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Refereed essays Web of Science
When there are more than two parties, policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process. We investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest: voting power. In order to isolate close elections in a proportional election ...
In:
European Economic Review
80 (2015), S. 310-328
| Ronny Freier, Christian Odendahl
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper investigates the mechanisms behind the health effects of retirement. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit financial incentives in the German pension system for identification, I find that retirement improves subjective health status and mental health, while also reducing outpatient care utilization. I explore a wide range of health behaviors, time use, and effect heterogeneity ...
In:
Journal of Health Economics
43 (2015), S. 1-12
| Peter Eibich
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper argues that the development of energy systems rests on a combination of three different domains of socio-economic processes and associated modes of decision-making. For shorthand these are termed ‘satisficing’, ‘optimising’, and ‘transforming’ domains, with corresponding underpinnings found in behavioural, neoclassical, and evolutionary economics respectively. Each domain operates at different ...
In:
Technological Forecasting & Social Change
98 (2015), S. 290-302
| Michael Grubb, Jean-Charles Hourcade, Karsten Neuhoff
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper argues that counter-cyclical liquidity hoarding by financial intermediaries may strongly amplify business cycles. It develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which banks operate subject to agency problems and funding liquidity risk in their intermediation activity. Importantly, the amount of liquidity reserves held in the financial sector is determined endogenously: Balance ...
In:
Journal of Banking & Finance
54 (2015), S. 192-207
| Sören Radde
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Refereed essays Web of Science
The use of log-transformed data has become standard in macroeconomic forecasting with VAR models. However, its appropriateness in the context of out-of-sample forecasts has not yet been exposed to a thorough empirical investigation. With the aim of filling this void, a broad sample of VAR models is employed in a multi-country set up and approximately 42 million pseudo-out-of-sample forecasts of GDP ...
In:
Economics Letters
126 (2015), S. 40-42
| Johannes Mayr, Dirk Ulbricht
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the effects of extracurricular music activities on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality, time use and ambition using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Our findings suggest that adolescents ...
In:
Economics of Education Review
44 (2015), S. 56–82
| Adrian Hille, Jürgen Schupp
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This study assesses whether the international monetary system is already tri-polar by testing what we call China's ‘dominance hypothesis’, i.e. whether the renminbi already influences exchange rate and monetary policies strongly in Asia, a direct reference to the old ‘German dominance hypothesis’ which ascribed to the German mark a dominant role in Europe in the 1980s. Using a global factor model of ...
In:
The Economic Journal
124 (2014), Iss. 581, S. 1343-1370
| Marcel Fratzscher, Arnaud Mehl
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Central banks regularly communicate about financial stability issues. This article asks how such communications affect financial markets, based on a unique dataset covering more than 1,000 releases of Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) and speeches by 37 central banks over the past 14 years. The findings suggest that optimistic FSRs lead to significant and potentially long-lasting positive abnormal ...
In:
The Economic Journal
124 (2014), 577, S. 701-734
| Benjamin Born, Michael Ehrmann, Marcel Fratzscher
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper estimates the effect of involuntary job loss on smoking behaviour and body weight using German SOEP data. Baseline non-smokers are more likely to start smoking due to job loss, while smokers do not intensify smoking. In particular, single individuals and those with lower health or socioeconomic status prior to job loss exhibit high rates of smoking initiation. Job loss increases body weight ...
In:
Economica
81 (2014), 324, S. 626-648
| Jan Marcus
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Despite high economic growth during the past decades, China is still vulnerable to shocks arising from industrial states. The advanced economies strongly influence Chinese export performance, with subsequent effects on output growth. Using a production function, this article examines to which extent regional GDP growth in China is export driven. In a panel of 28 Chinese provinces, series are splitted ...
In:
Applied Economics
46 (2014), 35, S. 4302-4308
| Christian Dreger, Yanqun Zhang