Empirical research is seeking through methodological processes to discover, hopefully, nontrivial facts and insights. Beside choosing a topic and grounding an idea in theory, empirical research consists of gathering and analysing data as well as presenting results in scientific contexts. Our workshop tackles these steps of your research project: Gathering data via (un)structured interviews and...
For the fifth time Graduate Center students will meet at Griebnitzsee for the annual Summer Workshop from June 27th to June 29th 2016. During the three-day workshop, GC13 and GC14 doctoral students present their current research.
This paper examines the Taylor rule in five emerging economies, namely Indonesia, Israel, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey. In particular, it investigates whether monetary policy in these countries can be more accurately described by (i) an augmented rule including the exchange rate, as well as (ii) a nonlinear threshold specification (estimated using GMM), instead of a baseline linear rule. The results ...
The structures of the European project have been helping the continent overcome many effects of the current crisis. Nevertheless, these shocks have also pointed to shortcomings in its construction, and eurozone economic governance is still lagging behind in coordination of fiscal and structural policies and in terms of risk sharing. Such reforms are imperative to lessen the burden on monetary...
(joint with Peter Haan and Victoria Prowse) We show how taxes and three transfer programs—unemployment insurance, social assistance and disability benefits—affect the inequality of lifetime income, and we explore how well taxes and transfer programs mitigate lifetime income risk due to labor market frictions. Calculations based on income trajectories generated from a dynamic life...
We re-examine the common wisdom that cross-border mergers are the most effective merger strategy for firms facing powerful unions. In contrast, we obtain a domestic merger outcome whenever firms are sufficiently heterogeneous (in terms of productive efficiency and product differentiation). A domestic merger unfolds a “wage-unifying” effect which limits the union's ability to extract rents. When products ...
We revisit the alleged retirement consumption puzzle. According to the life-cycle theory, foreseeable income reductions such as those around retirement should not affect consumption. However, we first recall that given higher leisure endowments after retirement, the theory does predict a fall of total market consumption expenditures. In order not to mistake this predicted drop for a puzzle we focus ...
This paper investigates neighborhood peer effects on individual welfare using a combined IV and control function approach. The empirical analysis is based on panel data for the years 2007-2010 constructed by enriching the geo-referenced version of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with aggregated zip code level-information. The results suggest that individual welfare use is positively correlated ...
