Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier. If accurate, such age-driven skill losses pose a major threat to the human capital of societies with rapidly aging populations. We estimate actual age-skill profiles from individual changes in literacy and numeracy skills at different ages. We use the unique German longitudinal component of the ...
Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. This paper shows that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data – Facebook interests – to construct novel regional measures of patience within Italy and the United ...
Understanding widowhood duration is essential for individuals and effective widow support policies, yet widowhood duration remains an understudied topic. In this article, we provide a quantitative estimation of the impact of three primary determinants of expected widowhood duration at age 60 in a unified framework: (1) the degree of overlap between male and female mortality distributions, (2) the spousal ...
This paper studies the role of viewers’ heterogeneous ad aversion on media content demand and advertisers’ willingness to pay. High-frequency individual-level data on broadcast media content allows us to track viewers’ minute-by-minute choices within the set of available alternatives. We first illustrate the potential selection biases that arise when using aggregated market-level data to estimate...
Background Perceived social cohesion (PSC) is a protective factor for mental health. Yet, evidence on social mechanisms influencing mental health is scarce. Aims We examined the moderating role of PSC between parental stressors and depressive symptoms before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We performed a multilevel moderated linear regression analysis using German Socio-Economic Panel ...
Policies that affect the cost of using fossil fuels in production have a complex impact on the economy. In this paper, we focus on the role of these policies for the pattern of comparative advantage through their effect on production costs in manufacturing industries. Using data on carbon prices and fossil fuel subsidies, we show that less stringent carbon pricing policies increase comparative advantage ...
Sweden is at the forefront of the transition of its energy sector to low-carbon technologies with profound consequences for both energy generation and its distribution. However, the impact of this transition on the performance of Electricity Distribution System Operators (DSOs) has not been thoroughly studied. The article addresses this gap by using a novel approach and detailed georeferenced firm-level, ...
In conventional proxy VAR analysis, the shocks of interest are identified by external instruments. This is typically accomplished by considering the covariance of the instruments and the reduced-form residuals. Alternatively, the instruments may be internalized by augmenting the VAR process by the instruments or proxies. These alternative identification methods are compared and it is shown that the ...
