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The Economic Costs of Hybrid Wars: The Case of Ukraine

With more than ten thousand casualties, the ongoing hybrid Ukrainian war between pro-Russian separatists and the government in the Donbass region, Ukraine’s productive core, has taken a severe toll on the country. Using cross-country panel data over the period 1995–2017, this paper estimates the causal effects of the Donbass war on Ukraine’s GDP. Our counterfactual estimation by the synthetic control ...

The Personality Traits of Self-Made and Inherited Millionaires

Very wealthy people influence political and societal processes by wielding their economic power through foundations, lobbying groups, media campaigns, as investors and employers. Because personality shapes goals, attitudes, and behaviour, it is important to understand the personality traits that characterize the rich. We used representative survey data to construct two large samples, one from the general ...

In an Imperfect World Policy Rules Cannot be Perfect Either: Letter

It is striking that economists in particular firmly believe in the benefits of rule-binding, even though this belief runs counter to the standard assumption of economic theory that we humans are self-interested and therefore extremely resourceful when it comes to circumventing inconvenient government regulations, e.g. taxes. In Public Choice Theory, politicians are even assumed to have nothing but ...

The Length of Schooling and the Timing of Family Formation

Individuals typically traverse several life phases before forming a family. We analyze whether changing the duration of one of these phases, the education phase, affects the timing of marriage and childbearing. For this purpose, we exploit the introduction of short school years (SSYs) in Germany in 1966–1967, which compressed the education phase without affecting the curriculum. Based on difference-in-differences ...

The Joy of Gratifications: Promotion as a Short-Term Boost or Long-Term Success: The Same for Women and Men?

Job satisfaction helps create a committed workforce with many positive effects, such as increased organisational citizenship behaviour and reduced absenteeism. In turn, job satisfaction can be increased through gratifications, such as wage increases and promotions. But human satisfaction is prone to being governed by the homeostatic principle and will eventually return to the individual's base level. ...

Marriage, the Risk of Overeducation, and Selection into Both: Evidence from Germany

Two competing theories of social support and role specialization have been invoked to explain how marital status affects labour market outcomes. Whereas evidence of beneficial labour market outcomes among married men and employed married women favours a social support perspective, evidence of married women’s reduced labour market participation corresponds to a role specialization perspective. We make ...

2D:4D and Self-Employment: A Preregistered Replication Study in a Large General Population Sample

The 2D: 4D digit ratio, the ratio of the length of the second finger to the length of the fourth finger, is often considered a proxy for testosterone exposure in utero. A recent study reported, among other things, an association between the left-hand 2D:4D and self-employment in a sample of 974 adults. In this preregistered study, we replicate the 2D:4D results on a sample of more than 2100 adults ...

Gender Identity and Wives’ Labor Market Outcomes in West and East Germany between 1983 and 2016

We exploit the natural experiment of German reunification in 1990 to investigate if the institutional regimes of the formerly socialist (rather gender-equal) East Germany and the capitalist (rather gender-traditional) West Germany resulted in differing gender norms regarding who should be the family breadwinner. We use data for three periods between 1983 and 2016 from the German Socio-Economic Panel. ...

Eine Dateninfrastruktur für die Gesellschaftswissenschaften: Unterstützung in der Arbeit mit Forschungsdaten durch KonsortSWD

Chances and Barriers for Germany’s Low Carbon Transition: Quantifying Uncertainties in Key Influential Factors

With the energy sector being one of the largest sources of global greenhouse-gas emissions, a swift change in the ways of energy generation and consumption is needed for a fulfilment of climate goals. But while the existence of global warming and the resulting need for action are widely agreed upon, there is a lot of discussion around the concrete measures and their timeline. A major cause of this ...