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Scenario Analysis as a Tool for Companies, Investors, and Regulators on the Path to Climate Neutrality

The structural transformation necessary for achieving climate neutrality is characterized by many interdependent changes. Shaping the transition to a zero-emissions economy cannot be based on past data alone, but also requires the definition of future scenarios that are as consistent as possible. The aim of these scenarios is to show how companies are prepared for transformation processes and burdens ...

Equilibrium Effects of Tax Exemptions for Low Pay

Across the world, tax exemptions for jobs with low earnings intend to incite non-participating workers to rejoin the labor market. However, such tax exemptions may also have negative equilibrium effects. The German minijob tax exemption offers a convenient case to identify equilibrium effects as it applies to some but not to other low-wage jobs. We build and estimate a structural job search model with ...

COVID-19: a Crisis of the Female Self-Employed

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the governmentmandated measures to contain its spread, affect the self-employed – particularly women – in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face ...

COVID-19: a Crisis of the Female Self-Employed

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the governmentmandated measures to contain its spread, affect the self-employed – particularly women – in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face ...

Extracting Agency and Communion from the Big Five: A Four-Way Competition

Agency and communion are the two fundamental content dimensions in psychology. The two dimensions figure prominently in many psychological realms (personality, social, self, motivational, cross-cultural, etc.). In contemporary research, however, personality is most commonly measured within the Big Five framework. We developed novel agency and communion scales based on the items from the most popular ...

Structural Vector Autoregressive Models with More Shocks than Variables Identified via Heteroskedasticity

In conventional structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models it is assumed that there are at most as many structural shocks as there are variables in the model. It is pointed out that heteroskedasticity can be used to identify more shocks than variables. However, even if there is heteroskedasticity, the number of shocks that can be identified is limited. A number of results are provided that allow ...

Active, or Passive? Revisiting the Role of Fiscal Policy in the Great Inflation

We reexamine whether pre-Volcker U.S. fiscal policy was active or passive. To do so, we estimate a DSGE model with monetary and fiscal policy interactions employing a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm (SMC) for posterior evaluation. Unlike existing studies, we do not have to treat each policy regime as distinct, separately estimated, models. Rather, SMC enables us to estimate the DSGE model over its entire ...

Modern state-owned firms' performance: An empirical analysis of productivity, market power and innovation

In sectors of general interests, the economic activity of the state decreased over decades as a consequence of privatisation and liberalisation. Recently, local governments began to remunicipalise in the energy and water sector, thereby creating a new and modern generation of state-owned firms.  These firms, however, differ in organisation and production environment from the state monopolists of...

Testing the Superstar Firm Hypothesis

The superstar firms model provides a compelling explanation for two simultaneously occurring phenomena: the rise of concentration in industries and the fall of labor shares. Our empirical analysis confirms two of the underlying assumptions of the model: the market share increases and the labor share decreases with increasing firm-level total factor productivity, providing support for the superstar ...

On the Role of Population-based Surveys and Citizen Dialogues in Selecting Social Indicators