Externe referierte Aufsätze

Earnings Inequality and Working Hours Mismatch

Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we document a significant rise in monthly earnings in- equality between 1993 and 2018. The main contributors are inter-temporal increases in working hours inequality and increases in the covariance between working hours and hourly wages, while changes in the distribution of hourly wages play a minor role. Applying a novel double decomposition technique ...

Centre-Based Care and Parenting Activities

We examine the relationship between parenting activities and centre-based care using time diary and survey data for mothers in Germany. While mothers using centre-based care spend significantly less time in the presence of their child, we find that differences in the time spent on specific activities such as reading, talking, and playing with the child are relatively small or zero. The pattern of results ...

Urban Land Use Fragmentation and Human Well-Being

We study how land use fragmentation affects the life satisfaction of city dwellers. To this end, we calculate fragmentation metrics based on exact geographical coordinates of land use from the European Urban Atlas and of households from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Using ordinary least squares and fixed effects specifications, we find little effect on life satisfaction when aggregating over land ...

Perspectives on Resilience: Trait Resilience, Correlates of Resilience in Daily Life, and Longer‐Term Change in Affective Distress

Resilience describes successful adaptation in the face of adversity, commonly inferred from trajectories of well‐being following major life events. Alternatively, resilience was conceptualised as a psychological trait, facilitating adaptation through stable individual characteristics. Both perspectives may relate to individual differences in how stress is regulated in daily life. In the present ...

Impact of the COVID‑19 Pandemic on Depression, Anxiety, Loneliness, and Satisfaction in the German General Population: a Longitudinal Analysis

Purpose Cross-sectional studies found high levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, and loneliness during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reported increases were lower in longitudinal population-based findings. Studies including positive outcomes are rare. This study analyzed changes in mental health symptoms, loneliness, and satisfaction. Methods Respondents of the German Socio-Economic ...

Die EZB-Geldpolitik in der Zwickmühle

Den großen Reibach abschöpfen?

Gender Differences in Fairness Evaluations of Own Earnings in 28 European Countries

Women tend to evaluate their own pay more favorably than men. Contented women are speculated to not seek higher wages, thus the ‘paradox of the contented female worker’ may contribute to persistent gender pay differences. We extend the literature on gender differences in pay evaluations by investigating fairness evaluations of own earnings and underlying conceptions of fair earnings, providing a closer ...

Pandemic Depression: COVID-19 and the Mental Health of the Self-Employed

We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...

Geodata in Labor Market Research: Trends, Potentials and Perspectives

This article shows the potentials of georeferenced data for labor market research. We review developments in the literature and highlight areas that can benefit from exploiting georeferenced data. Moreover, we share our experiences in geocoding administrative employment data including wage and socioeconomic information of almost the entire German workforce between 2000 and 2017. To make the data easily ...

Renewable Energy Targets and Unintended Storage Cycling: Implications for Energy Modeling

To decarbonize the economy, many governments have set targets for the use of renewable energy sources. These are often formulated as relative shares of electricity demand or supply. Implementing respective constraints in energy models is a surprisingly delicate issue. They may cause a modeling artifact of excessive electricity storage use. We introduce this phenomenon as “unintended storage cycling”, ...

Overcoming the Disconnect between Energy System and Climate Modeling

The Early Bird Catches the Worm! Setting a Deadline for Online Panel Recruitment Incentives

The literature on the effects of incentives in survey research is vast and covers a diversity of survey modes. The mode of probability-based online panels, however, is still young and so is research into how to best recruit sample units into the panel. This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of a specific type of incentive in this context: a monetary incentive that is paid conditionally upon panel ...

The Productivity Shock in Business Services

In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by SME, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. Similar developments can be observed in several other European economies. Using a German dataset with 700,000 firm-level observations, we analyze this largely undiscovered phenomenon in professional services, the fourth largest sector of the business economy in the EU-15, ...

Expectation Management of Policy Leaders: Evidence from COVID-19

This paper studies how the communication of political leaders affects the expectation formation of the public. Specifically, we examine the expectation management of the German government regarding COVID-19-related regulatory measures during the early phase of the pandemic. We elicit beliefs about the duration of these restrictions via a high-frequency survey of individuals, accompanied by an addi-tional ...

Signalling Creditworthiness with Fiscal Austerity

Sovereign borrowers may tighten their fiscal stance in order to signal their creditworthiness to lenders. In a model of sovereign debt with incomplete information, I show that a trustworthy country may reduce its debt beyond the optimal level in order to separate itself from less reliable countries. Since austerity is costly, the gains in the price of debt from separating need to be high enough, as ...

Centralized and Decentral Approaches to Succeed the 100% Energiewende in Germany in the European Context – A Model-based Analysis of Generation, Network, and Storage Investments

In this paper, we explore centralized and more decentral approaches to succeed the energiewende in Germany, in the European context. We use the AnyMOD framework to model a future renewable-based European energy system, based on a techno-economic optimization, i.e. cost minimization with given demand, including both investment and the subsequent dispatch of capacity. The model includes 29 regions for ...

Active Learning Improves Financial Education: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

We conduct a randomized field experiment to study the effects of two financial education interventions offered to small-scale retailers in rural western Uganda. The treatments contrast “active learning” with traditional “lecturing” within standardized lesson-plans. After six months, active learning has a positive effect on savings and investment outcomes, in contrast to small or zero effects for lecturing. ...

Longitudinal Bidirectional Associations between Personality and Becoming a Leader

Objective: Leaders differ in their personalities from non- leaders. However, when do these differences emerge? Are leaders “born to be leaders” or does their personality change in preparation for a leadership role and due to increasing leader-ship experience? Method: Using data from the German Socio- Economic Panel Study, we examined personality differences between leaders (N = 2683 leaders, women: ...

Early Retirement of Employees in Demanding Jobs: Evidence from a German Pension Reform

Early retirement options are usually targeted at employees at risk of not reaching their regular retirement age inemployment. An important at-risk group comprises older employees who have worked in demanding jobs formany years. This group may be particularly negatively affected by the abolition of early retirement options. Tomeasure differences in labor market reactions of employees in low- and high-demand ...