The deployment of a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 will be central to lifting containment measures. In a bid to speed up vaccine deployment, governments are entering into ‘Advance Purchase Agreements’ (APAs) with vaccine companies to secure access to vaccine doses. We document and compare the vaccine procurement strategies of the US and the EU. Most notably, we find that both...
Effective attention to information may play a prominent role in consumer choice for energy-intensive services and it may simply be a function of receiving timely information when consumption takes place. This paper investigates whether and why the timing of utility bills leads to salience bias in heat energy consumption. In Germany, the 12-month billing period varies across buildings with a significant ...
Women’s life courses underwent substantial changes in the family and work domains in the second half of the twentieth century. The associated fundamental changes in opportunity structures and values challenged the importance of families of origin for individual life courses, but two research strands suggest enduring within-family reproduction of women’s family behavior and work outcomes. We revisit ...
This dissertation consists of three papers sharing the objective to analyze how machine learning methods can be useful to economists and econometricians in their pursuit to understand causal mechanisms operating in the economy. Such causal knowledge is essential when designing policies that help achieve societal goals. ML techniques are increasingly applied in and adapted to practical policy settings. ...
This paper recalls the development of the German lignite regions Rhineland and Lusatia since 1945 to allow for a better understanding of their situation in 2019. We analyze their economic resilience, defined as adaptive capacity, using Holling’s adaptive cycle model. We find that the Rhineland is currently in the conservation phase, while Lusatia experiences a reorganization phase following the economic ...
Labor markets in low- and middle income countries are characterized by high levels of informality. A multitude of interventions have therefore been implemented in many countries with the objective to increase the formalization of firms and workers, including information campaigns, simplification of registration procedures, reductions of payroll taxes and social security contributions, and interventions ...
