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Stephanie Ettmeier has successfully defended her dissertation

Stephanie Ettmeier was recently a research assistant in the Macroeconomics Department and received her doctorate with her dissertation titled "From Policy to Practice: Applying Empirical Analysis and Historic Contexts to Understand Fiscal and Monetary Policy, and their Interaction" on May 15. Her supervisor was Alexander Kriwoluzky, Head of the Department of Macroeconomics. Congratulations!

How Divestitures Affect Bargaining Power

This paper studies how bargaining power is affected by merger and divestiture policies. I provide a new empirical framework to compute bounds on brand-level bargaining weights using widely available sales data. Next, I exploit the variation in brand ownership caused by a large merger, cleared conditional on divestiture, in the U.S. deodorant market, to quantify the extent to which divestitures...

Transport Pricing in Europe

Cognitive Reflection and 2D:4D: Evidence from a Large Population Sample

Bosch-Domènech et al. (2014) reported a negative association between 2D:4D, a suggested marker of prenatal testosterone exposure, and the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) in a sample of 623 university students. In this pre-registered study, we test if we can replicate their findings in a general population sample of over 2,500 individuals from Germany. We find no statistically significant association ...

Tuition Fees and Educational Attainment

Following a landmark court ruling in 2005, more than half of Germany’s universities started charging tuition fees, which were later abolished in a staggered manner. We exploit the fact that even students who were already enrolled had to start paying fees. We show that fees increase study effort and degree completion among these students. However, fees also decrease first-time university enrollment ...

Family Care during the First COVID-19 Lockdown in Germany: Longitudinal Evidence on Consequences for the Well-Being of Caregivers

We examine changes in the well-being of family caregivers during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the SOEP-CoV study. The COVID-19 pandemic posed an extraordinary challenge for family caregivers, as care recipients are a high-risk group requiring special protection, and professional care services were severely cut back. ...

“Next steps for HANK” Workshop

Heterogeneous Agent Macroeconomics: Methods and Applications

The course provides participants with the tools to develop and analyze business cycle models with heterogenous agents. This class of models has become the new standard in the business cycle literature and allows to analyze the interaction of the business cycle and the distribution of consumption, income, and wealth. The focus of the course is on numerical methods. Coding exercises in class are an...

Transition and Duration Models

Objectives Students will study models of transitions and durations, and learn how to estimate these using realworld data.   Outline This course is an introduction to modelling transitions into a state of interest (such as the transition into employment from unemployment) and durations (such as unemployment, survival of patients after medical treatment or firms after a financial crash). We...

Electricity Market Design

The course in a tweet. This is an advanced course on electricity markets: forward, spot, balancing and retail. It is a course at the intersection of energy, economics and finance that focuses on public policy and regulation: how should power markets be designed with security of supply and social welfare in mind? The significance of electricity markets & trading. Electricity markets and the...