The energy efficiency of the residential housing stock plays a key role in strategies to mitigate climate change and global warming. In this context, it is frequently argued that private investment and the quality of thermal upgrades is too low in the light of the challenges faced and the potential energy cost savings. While many authors address the potential barriers for investors to increase energy ...
The European Economic Association (EEA) gave one of the FEEM Awards 2014 for the best papers presented at the annual congress of the EEA to Christian Krekel, doctoral student at the SOEP. The award was established in 2009 and aims to reward new ideas addressing key economic issues at the European and global scale. It honors young economists who are no more than three years past their PhD defense. The ...
For most of the developing world, microenterprises are a key source of income and employment creation. For many countries the informal sector, where most of the small enterprises exist, represents over 80% of employment (ILO 2012). These businesses often have a difficult time growing. There are a number of reasons that have been put forward by policy makers and researchers for this lack of growth, ...
Based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, this article analyses the effects of workplace training in Germany on subjective job security. Using fixed-effects models, this article tests whether workplace training has positive effects on perceived job security, and if so, whether the returns are of a short- or long-term nature. The results confirm a positive effect of workplace training ...
This paper provides new evidence on the contribution of local banking to local economic growth (i.e. at county level – the Italian “province”) in Italy. A comprehensive dataset is used, which includes control variables for social capital and human capital as well as indicators of the quality of local infrastructures and the production structure of the local economy. A linear within-estimator technique ...
The German economy will grow by 1.5 percent this year. In the coming year, the increase in GDP will be somewhat higher at 1.8 percent. The jobless rate will be 6.7 percent this year but it will rise by three-tenths of a percentage point in the coming year. Inflation will remain moderate in both years; prices will rise by 1.0 percent this year and 1.5 percent in 2015. Global economic growth was far ...
The paper examines the extent to which the prestige value of a retiree’s former occupation increases the likelihood that they will make a transition into volunteering after retirement. Following social production function theory, we assume that when a person retires, the prestige value attached to their former occupation fades. The fact that volunteering has the character of a collective good provides ...
This paper considers Bayesian models for inference on unknown spatial weights in a spatial error model. We study two different assumptions that ensure identification, (i) symmetric spatial weights, and (ii) triangular systems. We propose Bayesian methods for inference under these assumptions and study the finite sample performance of these estimators. The results indicate that the Bayesian...
