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Wealth Creators or Inheritors? Unpacking the Gender Wealth Gap from Bottom To Top and Young to Old

There is growing interest in understanding how gender influences the accumulation of wealth. While prior studies focused on labor-related determinants, our research focuses on inheritances and gifts. Using unique survey data that oversamples the top 1% of wealth holders in Germany, we show that the gender wealth gap is small for individuals up to age 40, then widens, and declines for those past retirement ...

Effectiveness and Heterogeneous Effects of Purchase Grants for Electric Vehicles

We evaluate German purchase subsidies for battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) using data on new vehicle registrations in Germany dur¬ing 2015-2022. We account for confounding time trends and interacting EU-level CO2 standards using neighboring countries as a control group. We find that 40% of BEV and 25% of PHEV registrations were subsidy-induced. The program ...

Nobody Decides for All — Modeling Incentives and Policies for Closing the Material Loop

Euro Area Inflation Differentials: The Role of Fiscal Policies Revisited

The Non-linear Impact of Risk Tolerance on Entrepreneurial Profit and Business Survival

Entrepreneurs tend to be risk tolerant but is higher risk tolerance always better? In a sample of about 2100 small businesses, we find an inverted U-shaped relation between risk tolerance and profitability. This relationship holds in a simple bilateral regression, and even after controlling for a large set of individual and business characteristics. Apparently, one major transmission goes from risk ...

The Educational Wealth Divide in Europe: Post-Secondary Enrollment Gaps Across Parental Wealth Components and Countries

Parental wealth is a crucial dimension of socioeconomic status (SES) and plays a significant role in the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage. Previous research on the topic has been limited to a small number of countries, and findings on the relationship between parental wealth and educational attainment are hardly comparable across institutional contexts. Furthermore, the specific ...

EU Power Market Reform Toward Locational Pricing: Rewarding Flexible Consumers for Resolving Transmission Constraints

The ongoing expansion of wind and solar electricity generation alongside increasing electrification is leading to a considerable strain on transmission capacities and grid bottlenecks in the EU. Coping with this challenge requires increasing system flexibility, e.g. by exploiting the potential for demand-side flexibility. However, in the current market design, demand-side flexibility responds to zonal ...

Impact of ESG Performance on the Cost of Capital in the Energy, Utilities, and Basic Materials Sectors

This paper explores the presence of an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) premium for firms operating in the energy, utilities, and basic materials sectors. Specifically, we examine the influence of ESG performance on firms’ cost of capital in both debt and equity markets. We apply a measure of the ex ante implied cost of equity and the cost of debt to a global sample of over 24,000 firm-year ...

Wage Risk and Portfolio Choice: The Role of Correlated Returns

From standard portfolio-choice theory, it is well-understood that background risk, primarily due to wage risk, is one of the central determinants of individuals’ portfolio composition: higher background risk reduces risky investments. However, if background risk is negatively correlated with financial market risk, higher background risk implies a more risky investment. We quantify the influence of ...

Disentangling Structural Change, Servitization, and Skill-Biased Change

This paper analyzes three key labor market trends – structural change, servitization, and skill-biased change – using German data from 1975 to 2017. Through a decomposition analysis, we discern their individual impacts on employment shifts, revealing their distinct roles in the German labor market’s evolution. Servitization and skill-biased change significantly influence employment growth alongside ...