External refereed essays

The State Dependent Impact of Bank Exposure on Sovereign Risk

The theoretical literature remains inconclusive on whether changes in bank exposure to the domestic sovereign have an adverse effect on the sovereign risk position through a diabolic loop in the sovereign-bank nexus, or reduce perceived default risk by acting as a disciplinary device for the sovereign. In this paper we empirically analyze the impact of exogenous changes in bank exposure on the risk ...

Corporate Debt and Investment: A Firm-Level Analysis for Stressed Euro Area Countries

This paper investigates the link between corporate debt and investment for a group of five peripheral euro area countries. Using firm-level data from 2005 to 2014, we postulate a non-linear corporate leverage-investment relationship and derivethresholds beyond which leverage has a negative and significant impact on investment. The investment sensitivity of debt increased after 2008 when financial distress ...

Ohne Plan: Wirtschaftsentwicklung und Wirtschaftspolitik in Ungarn

School Entry, Afternoon Care, and Mothers’ Labour Supply

The availability of childcare is a crucial factor for mothers’ labour force participation. While most of the literature examines childcare for preschool children, we specifically focus on primary school-aged children, estimating the effect of formal afternoon care on maternal labour supply. To do so, we use a novel matching technique, entropy balancing, and draw on the rich and longitudinal data of ...

The Association between CVD-Related Biomarkers and Mortality in the Health and Retirement Survey

Background: It has become increasingly common in multiple purpose general population surveys to integrate different kinds of biomarker in the data collection process.Objective: In this article we test the predictive power of five different functional forms of CVD-related biomarkers for all-cause and CVD mortality in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS).Methods: We use five different functional forms ...

Successfully Striving for Happiness: Socially Engaged Pursuits Predict Increases in Life Satisfaction

Happiness is considered a highly desirable attribute, but whether or not individuals can actively steer their lives toward greater well-being is an open empirical question. In this study, respondents from a representative German sample reported, in text format, ideas for how they could improve their life satisfaction. We investigated which of these ideas predicted changes in life satisfaction 1 year ...

Occupational Segregation and the (Mis)allocation of Talent

In this paper, I study how occupational segregation affects the allocation of talent in a competitive labour market. I propose a model of occupational choice in which heterogeneous workers must rely on their social contacts to acquire job‐vacancy information. While occupational segregation implies benefits in terms of job‐finding probability, it also leads to allocative inefficiencies. Efficient and ...

Long Working Hours and Depressive Symptoms: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Published Studies and Unpublished Individual Participant Data

Objectives This systematic review and meta-analysis combined published study-level data and unpublished individual-participant data with the aim of quantifying the relation between long working hours and the onset of depressive symptoms. Methods We searched PubMed and Embase for published prospective cohort studies and included available cohorts with unpublished individual-participant data. We used ...

How Do Fuel Taxes Impact New Car Purchases? an Evaluation Using French Consumer-Level Data

This study evaluates the impact of fuel taxes on new car purchases, using exhaustive individual-level data of monthly new car registrations in France. We use information on the car holder to account for heterogeneous preferences across purchasers, and we identify demand parameters through the large oil price fluctuations of this period. We find that the short-term sensitivity of demand with respect ...

Are Political Representatives More Risk-Loving Than the Electorate? Evidence from German Federal and State Parliaments

Political representatives frequently make decisions with far-reaching implications for citizens and societies. Most of these decisions are choices in situations in which the probabilities of gains and losses are hard to estimate. Although decision-making is crucial to politics, existing research has hardly ever addressed the political representation of traits that notably influence decision-making. ...

Comparing Survey Data and Administrative Records on Gross Earnings: Nonreporting, Misreporting, Interviewer Presence and Earnings Inequality

Research on earnings inequality mostly relies on survey data, but these data may not be accurate. Survey data on earnings might be biased as research indicates that some respondents are likely to avoid reporting their gross earnings and others are likely to misreport them. In addition, the mode of data collection might affect responses to sensitive questions such as those on earnings. Given these three ...

Relations among Maternal Life Satisfaction, Shared Activities, and Child Well-Being

Maternal well-being is assumed to be associated with well-being of individual family members, optimal parenting practices, and positive developmental outcomes for children. The objective of this study was to examine the interplay between maternal well-being, parent-child activities, and the well-being of 5- to 7-year-old children. In a sample of N = 291 mother-child dyads, maternal life satisfaction, ...

The Effect of Pension Reforms on Old-Age Income Inequality

Many OECD countries are raising the normal retirement age (NRA), thereby, making early retirement more costly. Whereas such reforms incentivize individuals to work longer, labor market frictions might partly undermine intended behavioral responses. Employing administrative data of West German men, I estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of work, unemployment and retirement allowing for labor market ...

Outcomes of Unemployment Episodes during Early Career for Mismatched Workers in the United Kingdom and Germany and the Mediating Effects of Education and Institutions

Our research challenges the traditional view that unemployment is an unequivocal negative event in working life. We argue that depending on workers’ educational attainment and on national-specific institutional settings unemployment might have different implications on young workers who begin their employment careers in low occupational positions. The strongly skill-based and rigid labour market in ...

Armut in Deutschland: Ein Vergleich zwischen den beiden Haushaltspanelstudien SOEP und PASS

Die Ergebnisse von Armutsanalysen auf Basis von Befragungsdaten unterliegen statistischen Unsicherheiten und möglichen systematischen Verzerrungen, deren Ursachen sowohl in der Pre-Data-Collection-Phase (z. B. bei der Stichprobenziehung), der Data-Collection-Phase (Unit- bzw. Item-Non-Response), als auch in der Post-Data-Collection-Phase (Gewichtung, Datengenerierung) liegen können. Um diese studienspezifischen ...

Information Asymmetries between Parents and Educators in German Childcare Institutions

Economic theory predicts market failure in the market for early childhood education and care (ECEC) due to information asymmetries. We empirically investigate information asymmetries between parents and ECEC professionals in Germany, making use of a unique extension of the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SEOP). We compare quality perceptions by parents and by professionals across 734 institutions. We detect ...

The Prosociality of Intuitive Decisions Depends on the Status Quo

Previous research came to contradictory conclusion about the prosocial nature of intuitive decisions, as compared to deliberate decisions. This paper proposes the prosociality of the status quo allocation as a determinant of the prosociality of intuitive decisions. I present results from two experiments (N = 1,649) that manipulate time pressure and elicit response times in a binary dictator game. One ...

Welfare Effects of TTIP in a DSGE Model

We analyze the welfare effects of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). Earlier TTIP studies analyze welfare effects in a framework where output and welfare coincide. We believe that the utility function of households, which depends on consumption and employment, is the best criterion for assessing TTIP. We measure the ...

Regression Discontinuity Designs Based on Population Thresholds: Pitfalls and Solutions

In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to measure the effects of these threshold‐based policies on political and economic outcomes. Using evidence ...

Video Data Analysis: A Methodological Frame for a Novel Research Trend

Since the early 2000s, the proliferation of cameras, whether in mobile phones or CCTV, led to a sharp increase in visual recordings of human behavior. This vast pool of data enables new approaches to analyzing situational dynamics. Application is both qualitative and quantitative and ranges widely in fields such as sociology, psychology, criminology, and education. Despite the potential and numerous ...