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Finding the Right Yardstick: Regulation of Electricity Networks under Heterogeneous Environments

Revenue cap regulation is often combined with systematic benchmarking to reveal the managerial inefficiencies when regulating natural monopolies. One example is the European energy sector, where benchmarking is based on actual cost data, which are influenced by managerial inefficiency as well as operational heterogeneity. This paper demonstrates how a conditional nonparametric method, which allows ...

Who Cares about Social Image?

This paper experimentally investigates how concerns for social approval relate to intrinsic motivations to purchase ethically. Participants state their willingness-to-pay for both a fair trade and a conventional chocolate bar in private or publicly. A standard model of social image predicts that all participants increase their fair trade premium when facing an audience. We find that the premium is ...

Fairness in Markets and Market Experiments

Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratories survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We investigate how fairness in a laboratory experiment framed explicitly as a market exchange relates to preferences for fair trade products before and after the market experiment. We find that the willingness to buy at a higher price when higher wages are paid ...

Top Incomes in Germany, 1871-2013

This study provides new homogeneous series on top income shares in Germany from the early phase of industrialization until present. German income tax statistics offer the unique possibility to go back as far as 1871 and produce series for eight German states ranging from heavily industrializing Prussia or Saxony to mostly agrarian Baden or Wurttemberg. Top income earners in Germany are mostly business ...

Weighting in PIAAC-L 2015

Nuclear Power in the Twenty-First Century: An Assessment (Part I)

Nuclear power was one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century, and it continues to play an important role in twenty-first century discussions about the future energy mix, climate change, innovation, proliferation, geopolitics, and many other crucial policy topics. This paper addresses some key issues around the emergence of nuclear power in the twentieth century and perspectives ...

Validation of the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire Short Scale (NARQ-S) in Convenience and Representative Samples

Due to increased empirical interest in narcissism across the social sciences, there is a need for inventories that can be administered quickly while also reliably measuring both the agentic and antagonistic aspects of grandiose narcissism. In this study, we sought to validate the factor structure, provide representative descriptive data and reliability estimates, assess the reliability across the trait ...

The Effect of Increasing Education Efficiency on University Enrollment: Evidence from Administrative Data and an Unusual Schooling Reform in Germany

We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling on university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time. Based on a difference-in-differences approach and using administrative ...

Brexit and Uncertainty in Financial Markets

This paper applies long-memory techniques (both parametric and semi-parametric) to examine whether Brexit has led to any significant changes in the degree of persistence of the FTSE 100 Implied Volatility Index (IVI) and of the British pound’s implied volatilities (IVs) vis-à-vis the main currencies traded in the FOREX, namely the euro, the US dollar and the Japanese yen. We split the sample to compare ...

Price Overreactions in the Cryptocurrency Market

This paper examines price overreactions in the case of the following cryptocurrencies: BitCoin, LiteCoin, Ripple and Dash. A number of parametric (t-test, ANOVA, regression analysis with dummy variables) and non-parametric (Mann–Whitney U test) tests confirm the presence of price patterns after overreactions: the next-day price changes in both directions are bigger than after “normal” days. A trading ...