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Submission to the revision of the EU infrastructure regulation

The European Commission currently revises its regulation of selection of and support to so-called Trans-European Networks in the energy sector (TEN-E). Currently, the European Union still provides support to fossil natural gas infrastructure that were selected as so-called Projects of Common Interest (PCI) without sufficiently taking into account the long-term climate targets. In the research project ...

Health Effects of Prenatal and Infancy Home Visiting Programs by Nurses: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

Home visiting programmes are increasingly being implemented across the globe to help vulnerable families with young children, however longer-term experimental evidence on their health impacts on both parents and children is scarce. In this paper we study the medium-term health impacts of a randomized control trial to evaluate the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), one of the oldest home visitation...

An Auction Story: How Simple Bids Struggle with Uncertainty

Short-term electricity markets are key to an efficient production by generation units. We develop a two-period model to assess different bidding formats to determine for each bidding format the optimal bidding strategy of competitive generators facing price-uncertainty. We compare the results for simple bidding, block bidding and multi-part bidding. We find that even under optimal simple and block ...

Distributive Justice in Marriage: Experimental Evidence on Beliefs about Fair Savings Arrangements

Objective This study examines fairness perceptions of experimentally manipulated savings arrangements in couples (i.e., distribution of control and ownership of savings) to identify distributive justice principles in marriage.Background Theoretically, competing norms about individual ownership rights and autonomy (equity principle) and marital sharing (equality principle) in interaction with gender ...

Social Status Concerns and the Political Economy of Publicly Provided Private Goods

We analyse the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social status. Status concerns motivate richer individuals to vote for the public provision of goods they themselves buy in markets: a higher provision level attracts more individuals to the public sector, enhancing the social exclusivity of market purchases. Majority voting may lead to a public ...

Why Didn’t the College Premium Rise Everywhere? Employment Protection and On-the-Job Investment in Skills

Why has the college wage premium risen rapidly in the United States since the 1980s, but not in European economies such as Germany? We argue that differences in employment protection can account for much of the gap. We develop a model in which firms and workers make relationship-specific investments in skill accumulation. The incentive to invest is stronger when employment protection creates an expectation ...

Diversity in Family Life Course Patterns and Intra-Cohort Wealth Disparities in Late Working Age

Against the backdrop of soaring wealth inequalities in older age, this research addresses the relationship between increasingly diverse family life courses and widening wealth differences between individuals as they age. We holistically examined how childbearing and marital histories matter for West German baby boomer cohorts’ personal wealth at ages 51 to 59. We proposed that wealth penalties associated ...

Do Adult Men and Women in Same-Sex Relationships Have Weaker Ties to Their Parents?

Using a national sample of people in same-sex relationships (N = 843) and different-sex relationships (N = 510) in the Netherlands, we examine the frequently discussed but infrequently tested hypothesis of weaker intergenerational ties between parents and their adult daughters and sons in same-sex relationships. We also test hypotheses linking the strength of these ties to gender differences and the ...

Bond Market Liquidity and Swap Market Efficiency – What Role Does the Repo Market Play?

Sin Taxes and Self-Control

“Sin taxes” are high on the political agenda in the global fight against obesity. Ac- cording to theory, they are welfare improving if consumers with low self-control are at least as price responsive as consumers with high self-control, even in the absence of ex- ternalities. In this paper, we investigate if consumers with low and high self-control react differently to sin tax variation. For identification, ...