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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
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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
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SOEPpapers 339 / 2010
According to the life-cycle theory of consumption and saving, foreseeable retirement events should not reduce consumption. Whereas some consumption expenditures may fall when goods are self-produced (given higher leisure after retirement), this argument applies especially to housing consumption which can hardly be substituted by home production. We test this hypothesis using micro data for Germany ...
2010| Miriam Beblo, Sven Schreiber
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SOEPpapers 350 / 2010
We analyze the effect of household indebtedness on different health outcomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1999-2009. To establish a causal effect, we rely on (a) fixed-effects methods, (b) a subsample of constantly employed individuals, and (c) lagged debt variables to rule out problems of reverse causality. We apply different measures of household indebtedness, such as the ...
2010| Matthias Keese, Hendrik Schmitz
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SOEPpapers 327 / 2010
This research investigates how family events in adult children's lives influence the timing of their parents' financial transfers. We draw on retrospective data collected by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and use event history models to study the effects of marriage, divorce, and childbirth on receiving large gifts from parents. We find increased chances of receiving gifts of houses or ...
2010| Thomas Leopold, Thorsten Schneider
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Diskussionspapiere 978 / 2010
We use a life cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice to study the effects of social security on the investment decisions of households for the European case. Our model is mainly based on the one developed by Cocco, Gomes, and Maenhout (2005). We extend it by unemployment risk using Markov chains to model the transition between different employment states. In contrast to most models in the ...
2010| Vladimir Kuzin, Franziska Bremus
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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
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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
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SOEPpapers 289 / 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
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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