-
Diskussionspapiere 1066 / 2010
Survey-based indicators such as the consumer confidence are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity, especially for the future path of private consumption. Although they receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power appears to be very limited. Therefore, this paper takes a fresh look on the survey data, which serve as a basis for the consumer confidence indicator (CCI) ...
2010| Christian Dreger, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
-
Diskussionspapiere 1056 / 2010
Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer construct with microfoundations. One complex aspect of micro-level heterogeneity is household size, as individuals ...
2010| Christos Koulovatianos, Carsten Schröder, Ulrich Schmidt
-
Diskussionspapiere 1046 / 2010
This paper empirically investigates the effects of changes in the interest rate as well as transitory income uncertainty on households' consumption-savings decision. Applying a structural demand model to German survey data, we estimate the uncompensated interest rate elasticity for savings, in line with the literature, to around zero. Accordingly, any policy-induced variation of net returns to savings ...
2010| Martin Beznoska, Richard Ochmann
-
Externe Monographien
Essen:
RWI,
2010,
37 S.
(Ruhr Economic Papers ; 180)
| Silke Anger, Michael Kvasnicka, Thomas Siedler
-
Externe Monographien
Bonn:
IZA,
2010,
35 S.
(Discussion Paper Series / Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit ; 4873)
| Silke Anger, Michael Kvasnicka, Thomas Siedler
-
Weekly Report 19 / 2010
More than half of German adults are overweight. Those most often affected include the elderly, poor, and individuals with poor education. Yet is overweight an issue that economists should address? Poor nutrition and lack of exercise play a major role in widespread diseases. One third of total health care expenditures are devoted to illnesses related to overweight. This is just one of the reasons why ...
2010| Kornelia Hagen
-
Weekly Report 20 / 2010
Findings from consumer surveys and studies about nutritional labeling tend to be hard to compare, because the methodologies they use and questions they address are quite varied. Nevertheless, by evaluating these studies, we can obtain a good overview of existing nutritional labeling systems and consumer preferences. The present background article offers an overview of the studies frequently cited in ...
2010| Kornelia Hagen
-
SOEPpapers 295 / 2010
Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify individuals, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. We use this framework to analyze the role of wealth, health and education, in addition to income, as dimensions of multidimensional ...
2010| Andreas Peichl, Nico Pestel
-
Diskussionspapiere 997 / 2010
In this paper, we investigate whether the Google search activity can help in nowcasting the year-on-year growth rates of monthly US private consumption using a real-time data set. The Google-based forecasts are compared to those based on a benchmark AR(1) model and the models including the consumer surveys and financial indicators. According to the Diebold-Mariano test of equal predictive ability, ...
2010| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Maximilian Podstawski, Boriss Siliverstovs
-
Diskussionspapiere 992 / 2010
This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on individuals' smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich longitudinal ...
2010| Silke Anger, Michael Kvasnicka, Thomas Siedler