Topic Consumers

The Effect of Social Comparison on Debt Taking: Experimental Evidence

A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we disentangle two mechanisms by performing a lab experiment designed to study the effects of social image concerns and peer information on consumption choices financed through debt taking. We find that ...

Facebook Shadow Profiles

Data is often at the core of digital products and services, especially when related to online advertising. This has made data protection and privacy a major policy concern. When surfing the web, consumers leave digital traces that can be used to build user profiles and infer preferences. We quantify the extent to which Facebook can track web behavior outside of their own platform. The network of engagement ...

Where is the Consumer Center? A Case of St. Petersburg

In an urban economy, the distribution of people and real estate prices depends on the location of the central business district of a city. As distance from the city center increases, both prices and population density diminish, for travel costs increase in terms of time and money. As manufacturing gradually leaves the cities, the importance of consumer amenities as attractors of population to the urban ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...