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Mobile Money, Financial Inclusion, and Unmet Opportunities: Evidence from Uganda

Mobile money is an important instrument to improve the degree of financial inclusion, especially in developing countries. However, having a mobile money account does not imply that this account is actually used. In our sample, 86% of microentrepreneurs own a mobile money account, but only 49% actively use it – the resulting gap indicates unmet opportunities. We estimate that mobile money reaches up ...

Prejudice in Disguise: Which Features Determine the Subtlety of Ethnically Prejudicial Statements?

In current immigration debates ethnic prejudice is often expressed in a subtle manner, which conceals its xenophobic content. However, previous research has only insufficiently examined the specific features that make certain ethnically prejudicial statements subtler, i.e., less readily identifiable as xenophobic, than others. The current study employs an experimental factorial survey design and assesses ...

The Effects of Natural Disasters on Price Stability in the Euro Area

This paper investigates the impact of natural disasters on price stability in the euro area. We estimate panel and country-specific structural vector autoregression (VAR) models by combining estimated damages of disaster events with monthly data for the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) for all euro area countries over the period 1996-2021. Besides estimating the effect on overall headline ...

Policy Evaluation of Waste Pricing Programs Using Heterogeneous Causal Effect Estimation

Using machine learning methods in a quasi-experimental setting, I study the heterogeneous effects of introducing waste prices - unit prices on household unsorted waste disposal - on waste demands and social welfare. First, using a unique panel of Italian municipalities with large variation in prices and observables, I show that waste demands are nonlinear. - find evidence of constant elasticities at ...

SOEP-Core – 2020: Sampling, Nonresponse, and Weighting in Living in Germany – Nationwide Corona Monitoring (RKI-SOEP)

Fossil Natural Gas Exit – A New Narrative for the European Energy Transformation towards Decarbonization

This paper discusses the potential role of fossil natural gas in the process of the energy transformation in Europe on its way to decarbonization. Mainstream conventional wisdom has it that natural gas, perhaps in combination with other gases, should maintain an important role in the energy mix, first, as a "bridge fuel", and then through a gradual transition toward "decarbonized gases". However, when ...

Does Grandparenting Pay off for the Next Generations? Intergenerational Effects of Grandparental Care

Grandparents act as the third largest caregiver after parental care and daycare in Germany, as in many Western societies. Adopting a double-generation perspective, we investigate the causal impact of this care mode on children’s health, socio-emotional behavior, and school outcomes, as well as parental well-being. Based on representative German panel data sets, and exploiting arguably exogenous variations ...

The Term Structure of Currency Futures' Risk Premia

The use of futures instead of forwards exchange contracts completes the maturity spectrum of the correlation between spot yields and the premium. We find that the forward premium puzzle appears to be a precrisis phenomenon and is only observed for maturities longer than about 1 month. Differences in the exposure to risk help to explain cross-sectional spreads in currency excess returns. However, this ...

In a World with Many Targets, One-Dimensional Target Indicators Will Always Be Bypassed

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 ...

Strengthening Gender Justice in a Just Transition: A Research Agenda Based on a Systematic Map of Gender in Coal Transitions

For climate change mitigation, a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels such as coal is necessary. This has far-reaching gender-specific consequences. This paper presents a systematic map of the literature that examines the impact of historical coal phase-out processes on women and their role in these processes. The search process consisted of screening over 3100 abstracts and reading 247 full-text studies. ...