Externe referierte Aufsätze

Maintaining Perceived Control with Unemployment Facilitates Future Adjustment

Unemployment is a major challenge to individuals' development. An important personal resource to ameliorate the negative impact of unemployment may be perceived control, a general-purpose belief system. Little is known, however, about how perceived control itself changes with the experience of unemployment and what the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of such change in perceived control are ...

Wealth Effects on Job Preferences

Preferences over jobs depend on wages and non-wage aspects. Variation in wealth may change the importance of income as a motivation for working. Higher wealth levels may make good non-wage characteristics relatively more important. This hypothesis is tested empirically using a reduced form search model in which differential job leaving rates identify willingness to pay for non-wage aspects of jobs. ...

Benefits of Coordinating Congestion Management in Electricity Transmission Networks: Theory and Application to Germany

This article analyzes the coordination of congestion management in the electricity grid and identifies the benefits from closer cooperation among Transmission System Operators. Mimicking the German situation with four Transmission System Operators in charge of relieving grid congestion, in particular by redispatch of power plants, we set up a model with shared transmission network constraints. Through ...

Dubious versus Trustworthy Faces: What Difference Does It Make for Tax Compliance?

We find experimental evidence that the decision problem of tax compliance changes if subjects’ declarations are not randomly assessed, but is based on their appearance as captured by pictures of their faces, even if the aggregate audit probability does not change. Some subjects may fear that their picture looks rather dubious, whereas others may believe that their picture looks more trustworthy than ...

Sports and Exercise at Different Ages and Leukocyte Telomere Length in Later Life: Data from the Berlin Aging Study II (Base-II)

Physical activity and sports have repeatedly been reported to be associated with telomere length. We studied the association of different types of sports across different stages of life on relative leukocyte telomere length (rLTL) in advanced age.815 participants (397 men) from the Berlin Aging Study II aged over 61 years were included in the analysis. rLTL was measured by real time PCR and physical ...

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 ...

Between the Hammer and the Anvil: The Impact of Economic Sanctions and Oil Prices on Russia's Ruble

Childhood Roots of Financial Literacy

Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in a new survey study and examine their relation to financial literacy, while controlling for established socio-demographic ...

A Generalized Approach for Measuring the Marginal Social Costs of Road Transport in Europe

Social marginal cost pricing requires bottom-up calculations of social marginal costs for all circumstances. Because this is not practicable for policymaking, we suggest an approach to generalize available cost estimates and present results from this for two case studies. We conclude that in the peak period congestion costs are the most important externality of road use, and that accidents, wear and ...

Einkommensnachteile von Müttern im Vergleich zu kinderlosen Frauen in Deutschland

Wie in anderen OECD-Staaten hat auch in Deutschland die Frauen- und Müttererwerbsbeteiligung stark zugenommen, allerdings bestehen noch immer Lohnunterschiede zwischen Männern und Frauen, welche für Frauen mit Kindern am größten ausfallen. Diese werden oft mit Humankapitalentwertung, der Signalwirkung von (langen) Erwerbsunterbrechungen und der möglichen Diskriminierung von Frauen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt ...

Terminal Decline in Well-Being Differs between Residents in East Germany and West Germany

Lifespan research has long been interested in how contexts shape individual development. Using the separation and later reunification of Germany as a kind of natural experiment we examine whether and how living and dying in the former East or West German context has differentially shaped late-life development of well-being. We apply multi-level growth models to annual reports of life satisfaction collected ...

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 ...

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 ...

Voters Prefer More Qualified Mayors, but Does It Matter for Public Finances? Evidence for Germany

This paper studies the importance of politicians’ qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and qualification levels of mayoral candidates. We principally use a regression discontinuity design focusing on close ...

Do Parties Matter? Estimating the Effect of Political Power in Multi-Party Systems

When there are more than two parties, policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process. We investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest: voting power. In order to isolate close elections in a proportional election ...

Understanding Chinese Consumption: The Impact of Hukou

Since the onset of the economic reforms more than three decades ago, the Chinese growth miracle has been based on exports and investment. While strong output growth was maintained even during the financial crisis, imbalances within the country increased. To return to a more sustainable development path, recent government policies have aimed to improve the role of private consumption. This article argues ...

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 ...

Do Administrative Courts Favor the Government? Evidence from Medical Malpractice in Spain

A standard argument against specialised administrative courts in the tradition of civil law jurisdictions is their lack of independence. They are perceived to be ineffective in restraining the government’s interference with private rights, therefore failing to secure strong judicial independence. In this paper, we use a dataset of 365 medical malpractice cases decided by the Spanish Supreme Court in ...

Estimating Alternative Technology Sets in Nonparametric Efficiency Analysis: Restriction Tests for Panel and Clustered Data

Nonparametric efficiency analysis has become a widely applied technique to support industrial benchmarking as well as a variety of incentive-based regulation policies. In practice such exercises are often plagued by incomplete knowledge about the correct specifications of inputs and outputs. Simar and Wilson (Commun Stat Simul Comput 30(1):159–184, 2001) and Schubert and Simar (J Prod Anal 36(1):55–69, ...