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SOEPpapers 611 / 2013
Using harmonized wealth data and a novel decomposition approach, we show that cohort effects exist in the income profiles of asset and debt portfolios for a sample of European countries, the U.S. and Canada. We find that younger households' participation decisions in assets are more responsive to income than older households. Family structure plays a significant role in explaining cross-country differences ...
2013| Eva Sierminska, Karina Doorley
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Diskussionspapiere 1341 / 2013
The Chinese growth miracle was based on exports and investment in recent years. While strong output growth has been maintained even during the financial crisis, the imbalances within the country increased. To return to a more sustainable path of development, policies are directed to improve the role of private consumption. However, the institutional framework is an impediment to the transformation, ...
2013| Christian Dreger, Tongsan Wang, Yanqun Zhang
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Diskussionspapiere 1335 / 2013
The paper deals with the competitive effects of price guarantees in a spatial duopoly where consumers can search for lower prices but have to incur hassle costs if they want to claim a price guarantee. It is shown that symmetric equilibria with and without price guarantees exist but price guarantees will have no effect on prices if search costs are low, hassle costs are high and the number of uninformed ...
2013| Pio Baake, Ulrich Schwalbe
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SOEPpapers 594 / 2013
We demonstrate that interpersonal comparisons lead to "keeping up with the Joneses"-behavior. Using annual household data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the causal effect of changes in reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived to be richer, on household savings and consumption. When controlling for own income, an increase in reference ...
2013| Moritz Drechsel-Grau, Kai D. Schmid
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Diskussionspapiere 1332 / 2013
This paper investigates the effects of global oil and food price shocks to consumer prices in Middle East-North African (MENA) countries using threshold cointegration methods. Oil and food price shocks increase domestic prices in the long run, whereby the impact of food prices dominates. While global prices are weakly exogenous, consumer prices respond to deviations from the equilibrium relationship. ...
2013| Ansgar Belke, Christian Dreger
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Externe Monographien
This paper investigates the effects of global oil and food price shocks to consumer prices in Middle East-North African (MENA) countries using threshold cointegration methods. Oil and food price shocks increase domestic prices in the long run, whereby the impact of food prices dominates. While global prices are weakly exogenous, consumer prices respond to deviations from the equilibrium relationship. ...
Essen:
RWI,
2013,
26 S.
(Ruhr Economic Papers ; 448)
| Ansgar Belke, Christian Dreger
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Refereed essays Web of Science
The paper discusses the opportunities for an empirically grounded decision support system as an instrument for independent and scientifically based consumer policy consulting. To date, consumer policy is dominated by the information paradigm and the leitbild of the rational, sovereign and information-seeking consumer. Yet, both everyday practice and research in behavioural economics show that this ...
In:
Journal für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit
8 (2013), 1/2, S. 61-66
| Kornelia Hagen, Hans-W. Micklitz, Andreas Oehler, Lucia A. Reisch, Christoph Strünck
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SOEPpapers 540 / 2013
While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). In married and cohabiting couples, men have, on average, 33,000 Euro more net worth than women. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, ...
2013| Markus M. Grabka, Jan Marcus, Eva Sierminska
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Refereed essays Web of Science
Survey-based indicators are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity. As such, consumer confidence might be informative for the future path of private consumption. Although the indicators receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power often appears to be very limited. This paper takes a fresh look at the data that serve as a basis for the consumer confidence indicator (CCI) ...
In:
Journal of Forecasting
32 (2013), 1, S. 10-18
| Christian Dreger, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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Diskussionspapiere 1278 / 2013
We investigate whether the willingness to take investment risk is a sex-linked trait and link the results to the country's gender equality regime. Our empirical analysis involves household data on financial asset holdings as well as on self-reported risk tolerance for Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Of those countries, Italy is by far the country with the greatest degree of gender inequality ...
2013| Nataliya Barasinska, Dorothea Schäfer