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Refereed essays Web of Science
The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals' attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique natural experiment that allows us to conduct such a study. Using data from the German General Social Survey ...
In:
Journal of Comparative Economics
37 (2009), 2, S. 251-269
| Helmut Rainer, Thomas Siedler
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper considers the impact of foreign aid flows on the risk of civil conflict. We improve on earlier studies on this topic by addressing the problem of the endogenous aid allocation using GDP levels of donor countries as instruments. A more structural addition to the literature is that we efficiently control for unobserved country specific effects in typical conflict onset and conflict continuation ...
In:
Journal of Development Economics
88 (2009), 2, S. 301-313
| Joppe de Ree, Eleonora E. M. Nillesen
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Refereed essays Web of Science
In Europe, two market designs are discussed for electricity trade and transmission. We argue that their performance in the presence of market power can be represented by two models from the literature. In contrast to examples for simple two-node networks, we show that in more complex networks a general ranking of both designs is not possible. Hence, computational models are required to evaluate the ...
In:
Operations Research
57 (2009), 2, S. 274-286
| Andreas Ehrenmann, Karsten Neuhoff
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Refereed essays Web of Science
In Deutschland stehen für Fragen der empirischen Bildungsforschung bislang überwiegend Querschnittserhebungen zur Verfügung, die ergänzt werden durch länderspezifische bzw. gruppenspezifische Längsschnitterhebungen. Zudem sind diese in der Regel auf einzelne Übergänge im Bildungssystem fokussiert. Die Herausforderung einer lebensverlaufstheoretischen Bildungsforschung liegt jedoch in der Analyse von ...
In:
Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft
12 (2009), 2, S. 252-280
| Henning Lohmann, C. Katharina Spieß, Olaf Groh-Samberg, Jürgen Schupp
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Refereed essays Web of Science
We analyze the distribution of market income in Germany in the period 1992 to 2003 on the basis of an integrated dataset that encompasses the whole spectrum of the population, from the very poor to the very rich. We find a modest increase of the Gini coefficient, a substantial drop of median income and a remarkable growth of the income share accruing to the economic elite, which we define as the richest ...
In:
The Review of Income and Wealth
55 (2009), 2, S. 303-330
| Stefan Bach, Giacomo Corneo, Viktor Steiner
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper studies the determinants of the unusually high and volatile price differential between common (voting) shares and preferred (nonvoting) shares in Russia's emerging stock market. It focuses on three potential explanations for the price spread between these two classes of stock: the control contest model of the voting premium, the inferior liquidity of preferred shares, and the risk of expropriation ...
In:
Emerging Markets, Finance & Trade
45 (2009), 2, S. 21-43
| Alexander Muravyev
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Refereed essays Web of Science
When potential income tax reforms are debated, the suspected impact on entrepreneurship is often used as an argument in favour of or against a certain policy. Quantitative ex-ante evaluations of the effect of certain tax reform options on entrepreneurship are very rare, however. This paper estimates the ex-ante effects of the German tax reform 2000 and of two hypothetical flat-rate tax scenarios on ...
In:
Fiscal Studies
30 (2009), 2, S. 179-218
| Frank M. Fossen
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Refereed essays Web of Science
The influence of risk aversion on the decision to become self-employed is a much discussed topic in the entrepreneurial literature. Conventional wisdom asserts that being an entrepreneur means making risky decisions; hence more risk-averse individuals are less likely to become entrepreneurs. In contrast to previous research, we are able to examine empirically whether the decision of starting a business ...
In:
Small Business Economics
32 (2009), 2, S. 153-167
| Marco Caliendo, Frank M. Fossen, Alexander S. Kritikos
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Dieser Aufsatz zeigt, dass die Messung der Handgreifkraft ein auch in sozialwissenschaftlichen Bevölkerungsumfragen einfach zu ermittelndes, nicht-invasives und verlässliches objektives Gesundheitsmaß ist. Die Greifkraftmessung stellt nicht nur eine sinnvolle Ergänzung zu selbst berichteten Indikatoren des Gesundheitszustandes dar, sondern besitzt darüber hinaus hinsichtlich einer Vielzahl insbesondere ...
In:
Zeitschrift für Gerontologie und Geriatrie
42 (2009), 2, S. 117-126
| Karsten Hank, Hendrik Jürges, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner
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Refereed essays Web of Science
This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms' short-term leverage and macroeconomic and idiosyncratic sources of uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts a negative relationship between uncertainty and optimal levels of borrowing. This proposition is tested using a panel of nonfinancial U.S. firms drawn from ...
In:
Economic Inquiry
47 (2009), 2, S. 216-225
| Christopher F. Baum, Andreas Stephan, Oleksandr Talavera