In spring 2014, the German economy is experiencing an upturn. Gross domestic product (GDP) is forecast to increase by 1.9 percent this year, the 68-percent forecast interval ranges from 1.2 percent to 2.6 percent. The driving force is domestic demand. The rise in consumer prices this year is moderate, at 1.3 percent. Employment growth is expected to remain strong in 2014. In 2015, GDP is expected to ...
The first paper in this thesis deals with the issue of whether there are bubble components in stock prices. This is joint research with Wenjuan Chen (Free Universtiy Berlin). We investigate existing bivariate structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models and test their identifying restriction by means of a Markov switching (MS) in heteroskedasticity model. We use data from six different countries ...
Several leading policymakers – from ECB President Mario Draghi to EC President José Manual Barroso – have pushed Eurozone countries to adopt far-reaching structural reforms in labour and product markets in order to foster growth and employment. While there is a broad consensus that structural reforms enhance countries’ growth potential in the long-run, recent research shows that they may have harmful ...
The SOEPmonitors with numerical series for chosen indicators have been just published. Differentiated for individuals (SOEPmonitor Person) and households (SOEPmonitor Household) they offer an important reference point to evaluate the results of your own research.More information
Abstract: We investigate the causal effect of retirement on health and cognitive abilities by exploiting the variation between and within European countries in old age retirement rules. We show negative and significant effect of retirement on both health and cognitive abilities. We also show evidence of significant heterogeneity across occupational groups. In particular, the negative effect of...
Using data from the long-running German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 1984-2008, this paper analyses the effects of individual preferences and choices on subjective well-being (SWB). It is shown that preferences and choices relating to life goals/values, partner's personality, hours of work, social participation and healthy lifestyle all have substantial effects on life satisfaction. The results have ...
In this paper we investigate natural gas producer's reactions to changes in market prices. We estimate price elasticities of aggregated supply in the most competitive market for natural gas: the United States. Using monthly time series data form 1987 to 2012 our analysis is based on an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bound Cointegration approach to obtain short and long-run elasticities of natural ...
We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel data set containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 700 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of demand and, based on an oligopolistic model of multiproduct firms, we then recover the marginal costs and ...
