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Diurnal Coupling between Testosterone and Cortisol from Adolescence

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axes are typically conceptualized as mutually inhibitory systems; however, previous studies have found evidence for positive within-person associations (i.e., coupling) between cortisol and testosterone. One developmental hypothesis is that positive testosterone-cortisol coupling is unique to the adolescent period and ...

Testing for Identification in SVAR-Garch Models

Changes in residual volatility in vector autoregressive (VAR) models can be used for identifying structural shocks in a structural VAR analysis. Testable conditions are given for full identification for the case where the volatility changes can be modelled by a multivariate GARCH process. Formal statistical tests are presented for identification and their small sample properties are investigated via ...

Does Public Investment Stimulate Private Investment? Evidence for the Euro Area

This paper explores the long run relationship between public and private investment in the euro area. In contrast to previous studies a stock-flow approach is applied to control for the different orders of integration between the stock and flow variables. Panel econometric techniques allowing for international spillovers are employed. Private and public capital stocks are both I(2) and cointegrated. ...

Religious Heterogeneity and Fiscal Policy: Evidence from German Reunification

Theoretical work based on social identity theory predicts that population diversity undermines redistributive public policies. This article tests this proposition exploiting an exogenous shock in diversity due to Germany’s reunification. In contrast to previous work on ethno-linguistic or racial heterogeneity, we specifically analyze religious diversity, which is an increasingly relevant social cleavage ...

Long Working Hours and Alcohol Use: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Published Studies and Unpublished Individual Participant Data

Objective To quantify the association between long working hours and alcohol use.Design Systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies and unpublished individual participant data.Data sources A systematic search of PubMed and Embase databases in April 2014 for published studies, supplemented with manual searches. Unpublished individual participant data were obtained from 27 additional studies.Review ...

Belief Precision and Effort Incentives in Promotion Contests

The career concerns literature predicts that incentives for effort decline as beliefs about ability become more precise (Holmström, 1982, 1999). In contrast, we show that effort can increase with belief precision when agents compete for promotions to better paid jobs that are assigned on the basis of perceived abilities. In this case, an intermediate level of precision provides the strongest incentive ...

Why Is TFP Growth Sectorally Concentrated?

Research shows that total factor productivity (TFP) growth is weak in European countries. This is inter alia attributed to the fact that substantial TFP growth is limited to a few industries. Because TFP growth is typically understood as technological progress, it is concluded that technology diffusion between sectors in Europe is hampered. We use EU KLEMS data sets to decompose sectoral TFP for nine ...

Urban House Prices: A Tale of 48 Cities

In this paper, the authors construct a unique data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities across 24 countries. The data collected between January and May 2012 from 33 websites, are drawn from Internet advertisements of dwellings. Using the resulting sample of more than 1,000,000 announcements, the authors compute the quality-adjusted city-specific house prices. Based on ...

Sports and Exercise at Different Ages and Leukocyte Telomere Length in Later Life: Data from the Berlin Aging Study II (Base-II)

Physical activity and sports have repeatedly been reported to be associated with telomere length. We studied the association of different types of sports across different stages of life on relative leukocyte telomere length (rLTL) in advanced age.815 participants (397 men) from the Berlin Aging Study II aged over 61 years were included in the analysis. rLTL was measured by real time PCR and physical ...

Big Changes before Big Birthdays? Panel Data Provide No Evidence of End-of-Decade Crises