Externe referierte Aufsätze

Risks in Global Natural Gas Markets: Investment, Hedging and Trade

Recent supply security concerns in Europe have revived interest into the natural gas market. We investigate infrastructure investment and trade in an imperfect market structure for various possible risks for both supply and demand. We focus on three possible scenarios in a stochastic global gas market model: (i) transit of Russian gas via Ukraine that may be disrupted from 2020 on; (ii) natural gas ...

Shaking Dutch Grounds Won't Shatter the European Gas Market

The Netherlands have been a pivotal supplier in Western European natural gas markets in the last decades. Recent analyses show that the Netherlands would play an important role in replacing Russian supplies in Germany and France in case of a Russian export disruption. Lately, however, the Netherlands have suffered from a series of earthquakes that are related to the natural gas production in the major ...

The European Debt Crisis and Fiscal Reactions in Europe 2000-2014

After the outbreak of the global financial crisis, some governments in the EU experienced serious fiscal problems, while others were less affected. This paper seeks to shed light on the divergent fiscal performance in the EU countries before and after the outbreak of the crisis. Fiscal reaction functions of the primary balance are estimated for different groups of EU countries using quarterly data ...

Liquidity Requirements: A Double-Edged Sword

This paper shows that bank liquidity regulation may be a "double-edged sword." Under certain conditions, it may hamper, rather than strengthen, a bank’s resilience to financial stress. The reason is the existence of two opposing effects of liquidity regulation, a liquidity effect and a solvency effect. The liquidity effect arises because a bank mitigates its risk of illiquidity when it increases its ...

Information Flows in Foreign Exchange Markets: Dissecting Customer Currency Trades

We study the information in order flows in the world's largest over-the-counter market, the foreign exchange (FX) market. The analysis draws on a data set covering a broad cross-section of currencies and different customer segments of FX end-users. The results suggest that order flows are highly informative about future exchange rates and provide significant economic value. We also find that different ...

Erbschaft und Eigenleistung im Vermögen der Deutschen: eine Verteilungsanalyse

Wir gehen der Frage nach, ob die gegenwärtige Vermögensungleichheit in Deutschland auf eine Dominanz von Erbschaften im oberen Bereich der Verteilung zurückzuführen ist. Auf Basis von Daten der Deutschen Bundesbank zeigt sich, dass die Vermögen der Deutschen zu etwa zwei Dritteln auf Eigenleistung und zu etwa einem Drittel auf Erbschaft zurückgehen. Diese Proportion verändert sich entlang der Vermögensverteilung ...

Housing Policy in Soviet Russia and Germany between the Two World Wars: Comparative Analysis of Two Systems

World War I played a key role in shaping modern housing policy. While in the pre-War era, there was virtually no housing policy, hostilities led to an almost immediate and comprehensive state intervention in the housing market, particularly among those engaged in the war. Originally, Russia went the same way as the other countries. However, after the communists seized power in November 1917, they started ...

Wage Mobility in East and West Germany

This article studies long run wage mobility as a characteristic of regional labor markets. Using German administrative data we describe wage mobility since 1975 in West and since 1992 in East Germany. Wage mobility declined substantially in East Germany in the 1990s and moderately in East and West Germany since the late 1990s. These findings are robust in many dimensions. We apply RIF regression based ...

Credit Provision and Banking Stability after the Great Financial Crisis: The Role of Bank Regulation and the Quality of Governance

In response to the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), bank regulatory regimes were tightened world-wide to strengthen banking stability and the resilience of the banking sectors. Yet, it is often claimed that regulatory tightening may lead banks to cut back on lending and comes at the cost of a lower loan supply. The present paper uses a country panel for 50 advanced and emerging market economies to analyze ...

Unconventional Monetary Policy and Money Demand

This paper investigates the usefulness of the money demand relationship in times of unconventional monetary policies by cointegration methods. Our empirical evidence shows the existence of stable long run money demand functions even in the period of interest rates near the zero bound, both for the US economy and the euro area. Evidence is based on standard monetary aggregates, i.e. MZM for the US and ...

Andere Länder, andere Wege: Pflege im internationalen Vergleich?

Expansion of Full-Day Childcare and Subjective Well-Being of Mothers: Interdependencies with Culture and Resources

This study investigates whether an expansion of state-subsidized full-day childcare may improve the subjective well-being of mothers of children under school age by acting as a boundary-spanning resource to facilitate the combination of employment and childcare responsibilities. It extends previous studies that showed contradictory results by demonstrating that the relationship with parental subjective ...

Rates of Return and Early Retirement Disincentives: Evidence from a German Pension Reform

To counteract the financial pressure emerging in aging societies, statutory pension schemes are undergoing fundamental reforms in many Western countries. Starting with cohort 1937, Germany introduced permanent pension deductions for early retirement. This study examines the profitability of pension contributions against the background of this reform for cohorts 1935–1945. Internal rates of return (IRR) ...

Firms' Evaluation of Location Quality: Evidence from East Germany

Our study provides evidence for firms’ evaluation of location quality. We use a 2004 survey of 6,000 East German firms that contained questions on the importance and assessment of 15 different location factors ranging from closeness to customers and suppliers, transport infrastructure, and proximity to research institutions and universities, as well as questions about the local financial institutions ...

Language Acquisition of Recently Arrived Immigrants in England, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands

This study examines processes of language acquisition among new immigrants from Poland and Turkey in different European destinations focusing on the first few months after arrival. Starting from a human capital framework, a variety of pre- and post-migration conditions of language learning are addressed, including economic and non-economic incentives, the amount of exposure to the destination language ...

Technical Efficiency and CO2 Reduction Potentials: An Analysis of the German Electricity and heat Generating Sector

In this paper, we analyze the technical efficiency and CO2 reduction potentials of German power and heat plants, using a non-parametric sequential Data Envelopment Analysis. We apply a metafrontier framework to evaluate plant-level efficiency in the transformation of inputs into desirable (energy) and undesirable (CO2 emissions) outputs, taking into account different fossil fuel generation technologies. ...

Locus of Control and Low-Wage Mobility

We investigate whether non-cognitive skills – in particular Locus of Control – are important determinants of mobility processes for male workers at the low-wage margin. Our results reveal a significant amount of state dependence in low pay even after controlling for non-cognitive skills. Furthermore, compared to individuals with an external Locus of Control, individuals with a more internal Locus of ...

Exchange Rate Forecasts and Expected Fundamentals

Using a large panel of individual professionals' forecasts, this paper demonstrates that good exchange rate forecasts are related to a proper understanding of fundamentals, specifically good interest rate forecasts. This relationship is robust to individual fixed effects and further controls. Reassuringly, the relationship is stronger during phases when the impact from fundamentals is more obvious, ...

A Coordinated Strategic Reserve to Safeguard the European Energy Transition

In Germany and beyond, various capacity mechanisms are currently being discussed with a view to improving the security of electricity supply. One of these mechanisms is a strategic reserve that retains generation capacity for use in times of critical supply shortage. We argue that strategic reserves have specific advantages compared to other capacity mechanisms in the context of the European energy ...

Long-Term Effects of an Extensive Cognitive Training on Personality Development

Objective: Previous research found that cognitive training increases the Big Five personality trait openness to experience during and some weeks after the intervention. The present study investigated whether long-term changes happen in openness to experience and other personality traits after an extensive cognitive training of memory and perceptual speed.Method: Intervention group consisted of 204 ...