Publikationen des Vorstandsbereichs

Does Index Insurance Help Households Recover from Disaster? Evidence from IBLI Mongolia

This article investigates the impact of indemnity payments from index insurance on the asset recovery of households following a catastrophic weather disaster. Our focus is on the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) in Mongolia. We analyze the effect of IBLI indemnity payments after a once-in-50-year winter disaster struck Mongolia over the 2009/10 winter. The analysis is based on three waves of ...

Gender Discrimination in Hiring across Occupations: A Nationally-Representative Vignette Study

We investigate gender discrimination in a nationally-representative sample of German firms using a factorial survey design. Short CVs of fictitious applicants for apprenticeship positions are presented to human resource managers who are asked to evaluate the applicants. Women are evaluated worse than men on average, controlling for all attributes of the CV. This measure of discrimination is robust ...

A Nod to Public Open Access Infrastructures

The Role of Morbidity for Proxy-Reported Well-Being in the Last Year of Life

Late-life well-being often shows steep deteriorations, but the contributing factors are not well understood, in part because data about people’s final year of life are scarce. Here, we draw from and test theoretical perspectives that health-related vulnerabilities undermine the experience and skills older adults typically use to maintain well-being (Charles, 2010). To do so, we examined how various ...

Can Facts Trump Unconditional Trust? Evidence-Based Information Halves the Influence of Physicians' Non-Evidence-Based Cancer Screening Recommendations

Informed decision making in medicine, defined as basing one’s decision on the best current medical evidence, requires both informed physicians and informed patients. In cancer screening, however, studies document that these prerequisites are not yet met. Many physicians do not know or understand the medical evidence behind screening tests, do not adequately counsel (asymptomatic) people on screening, ...

Food Intake and the Role of Food Self-Provisioning

This article investigates the role of food self-provisioning for the intake of nutrients of households in Mongolia. We analyse nutritional outcomes within and across urban wage employees, rural households with small herds, and pastoralists with large herds. Food self-provisioning significantly affects dietary quality and quantity. Farming food crops improves the nutrient intake. In contrast, animal ...

"What Else Are You Worried about?" - Integrating Textual Responses into Quantitative Social Science Research

Open-ended questions have routinely been included in large-scale survey and panel studies, yet there is some perplexity about how to actually incorporate the answers to such questions into quantitative social science research. Tools developed recently in the domain of natural language processing offer a wide range of options for the automated analysis of such textual data, but their implementation ...

Estimation of Structural Vector Autoregressive Models

In this survey, estimation methods for structural vector autoregressive models are presented in a systematic way. Both frequentist and Bayesian methods are considered. Depending on the model setup and type of restrictions, least squares estimation, instrumental variables estimation, method-of-moments estimation and generalized method-of-moments are considered. The methods are presented in a unified ...

Terminal Decline in Well-Being: The Role of Multi-Indicator Constellations of Physical Health and Psychosocial Correlates

Well-being is often relatively stable across adulthood and old age, but typically exhibits pronounced deteriorations and vast individual differences in the terminal phase of life. However, the factors contributing to these differences are not well understood. Using up to 25-year annual longitudinal data obtained from 4,404 now-deceased participants of the nationwide German Socio-Economic Panel Study ...

Changes in Life Satisfaction when Losing One's Spouse: Individual Differences in Anticipation, Reaction, Adaptation and Longevity in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP)

Losing a spouse is among the most devastating events that may occur in people's lives. We use longitudinal data from 1,224 participants in the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) to examine (a) how life satisfaction changes with the experience of spousal loss; (b) whether socio-demographic factors and social and health resources moderate spousal loss-related changes in life satisfaction; and (c) ...