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Public Child‐Care Expansion and Changing Gender Ideologies of Parents in Germany

This study investigates whether the expansion of public child care for children aged younger than 3 years in Germany has been associated with individual‐level change in gender ideologies. The authors develop and test a theoretical framework of the short‐term impact of family policy institutions on ideology change. The analysis links the German Family Panel pairfam (2008 to 2015) with administrative ...

Convergence or Divergence? Educational Discrepancies in Work-Care Arrangements of Mothers with Young Children in Germany

This study examines how educational differences in work-care patterns among mothers with young children in Germany changed between 1997 and 2013. Since the mid-2000s, Germany has undergone a paradigm shift in parental leave and childcare policies. Our comparative analysis of East and West Germany provides new evidence on whether the long-standing gender regime differences interact with recent developments ...

Deindustrialisation and the Polarisation of Household Incomes: The Example of Urban Agglomerations in Germany

The tertiarisation, or perhaps more accurately, the deindustrialisation of the economy has left deep scars on cities. It is evident not only in the industrial wastelands and empty factory buildings, but also in the income and social structures of cities. Industrialisation, collective wage setting, and the welfare state led to a stark reduction in income differences over the course of the 20th century. ...

Speculative Price Bubbles in Urban Housing Markets: Empirical Evidence from Germany

In the light of the unconventional monetary policies implemented by most large central banks around the world, there is an intense debate about the potential impact on the prices of capital assets. Particularly in Germany, skepticism about the sustainability of the current policy by the European Central Bank is wide spread and concerns about the emergence of a speculative price bubble in the housing ...

Do Private Utilities Outperform Local Government-Owned Utilities? Evidence from German Retail Electricity

Against the background of remunicipalisation trends in European public service sectors, this paper estimates firm-level productivity for German electricity retailers and tests whether the ownership type has a significant impact on productivity. We specify a production function for the retail sector with labour and external services as main inputs, which is estimated using a control function approach. ...

Hidden Skewness: On the Difficulty of Multiplicative Compounding under Random Shocks

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have an asymmetric distribution of outcomes. In a series of incentivized laboratory experiments, we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimatethe asymmetry or ignore it completely. Participants misperceive the spread of the outcome distribution to be too narrowband, and they estimate the median and ...

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Inequality-Minimization with a Given Public Budget

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, it can be solved by an interior-point algorithm. If it is quasiconvex, the bisection method can be used. Using artificial and real-world data, we implement ...

Distributional Effects of Subsidizing Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Germany

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the income distribution, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme is almost distributionally neutral in terms of standard inequality measures. Two effects offset ...

The Impact of Policy Measures on Future Power Generation Portfolio and Infrastructure: a Combined Electricity and CCTS Investment and Dispatch Model (ELCO)

This paper presents a general electricity-CO2 modeling framework that is able to simulate interactions of the energy-only market with different forms of national policy measures. We set up a two sector model where players can invest into various types of generation technologies including renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture, transport, and storage (CCTS). For a detailed representation of CCTS ...