Topic Consumers

Intangible Capital and Productivity Divergence

Understanding the causes of the slowdown in aggregate productivity growth is key to maintaining the competitiveness of advanced economies and ensuring long-term economic prosperity. This paper is the first to provide evidence that investment in intangible capital, despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the aggregate level ...

Fairness in Markets and Market Experiments

Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratory experiments survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We investigate how fairness in a laboratory experiment framed explicitly as a market exchange relates to preferences for fair trade products elicited before and at the end of the market experiment. We find that the willingness to buy at a higher price...

Consumption and Subjective Expectations: Empirical Evidence and Structural Estimation

The Value of Data for Prediction Policy Problems: Evidence from Antibiotic Prescribing

This is an online seminar using Cisco Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:   Large-scale personal data collection for the purpose of personalized predictions has been driven by high expectations of efficiency gains in many business and policy settings. Yet, quantifying the trade-off between the costs of linking disconnected silos of personal...

Wage Risk and Portfolio Choice: The Role of Correlated Returns

From standard portfolio-choice theory it is well-understood that background risk, overwhelmingly due to wage risk, is one of the central determinants of individuals’ portfolio composition: higher background risk reduces risky investments. However, if background risk is negatively correlated with financial market risk, higher background risk implies more risky investment. We quantify the influence of ...

Mobile Phone Network Expansion in Sparsely Populated Regions in Germany: Roaming Benefits Consumers

As part of the 2019 frequency allocation process for mobile communications, the Federal Network Agency required network providers to achieve a certain level of mobile network coverage for the population. Cooperation between different network providers was also permitted for the first time, although it was not specified what forms of cooperation are permitted. Using a model, this report shows that providers ...

An Economic Analysis of the Empty Nest Syndrome: What the Leaving Child Does Matters

This study is an empirical investigation of the empty nest syndrome, commonly understood as a situation where there are feelings of loss or loneliness for mothers and/or fathers following the departure of the last child from the family home. This investigation makes use of rich, longitudinal, nationally representative German data to assess whether there is evidence for such a syndrome. Furthermore, ...

The Case of Deutsche Telekom: How Stock Market Crashes Can Persistantly Affect Household Investment Decisions

Since decades, only one fourth of German households invest in shares. One exception was during the three IPOs from 1996 to 2000 of the Deutsche Telekom, which gave Germans a taste to enter the stock market. However, the fall in the share price shortly after the second IPO, followed by corruption scandals of the company, put an end to their enthusiasm. The present study based on SOEP data shows that ...

Unconventional Fiscal Policy in HANK

We show that in a New Keynesian model with household heterogeneity, fiscal policy can be a perfect substitute for monetary policy: three simple conditions for consumption taxes, labor taxes, and the government debt level are sufficient to induce the same consumption and labor supply of each household and, thus, the same allocation as interest rate policies. When monetary policy is constrained by a ...

All-Pay Competition with Captive Consumers

We study a game in which two firms compete in quality to serve a market consisting of consumers with different initial consideration sets. If both firms invest below a certain threshold, they only compete for those consumers already aware of their existence. Above this threshold, a firm is visible to all and the highest investment attracts all consumers. On the one hand, the existence of initially ...