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On the Economics of Electrical Storage for Variable Renewable Energy Sources

The use of renewable energy sources is a major strategy to mitigate climate change. Yet Sinn (2017) argues that excessive electrical storage requirements limit the further expansion of variable wind and solar energy. We question, and alter, strong implicit assumptions of Sinn’s approach and find that storage needs are considerably lower, up to two orders of magnitude. First, we move away from corner ...

Language Barriers during the Fieldwork of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany

The IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees is one of the first large-scale quantitative surveys in Germany focusing on refugees exclusively. It is able to provide valuable insights on the recent cohort of refugees who arrived in Germany as of the year 2013. However, due to the fact that most respondents of the target population are not proficient in German, the research partners who conducted the survey ...

Quality of Life and Inequality

Big Banks and Macroeconomic Outcomes: Theory and Cross‐Country Evidence of Granularity

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? We develop a theory of granularity for the banking sector by modeling heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using data for a large set of countries, we show that the banking sector is indeed “granular,” as the right tail of the bank size distribution follows a power law. We demonstrate empirically that the presence of big banks, ...

Signs of New Housing Bubble in Many OECD Countries – Lower Risk in Germany

Ten years after the worldwide financial and economic crisis was triggered by the American real estate market, real estate prices are rising around the globe. Concerns about a new housing bubble are growing. The present report based on OECD data for 20 countries demonstrates that this concern is not unwarranted. In eight countries, including the United Kingdom and the USA, the evolution of real estate ...

Bootstrapping Impulse Responses of Structural Vector Autoregressive Models Identified through GARCH

Different bootstrap methods and estimation techniques for inference for structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models identified by conditional heteroskedasticity are reviewed and compared in a Monte Carlo study. The model is a SVAR model with generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) innovations. The bootstrap methods considered are a wild bootstrap, a moving blocks bootstrap ...

Signs of New Housing Bubble in Many OECD Countries – Lower Risk in Germany

Ten years after the worldwide financial and economic crisis was triggered by the American real estate market, real estate prices are rising around the globe. Concerns about a new housing bubble are growing. The present report based on OECD data for 20 countries demonstrates that this concern is not unwarranted. In eight countries, including the United Kingdom and the USA, the evolution of real estate ...

How Cohabitation, Marriage, Separation and Divorce Influence BMI: A Prospective Panel Study

Objective: This study examines how changes in cohabitation or marital status affect Body Mass Index (BMI) over time in a large representative sample. Methods: Participants were 20,950 individuals (50% female; 19 to 100 years), representative of the German population, who provided 81,926 observations over 16 years. Face-to-face interviews were used to obtain demographic data, including cohabitation ...

Age Differences in Intertemporal Choice: U-Shaped Associations in a Probability Sample of German Households

To describe adult age differences in intertemporal choice, we analyzed data from 1,491 participants who completed an incentivized monetary intertemporal discounting choice task involving different conditions (e.g., time delay of 12 months vs. 1 month). Respondents completed a number of other survey measures, including behavioral measures of cognitive ability, and self-reports concerning health, financial ...

How Far Reaches the Power of Personality? Personality Predictors of Terminal Decline in Well-Being

Personality is a powerful predictor of central life outcomes, including subjective well-being. Yet, we still know little about how personality manifests in the very last years of life when well-being typically falls rapidly. Here, we investigate whether the Big Five personality traits buffer (or magnify) terminal decline in well-being beyond and in interaction with functioning in key physical and social ...