Publikationssuche

Entrepreneurship versus Joblessness: Explaining the Rise in Self-Employment

A large share of the workforce throughout the developing world is self-employed, and this proportion has increased in recent decades. Assessments of this development vary, with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs. Using a long panel dataset from Ghana, we empirically investigate the changing structure of earnings ...

Disclosure of Personal Information under Risk of Privacy Shocks

Breaches of the security of personal data collected by firms are reported almost daily. Companies are under an increasing political pressure to notify individuals whose privacy as been breached. At the moment, we know virtually nothing about the behavioral impact of data breach notifications. We present the results of an experimental study designed to investigate how breach notifications change the ...

Only Conservatives Are Voting in the Rain: Evidence from German Local and State Elections

In this note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the Conservatives profit from lower voter turnout at the expense of the Social Democrats. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using election day rain as an instrumental variable. Our particular contribution is the comparison of municipal and state electio ...

Too Much of a Good Thing? A Theory of Short-Term Debt as a Sorting Device

This paper shows that the liquidity risk associated with short-term debt financing can be used to sort insolvent firms out of financial markets when their solvency risk is private information. Notwithstanding this sorting role of short-term debt, unregulated financial firms tend to choose an inefficiently short debt maturity structure. This inefficiency arises for two reasons. First, by issuing more ...

The Effectiveness of a Strategic Reserve in the Presence of a High Portfolio Share of Renewable Energy Sources

To ensure sufficient investment in electricity generation capacity, mechanisms such as strategic reserves are being considered or already implemented. We analyze the effectiveness of a strategic reserve in the presence of a growing portfolio share of renewable energy sources (RES) with EMLab-Generation, an agent-based electricity market model. A strategic reserve can stabilize investment, but within ...

Short-Run Fuel Price Responses: At the Pump and on the Road

We provide evidence that motorists respond to short-run fluctuations in fuel prices at the gas pump and not on the road. Employing variants of censored panel regression to control for censoring of the dependent variable, we find that the fuel price has a negative impact on the quantity of fuel purchased, but no consistently significant impact on the subsequent distance driven until the next refill. ...

The Economics of the EU ETS Market Stability Reserve: Introduction

FTR Allocations to Ease Transition to Nodal Pricing: An Application to the German Power System

A shift from zonal to nodal pricing improves the efficiency of system operation. However, resulting price changes also shift surplus across generation and loads at different locations. As individual actors can lose, they might oppose any reform. We explore how allocation of financial transmission rights can be used to mitigate the distributional impact. The fundamental effects with regard to reference ...

Two Price Zones for the German Electricity Market: Market Implications and Distributional Effects

e discuss the implications of two price zones (i.e., one northern and one southern bidding area) on the German electricity market. In the northern zone, continuous increases in capacity with low variable costs cause large regional supply surpluses in the market dispatch, while in the southern zone conventional capacity decreases. As the spatial imbalance of supply and load is increasing, the current ...

Resource Curse Contagion in the Case of Yemen

This study analyses the economic developments in Yemen from the 1970s to today in the context of the resource curse hypothesis. After a brief survey of the resource curse literature, using empirical data, historical accounts, and political (economic) analyses, I confirm that post-reunification Yemen suffers from an intense oil curse. The curse is evidenced by low genuine savings rates, oil-dependency, ...