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The Dynamic Impact of Macroeconomic News on Long-Term Inflation Expectations

Well-anchored inflation expectations should not react to macroeconomic news. This paper analyzes the dynamics of inflation expectations in a proxy SVAR model, where macro news shocks are identified by their correlation with surprises from macroeconomic news announcements. Our results confirm that macro news shocks have no impact on U.S. long-term inflation expectations in the long run. In the short ...

The Valley of Death, the Technology Pork Barrel, and Public Support for Large Demonstration Projects

Moving non-incremental innovations from the pilot scale to full commercial scale raises questions about the need and implementation of public support. Heuristics from the literature put policy makers in a dilemma between addressing a market failure and acknowledging a government failure: incentives for private investments in large scale demonstrations are weak (the valley of death) but the track record ...

A Review of Technology and Policy Deep Decarbonization Pathway Options for Making Energy-Intensive Industry Production Consistent with the Paris Agreement

Flipping a Coin: Evidence from University Applications

We empirically investigate the possibility that a decision maker prefers to avoid making a decision and instead delegates it to an external device, e.g., a coin flip. A large data set from the centralized clearinghouse for university admissions in Germany shows a choice pattern of applicants that is consistent with coin flipping and that entails substantial consequences for the matching outcome. In ...

Motherhood and Mental Well-Being in Germany: Linking a Longitudinal Life Course Design and the Gender Perspective on Motherhood

Based on considerations of societal mothering ideologies, qualitative gender studies suggest detrimental effects of motherhood on women’s mental well-being. However, numerous quantitative life course analyses find no such effect. This dissonance may originate in the measurement of well-being usually employed in longitudinal quantitative designs, which does not capture the dimensions of well-being identified ...

Who Cares about Social Image?

This paper experimentally investigates how concerns for social approval relate to intrinsic motivations to purchase ethically. Participants state their willingness-to-pay for both a fair trade and a conventional chocolate bar in private or publicly. A standard model of social image predicts that all participants increase their fair trade premium when facing an audience. We find that the premium is ...

The Role of Time Preferences in Educational Decision Making

We analyze the implication of time-inconsistent preferences in educational decision making and corresponding policies using a structural dynamic choice model. We make two important research contributions. First, we estimate our model using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (soep) and provide quantitative evidence for time-inconsistent behavior in educational decision making. Second, we evaluate ...

Gene Discovery and Polygenic Prediction from a Genome-Wide Association Study of Educational Attainment in 1.1 Million Individuals

Here we conducted a large-scale genetic association analysis of educational attainment in a sample of approximately 1.1 million individuals and identify 1,271 independent genome-wide-significant SNPs. For the SNPs taken together, we found evidence of heterogeneous effects across environments. The SNPs implicate genes involved in brain-development processes and neuron-to-neuron communication. In a separate ...

The Short-Run Employment Effects of the German Minimum Wage Reform

We assess the short-term employment effects of the introduction of a national statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015. For this purpose, we exploit variation in the regional treatment intensity, assuming that the stronger a minimum wage ‘bites’ into the regional wage distribution, the stronger the regional labour market will be affected. In contrast to previous studies, we construct two regional ...

Hydrothermal Carbonization (HTC) of Green Waste: Mitigation Potentials, Costs, and Policy Implications of HTC Coal in the Metropolitan Region of Berlin, Germany

We quantify the greenhouse-gas mitigation potential and carbon abatement costs if green waste in the metropolitan region of Berlin, Germany, is diverted from composting into the production of hydrothermally carbonized coal (HTC coal) that is used to substitute for hard coal in electricity and heat generation. Depending on the origin of the green waste, we specify an urban, a rural-urban, and a rural ...