Income Taxation of Lone Mothers: An Empirical Comparison for Britain and Germany

Optimal tax rules are used to evaluate the optimality of taxation for lone mothers in Germany and Britain. The theoretical model is combined with elasticities derived from the structural estimation of lone mothers' labour supply. For both countries we do not find that in-work credits with marginal tax rates are optimal. However we show that when the government has a low taste for redistribution, out-of-work ...

O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Effects of Having a Sibling on Geographic Mobility and Labour Market Outcomes

This paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact in affecting children's mobility characteristics. Our main result is that the mobility of young adults crucially depends on the presence of a sibling. Siblings compete in location and employment decisions to direct parental care decisions towards their preferred outcome. Only children are not exposed ...