Externe referierte Aufsätze

On the Difficulties to Calculate Infrastructure Charges for Heavy Goods Vehicles: A Review of 15 Years’ Experience in Germany

This paper analyses the calculation principles used for determining the level and differentiation ofHGV charges in Germany. It demonstrates that calculating average cost-based charges is far fromstraightforward, even with an agreed methodology, and involves sensitive methodological choices.Based on a review of available studies, the paper argues that estimating marginal costs does notnecessarily involve ...

Testing Identification via Heteroskedasticity in Structural Vector Autoregressive Models

Tests for identification through heteroskedasticity in structural vector autoregressive analysis are developed for models with two volatility states where the time point of volatility change is known. The tests are Wald-type tests for which only the unrestricted model, including the covariance matrices of the two volatility states, has to be estimated. The residuals of the model are assumed to be from ...

25 Years of European Merger Control

We study the determinants of common European merger policy over its first 25 years, from 1990 to 2014. Using a novel dataset at the level of the relevant antitrust markets and containing all relevant merger cases notified to the European Commission, we evaluate how consistently arguments related to structural market parameters – dominance, rising concentration, barriers to entry, and foreclosure – ...

Social Policy or Crowding-out? Tenant Protection in Comparative Long-run Perspective

Private rental markets have become increasingly important since the Global Financial Crisis 2008–2009 and rent controls are back on the political agenda. Yet, they have received less attention from housing scholars than homeownership and public housing. This paper presents new data on the development of private tenancy legislation based on a content-coding of rent control, protection of tenants from ...

Growing Potentials for Migration Research Using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study

This article highlights the potentials for migration research using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), a longitudinal panel dataset of private households in Germany running since 1984. We provide a concise overview of its basic features, describe the survey contents and research potentials, and demonstrate opportunities to link external data sources to the SOEP thereby presenting its diverse ...

Solicited versus Unsolicited Ratings: The Role of Selection

This paper analyzes the extent to which selection explains the observed discrepancy between solicited and unsolicited ratings. I propose a model of selection with truth telling rating agencies and borrowers with the ability to veto the revelation of the rating. The observed difference between the two categories of ratings in different sectors is in line with the prediction of the model. In the sovereign ...

Changes in Optimism and Pessimism in Response to Life Events: Evidence from Three Large Panel Studies

Although individuals vary in how optimistic they are about the future, one assumption that researchers make is that optimism is sensitive to changes in life events and circumstances. We examined how optimism and pessimism changed across the lifespan and in response to life events in three large panel studies (combined N = 74,886). In the American and Dutch samples, we found that optimism increased ...

Mental Health Outcomes of Adults Born Very Preterm or with Very Low Birth Weight: A Systematic Review

Preterm birth research is poised to explore the mental health of adults born very preterm(VP;

Common Ownership in the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry: A Network Analysis

We investigate patterns in common ownership networks between firms that are active in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry for the period 2004–2014. Our main findings are that “brand firms”—that is, firms that have research and development capabilities and launch new drugs—exhibit relatively dense common ownership networks with each other that further increase significantly in density over time, whereas ...

Lost Job, Lost Trust? On the Effect of Involuntary Job Loss on Trust

This paper tests the conjecture that involuntary job loss erodes trust. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and considering how trust evolves over a quinquennial time interval, we find that job loss decreases trust by about 9 percent of a standard deviation.

Early Retirement as a Privilege for the Rich? A Comparative Analysis of Germany and Switzerland

This contribution analyses early retirement in Germany and Switzerland with a focus on financial resources. Using data from CH-SILC linked to administrative records and the German SOEP, we distinguish three different financial resources: namely, pre-retirement labour income, net worth and pension entitlements. High labour income reduces the probability for early retirement. In contrast, high pension ...

The Role of Budget Constraints in Sequential Elimination Tournaments

We study how budget constraints affect effort provision in sequential elimination tournaments. Our main result is that the introduction of budget constraints has two opposing effects on the initial effort of the unconstrained contestants, and leads to a non-monotonicity of this effort. This implies that if the budget asymmetry is not too large, total first-stage effort from unconstrained contestants ...

Waiting for Kin: A Longitudinal Study of Family Reunification and Refugee Mental Health in Germany

Involuntarily or planned – many refugees flee their home country alone, leave behind spouses and children but also siblings, parents and other family members they otherwise care for. Reunification in hosting communities is difficult, as governments limit institutional family reunifications and the individual journey of kin is dangerous and often illegal. Having family abroad is mentally distressing ...

The Economic Research Potentials of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study

We provide a concise introduction to a household-panel data infrastructure that provides the international research community with longitudinal data of private households in Germany since 1984: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We demonstrate the comparative strength of the SOEP data in answering economically-relevant questions by highlighting its diverse and impactful applications throughout ...

Parental Labour Supply Responses to the Abolition of Day Care Fees

This paper provides evidence that low private contributions to highly subsidised day care constrain mothers from working longer hours. We study the effects of reforms that abolished day care fees in Germany on parental labour supply. The reforms removed private contributions to highly subsidised day care in the year before children enter primary school. We exploit the staggered reform across states ...

Gender Score Development in the Berlin Aging Study II: A Retrospective Approach

In addition to biological sex, gender, defined as the sociocultural dimension of being a woman or a man, plays acentral role in health. However, there are so far few approaches to quantify gender in a retrospective manner inexisting study datasets. We therefore aimed to develop a methodology that can be retrospectively applied to assessgender in existing cohorts. We used baseline data from the Berlin ...

Nonparametric Regression with Selectively Missing Covariates

We consider the problem of regression with selectively observed covariates in a nonparametric framework. Our approach relies on instrumental variables that explain variation in the latent covariates but have no direct effect on selection. The regression function of interest is shown to be a weighted version of observed conditional expectation where the weighting function is a fraction of selection ...

A Real Chance for Transatlantic Partnership on Climate Policy

The EU ETS to 2030 and beyond: Adjusting the Cap in Light of the 1.5°C Target and Current Energy Policies

The Paris Agreement calls on countries to pursue efforts to limit global average temperature rise to 1.5°C. We derive a 2016–2050 emission budget for the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) based on cost-effectiveness criteria aimed at achieving the 1.5°C target with a 50%–66% probability, and translate it into a cap reduction path. We show that, under current ETS parameters, the vast majority of ...

Distributional Impacts of Carbon Pricing: A Meta-Analysis

Understanding the distributional impacts of market-based climate policies is crucial to design economically efficient climate change mitigation policies that are socially acceptable and avoid adverse impacts on the poor. Empirical studies that examine the distributional impacts of carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy reforms in different countries arrive at ambiguous results. To systematically determine ...