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Workshop 2 Report: Competitive Tendering and Other Forms of Contracting-Out: Institutional Design and Performance Measurement

Consideration of contracting-out has been a mainstay of Thredbo conferences past, accounting for over half of conference papers. This workshop showed that contracting-out remains an important and vibrant theme, with 32 papers and some 50 participants from 20 countries. Case studies of contracting-out (and variants thereof) were presented at the national level for both bus (21) and rail (6). All stages ...

Financial Education: Measures, Experiences, Evaluation and Outlook

SOEP-Core v34 – Codebook for the $PEQUIV File 1984-2017: CNEF Variables with Extended Income Information for the SOEP

Call for papers Quarterly Journal of Economic Research 4-2019: Debt – Blessing or Curse?

More than ten years after the outbreak of the Great Financial Crisis and almost ten years since the beginning of the European sovereign debt crisis, questions about the opportunities and risks of debt and debates about debt brakes have remained acute. Debt is the driving force behind investment, economic growth and prosperity: without the indebted­ness of private households, companies and governments, ...

The Causal Effects of the Minimum Wage Introduction in Germany: An Overview

In 2015, Germany introduced a statutory hourly minimum wage that was not only universally binding but also set at a relatively high level. We discuss the short-run effects of this new minimum wage on a wide set of socio-economic outcomes, such as employment and working hours, earnings and wage inequality, dependent and selff-employment, as well as reservation wages and satisfaction. We also discuss ...

Flipping a Coin: Evidence from University Applications

We empirically investigate the possibility that a decision maker prefers to avoid making a decision and instead delegates it to an external device, e.g., a coin flip. A large data set from the centralized clearinghouse for university admissions in Germany shows a choice pattern of applicants that is consistent with coin flipping and that entails substantial consequences for the matching outcome. In ...

Competitive Escalation and Interventions

Competitive escalation occurs frequently in managerial environments, when decisions create sunk costs and decision makers compete under time pressure. In a series of experiments using a minimal dollar auction paradigm, we test interventions to prevent competitive escalation. Without any intervention, most people, including experienced managers, escalate and lose money by bidding more than the price ...

Mortality in Midlife for Subgroups in Germany

Case and Deaton (2015) document that, since 1998, midlife mortality rates are increasing for white non-Hispanics in the US. This trend is driven by deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related diseases, termed as deaths of despair, and by the subgroup of low-educated individuals. In contrast, average mortality for middle-aged men and women continued to decrease in several other high-income ...

Philipp Kaminsky has passed his final exam as a Specialist in Market and Social Research (FAMS)

Congratulations to Philipp Kaminsky for passing his FAMS final exam on January 24, 2019! Philipp will be supporting the SOEP team in the SOEP Research Data Center (SOEP-RDC) by answering questions and requests on the SOEP-Hotline and taking care of contract management.

Housing Expenditures and Income Inequality

In this paper, we show that, in terms of real disposable income, changes in housing expenditures dramatically exacerbate the trend of income inequality that has risen sharply in Germany since the mid-1990s. More specifically, whereas the 50/10 ratio of net household income increasesby 22 percentage points (pp) between 1993 and 2013, it increases by 62 pp for income net of housing expenditures. At the ...