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Machine Learning Methods in Economics

Production and Cost: an IO perspective

Economic impact of competition policy enforcement on the functioning of télécoms markets in the EU

The purpose of the Study is to explain and quantify the causal relationship between competition policy, competition, and market outcomes in the telecoms sector, on the basis of sound and established econometric techniques. We aim at providing instruments and evidence that may help to improve the effectiveness of competition policy interventions and to inform the public about the effects of...

The Effect of Face-to-Face Interviewing on Personality Measurement: Brief Report

In recent years, an increasing number of nationally representative surveys in the social sciences and economics have implemented the Big Five model of personality. While many personality inventories were originally developed in the context of self-administered questionnaires, they are often used by large surveys in face-to-face interview settings instead. Drawing on an experimental research design, ...

Parental Health and Child Behavior: Evidence from Parental Health Shocks

This study examines the importance of parental health in the development of child behavior during early childhood. Our analysis is based on child psychometric measures from a longitudinal German dataset, which tracks mothers and their newborns up to age six. We identify major changes in parental health (shocks) and control for a variety of initial characteristics of the child including prenatal conditions. ...

Regulation and Investment Incentives in Electricity Distribution: An Empirical Assessment

We analyze the effects of incentive regulation with revenue caps on the investment behaviors of 109 German electricity distribution companies. We hypothesize that with Germany's implementation of incentive regulation in 2009 firms increase their investments in the base year when the rate base is determined for the following regulatory period. We build a model that controls for both firm-specific heterogeneity ...

Effective European Antitrust: Does EC Merger Policy Generate Deterrence?

We estimate the deterrence effects of European Commission (EC) merger policy instruments over the 1990–2009 period. Our empirical results suggest phase-1 remedies uniquely generate robust deterrence as—unlike phase-1 withdrawals, phase-2 remedies, and preventions—phase-1 remedies lead to fewer merger notifications in subsequent years. Furthermore, the deterrence effects of phase-1 remedies work best ...

Sovereign Risk, Interbank Freezes, and Aggregate Fluctuations

This paper shows how spillovers from sovereign risk to banks׳ access to wholesale funding establish a bank-sovereign nexus. In a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium set-up, heterogeneous banks give rise to an interbank market where government bonds are used as collateral. Government borrowing under limited commitment is costly ex ante as bank funding conditions tighten when the quality of collateral ...

The Anticipation and Adaptation Effects of Intra- and Interpersonal Wage Changes on Job Satisfaction

This paper analyses how individual job satisfaction is affected by wage changes. In order to account for potential dynamic effects of wage changes on job satisfaction, we include lead and lag effects of income changes in our analysis. Furthermore, we examine the role of social comparisons, i.e., how an individual’s job satisfaction is driven not only by changes in his wages, but also by the size of ...

Towards a Theory of Life Satisfaction: Accounting for Stability, Change and Volatility in 25-Year Life Trajectories in Germany

An adequate theory of Life Satisfaction (LS) needs to take account of both factors that tend to stabilise LS and those that change it. The most widely accepted theory in the recent past – set-point theory – focussed solely on stability (Brickman and Campbell, 1971; Lykken and Tellegen, 1996). That theory is now regarded as inadequate by most researchers, given that national panel surveys in several ...