We show that technical indicators deliver stable economic value in predicting the US equity premium over the out-of-sample period from 1966 to 2014. The results tentatively improve over time, and beat alternatives over a large continuum of sub-periods. In contrast, economic indicators work well only until the 1970s, but lose predictive power thereafter, even when considering the last crisis. Translating ...
Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented at universities. In this regard, the economic literature mainly studies the effect of financial constraints on post-secondary educational decisions. Our knowledge on potential effects of other constraints regarding university education is more limited. We investigate ...
This article by Marcel Fratzscher was originally published in Handelsblatt Global Edition on June 28, 2016. The Frenchman Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of today’s Europe, wrote that the process of European unity will “be accomplished in crises.”? The Brexit decision is a catastrophe for all Europeans. It is coming at a high price in political, social and economic terms. But ...
Kapitel 1: Um dem übermäßigen Gebrauch von Instrumenten wie Bürgerbegehren vorzubeugen, werden oftmals sogenannte Unterschriftenhürden vorgeschrieben. Wir evaluieren den kausalen Effekt einer Senkung der Unterschriftenhürde auf die beobachtete Anzahl an Bürgerinitiativen. Basierend auf deutschen Gemeindedaten nutzen wir diskrete Sprünge in der Unterschriftenhürde an bestimmten Bevölkerungsgrenzen, ...
To design effective and commonly accepted public health policies against performance-enhancing drugs (PED), it is important to understand general population attitudes. This article elicits PED attitudes in the Berlin population and compares response rates of former athletes (N = 496) with those of non-athletes (N = 1686). In addition, exploiting the natural experiment of the division of Germany, by ...
We quantify the importance of precautionary labor supply using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for 2001-2012. We estimate dynamic labor supply equations augmented with a measure of wage risk. Our results show that married men choose about 2.5% of their hours of work or one week per year on average to shield against unpredictable wage shocks. This implies that about 26% of precautionary ...
