External refereed essays

Analyzing the Continuity of Attitudinal and Perceptual Indicators in Hybrid Choice Models

The main objective of this paper is to compare the consequences of treating the attitudinal and perceptual indicators of hybrid discrete choice (HDC) models as continuous or ordinal outcomes. Based on tradition and computational reasons, such indicators are still predominantly treated as continuous outcomes in practice. This usually neglects their nature (as respondents are normally asked to state ...

Cross-Border Effects of Capacity Mechanisms in Interconnected Power Systems

The cross-border effects of a capacity market and a strategic reserve in interconnected electricity markets are modeled using an agent-based modeling methodology. Both capacity mechanisms improve the security of supply and reduce consumer costs. Our results indicate that interconnections do not affect the effectiveness of a capacity market, while a strategic reserve is affected negatively. The neighboring ...

The Effectiveness of Capacity Markets in the Presence of a High Portfolio Share of Renewable Energy Sources

The effectiveness of a capacity market is analyzed by simulating three conditions that may cause suboptimal investment in the electricity generation: imperfect information and uncertainty; declining demand shocks resulting in load loss; and a growing share of renewable energy sources in the generation portfolio. Implementation of a capacity market can improve supply adequacy and reduce consumer costs. ...

Parental Socio-Economic Status and Childcare Quality: Early Inequalities in Educational Opportunity?

This study examines whether children from potentially disadvantaged families attend early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers of lower quality compared to more advantaged children in the universal and strongly state-subsidized ECEC system in Germany. We combine the representative German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with the 2014 K2ID- SOEP extension study on ECEC quality. We run linear and logistic ...

The Relation between Religiosity and Muslims' Social Integration: A Two-Wave Study of Recent Immigrants in Three European Countries

Does their degree of religiosity affect how successfully recent Muslim migrants integrate socially into the host society in terms of their social contacts with the majority population and their ethno-religious group? And/or do these co-ethnic and interethnic social contacts affect the religiosity of Muslim migrants over time? On the basis of a two-wave study among recent migrants in Germany, the Netherlands ...

Credit Market Structure and Collateral in Rural Thailand

This paper empirically examines reliance on collateral in different credit market segments—formal, semiformal and informal lending—of a developing rural financial market. Determinants of collateralization indicate that all three types of lenders price risk conventionally. Controlled for standard risk factors, however, formal lenders rely on collateral about 40 per cent more often than informal lenders. ...

Germany and Poland in the Energy Union: Moving from Controversies to Shared Interests?

Who Is Minding the Kids? New Developments and Lost Opportunities in Reforming the British Early Education Workforce

The last 20 years have seen a substantial increase in enrolment in early childhood education and care (ECEC) in several European countries. The expansion of ECEC services inevitably requires new staff. There is however a tension between a rapid growth of services via the creation of low-paid, low-qualified jobs and the aspiration, voiced unanimously by policy makers, to improve the qualification and ...

Does Financial Education Impact Financial Literacy and Financial Behavior, and If So, When?

In a meta-analysis of 126 impact evaluation studies, we find that financial education significantly impacts financial behavior and, to an even larger extent, financial literacy. These results also hold for the subsample of randomized experiments (RCTs). However, intervention impacts are highly heterogeneous: financial education is less effective for low-income clients as well as in low- and lower-middle–income ...

Non-Migrants' Interethnic Relationships with Migrants: The Role of the Residential Area, the Workplace, and Attitudes toward Migrants from a Longitudinal Perspective

This paper studies the determinants of interethnic relationships between non-migrants and migrants in Germany. A large body of literature documents that such relationships generate positive outcomes for individual migrants as well as non-migrants and the social cohesion of host-societies at large. Previous research tends to focus on the migrant side, thereby neglecting the factors enabling non-migrants’ ...

Earnings Responses to Social Security Contributions

This paper utilises the discontinuities induced by earnings caps for social security contributions (SSC) in Germany to analyse the effect of SSC on gross labour earnings. Economic incidence is identified by exploiting an increase of a regional earnings cap of health and long-term care insurance as a natural experiment. Based on administrative data, difference-in-differences models are estimated. I ...

Estimation of Structural Vector Autoregressive Models

In this survey, estimation methods for structural vector autoregressive models are presented in a systematic way. Both frequentist and Bayesian methods are considered. Depending on the model setup and type of restrictions, least squares estimation, instrumental variables estimation, method-of-moments estimation and generalized method-of-moments are considered. The methods are presented in a unified ...

OPEC, Saudi Arabia, and the Shale Revolution: Insights from Equilibrium Modelling and Oil Politics

Why did OPEC not cut oil production in the wake of 2014's price fall? This study aims at aiding the mostly qualitative discussion with quantitative evidence from computing quarterly partial market equilibria Q4 2011 – Q4 2015 under present short-term profit maximisation and different competition setups. Although the model performs reasonably well in explaining pre-2014 prices, all setups fail to capture ...

Neighbourhood Turnover and Teenage Attainment

Theories about neighbours’ influence on children's education that are based on social capital, cohesion, and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. This is because stability is regarded as necessary for building strong ties and friendships, which in turn affect educational outcomes. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighbours on a child's education, ...

Intended College Enrollment and Educational Inequality: Do Students Lack Information?

Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented in universities. In this regard, the economics literature has focused on the role of financial constraints as a cause of these observed differences in educational choices. Our knowledge of potential effects of other constraints regarding university education is ...

Car Ownership and Hedonic Adaptation

Using panel data from the UK, we study the long-term effect of purchase decisions of automobiles on individuals’ happiness. We find a significant and sizable decrease in individual happiness in the years after a car purchase. We develop a model of hedonic adaptation that can explain these results. Applying the model to the data indicates a strong degree of habit persistence of around 80%, and that ...

Structural Vector Autoregressions with Smooth Transition in Variances

In structural vector autoregressive analysis identifying the shocks of interest via heteroskedasticity has become a standard tool. Unfortunately, the approaches currently used for modeling heteroskedasticity all have drawbacks. For instance, assuming known dates for variance changes is often unrealistic while more flexible models based on GARCH or Markov switching residuals are difficult to handle ...

Reduced Cross-Border Lending and Financing Costs of SMEs

This paper investigates how the withdrawal of banks from their cross-border business impacted the borrowing costs of European firms since the crisis. We combine aggregate information on total and cross-border credit with firm-level survey data for the period 2010 - 2014. We find that the decline in cross-border lending led to a deterioration in the borrowingconditions of small firms. In countries with ...

Designing a Model for the Global Energy System - GENeSYS-MOD: An Application of the Open-Source Energy Modeling System (OSeMOSYS)

This paper develops a path for the global energy system up to 2050, presenting a new application of the open-source energy modeling system (OSeMOSYS) to the community. It allows quite disaggregate energy and emission analysis: Global Energy System Model (GENeSYS-MOD) uses a system of linear equations of the energy system to search for lowest-cost solutions for a secure energy supply, given externally ...

Does Index Insurance Help Households Recover from Disaster? Evidence from IBLI Mongolia

This article investigates the impact of indemnity payments from index insurance on the asset recovery of households following a catastrophic weather disaster. Our focus is on the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) in Mongolia. We analyze the effect of IBLI indemnity payments after a once-in-50-year winter disaster struck Mongolia over the 2009/10 winter. The analysis is based on three waves of ...