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A Large Scale Test of the Effect of Social Class on Prosocial Behavior

Does being from a higher social class lead a person to engage in more or less prosocial behavior? Psychological research has recently provided support for a negative effect of social class on prosocial behavior. However, research outside the field of psychology has mainly found evidence for positive or u-shaped relations. In the present research, we therefore thoroughly examined the effect of social ...

Do Administrative Courts Favor the Government? Evidence from Medical Malpractice in Spain

A standard argument against specialised administrative courts in the tradition of civil law jurisdictions is their lack of independence. They are perceived to be ineffective in restraining the government’s interference with private rights, therefore failing to secure strong judicial independence. In this paper, we use a dataset of 365 medical malpractice cases decided by the Spanish Supreme Court in ...

TFP, Labor Productivity and the (Un)observed Labor Input: Temporary Agency Work

The study focuses on the question of whether productivity estimates are biased due to the emergence of a new input that is usually omitted: temporary agency worker (TAW). The study analyzes labor productivity and TFP by means of a structural approach using a representative dataset of German manufacturing firms. The empirical results show, once TAW is taken into account, that: i) labor productivity ...

Models with Occasionally Binding Constraints

Deadline for SOEP-IS 2016 expiring soon

We would like to remind you of the possibilities of the SOEP Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS) and encourage you to consider using this instrument in developing new empirical research questions to use the SOEP Innovation Sample for your innovative research projects. Please contact SOEP Survey Management (soepsurveymanagement@diw.de) as soon as possible, to present your proposal. If the project is determined ...

Estimating Alternative Technology Sets in Nonparametric Efficiency Analysis: Restriction Tests for Panel and Clustered Data

Nonparametric efficiency analysis has become a widely applied technique to support industrial benchmarking as well as a variety of incentive-based regulation policies. In practice such exercises are often plagued by incomplete knowledge about the correct specifications of inputs and outputs. Simar and Wilson (Commun Stat Simul Comput 30(1):159–184, 2001) and Schubert and Simar (J Prod Anal 36(1):55–69, ...

"Germany Economy Growing at Slightly Above-Average Rate": Eight Questions to Simon Junker

Mr. Junker, what kind of growth figures are you expecting for the German economy? The growth of the German economy will be slightly above average over the next few quarters. But this is also connected with special factors like higher consumption due to, among other things, the increasing number of refugees. The German economy is expected to grow by about 1.7 percent this year, and will be somewhat ...

Do Parties Matter? Estimating the Effect of Political Power in Multi-Party Systems

When there are more than two parties, policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process. We investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest: voting power. In order to isolate close elections in a proportional election ...

Voters Prefer More Qualified Mayors, but Does It Matter for Public Finances? Evidence for Germany

This paper studies the importance of politicians’ qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and qualification levels of mayoral candidates. We principally use a regression discontinuity design focusing on close ...

Only Conservatives Are Voting in the Rain: Evidence from German Local and State Elections

In this note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the Conservatives profit from lower voter turnout at the expense of the Social Democrats. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using election day rain as an instrumental variable. Our particular contribution is the comparison of municipal and state electio ...