The objective of the project is to analyze the effects of long enduring low interest rates on household investment behavior, setting a special focus on the stock market participation of German and US households. In particular, we address four questions within the project. Did the low interest rate environment induced more households to enter the stock market? How do low interest rates affect the...
As a contribution to the currently ongoing larger effort to establish Open Science as best practices in academia, this article focuses on the Open Source and Open Access tiers of the Open Science triad and community software projects. The current situation of research software development and the need to recognize it as a significant contribution to science is introduced in relation to Open Science. ...
Individuals often have to decide to which degree of risk they want to expose others, or how much risk to accept if their choice has an externality on third parties. One typical application is a household. We run an experiment in the German Socio-Economic Panel with two members from 494 households. Participants have a good estimate of each other’s risk preferences, even if not explicitly informed. They ...
The ability-to-pay approach assesses taxes paid as a sacrifice by the taxpayers. This raises the question of how to define and how to measure it: in absolute, relative, or marginal terms? U.S. respondents prefer a tax schedule that is either a pure (absolute) Equal Sacrifice or a mixture of Equal Sacrifice and Utilitarianism [Weinzierl, 2014]. To determine whether Germans prefer absolute, relative, ...