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Unemployment and Business Cycles

We develop and estimate a general equilibrium search and matching model that accounts for key business cycle properties of macroeconomic aggregates, including labor market variables. In sharp contrast to leading New Keynesian models, we do not impose wage inertia. Instead we derive wage inertia from our specification of how firms and workers negotiate wages. Our model outperforms a variant of the standard ...

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 ...

Early Birds in Day Care: The Social Gradient in Starting Day Care and Children's Non-cognitive Skills

In recent years, almost all children below school age in Western industrialized countries have some experience of attending day care institutions. However, the age at which children enter day care and therefore the overall time spent in day care varies substantially. We investigate the potential impact of later day care entry on the social and emotional behaviour of children, one important aspect of ...

Two Steps Forward - One Step Back? Evaluating Contradicting Child Care Policies in Germany

We apply a structural model of mothers’ labor supply and child care choices to evaluate the effects of two child care reforms in Germany that were introduced simultaneously. A legal claim to subsidized child care became effective for children aged 1 year or older. Moreover, a new child care allowance (‘Betreuungsgeld’) came into effect. It is granted to families who do not use publicly subsidized child ...

Developing Better Measures of Neighbourhood Characteristics and Change for Use in Studies of Residential Mobility: A Case Study of Britain in the Early 2000s

This paper addresses the problem of measuring neighbourhood characteristics and change when working with individual level datasets to understand the effects of residential mobility. Currently available measures in Britain are in various respects unsuitable for this purpose. The paper explores a new indicator of small area poverty: the Unadjusted Means-tested Benefits Rate (UMBR), which divides claimants ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Locus of Control and Mothers' Return to Employment

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 ...