External refereed essays

On the Treatment of Non-Original Sample Members in the German Household Panel Study (SOEP)

The Preadult Origins of Post-Materialism: A Longitudinal Sibling Study

Using a research design that traces siblings' preferences for postmaterialist values in Germany over two decades, this article provides new evidence on the origins of value preferences. Focusing on Inglehart's thesis of value change, the combined socialisation and scarcity hypothesis is tested against the social learning hypothesis - a prominent rival account of preadult value preference formation. ...

Russlands Energieexporte: Potentiale, Strategien, Perspektiven

Russia's oil and natural gas exports are of great importance for Europe's energy supplies. The future extent and direction of supplies will depend on Russia's energy policy as well as its export strategies. The amount of exports mentioned in prognoses can only be achieved if energy efficiency in Russia increases, coal replaces natural gas, price controls are eliminated, and considerable investments ...

Entrepreneurs' Gender and Financial Constraints: Evidence from International Data

This paper examines whether financial institutions discriminate against entrepreneurs on the basis of gender. Using the cross-country Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS), we find some evidence that, compared to male-managed counterparts, female-managed firms are less likely to obtain a bank loan. In addition, our analysis suggests that female entrepreneurs are charged higher ...

Die Bündelung familienbezogener Leistungen bei einem Parafiskus: eine Zusammenfassung bisheriger Überlegungen und eine Einordnung in die aktuelle Debatte

In Germany, support for families includes diverse types of financial and material aid. These different programs are not aligned and coordinated, but rather stand alone alongside each other and are far from being transparent. This article argues that this situation could be remedied by grouping the various family-related support measures within a single family support agency as a parafiscal institution. ...

Small Business Survival and Inheritance: Evidence from Germany

This paper investigates whether small businesses face financial constraints that affect their survival. A model of moral hazard is developed in which financial constraints arise endogenously. The model predicts that higher private assets relax financial constraints and have a positive effect on the firm's probability of survival. The empirical analysis confirms that the entrepreneur has a higher propensity ...

Does the Dispersion of Unit Labor Cost Dynamics in the EMU Imply Long-Run Divergence? Results from a Comparison with the USA and Germany

Welfare States, Labour Market Institutions and the Working Poor: A Comparative Analysis of 20 European Countries

This article regards the incidence of in-work poverty and how it is reduced by the payment of social transfers in 20 European countries. It combines a micro- and a macro-level perspective in two-level models. The basis for the analysis is micro-data from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2005 and macro-data from sources such as the OECD and Eurostat. The broad comparative ...

Persistence and Determinants of Firm Profit in Emerging Markets

Fortschritte und Herausforderungen der informationellen Infrastruktur in Deutschland

Financial Risks of Natural Hazards: Markets and the Role of the State ; Symposium

From Transition to Competition: Dynamic Efficiency Analysis of Polish Electricity Distribution Companies

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the economic transition toward a market economy increases the efficiency of firms. We study 32 Polish electricity distribution companies between 1997 and 2002, by applying common benchmarking methods to the panel: the non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA), the free disposal hull (FDH), and, as a parametric approach, the stochastic frontier analysis ...

First Evidence of Asymmetric Cost Pass-through of EU Emissions Allowances: Examining Wholesale Electricity Prices in Germany

We test the hypothesis that rising prices of emission allowances have a stronger impact on wholesale electricity prices than falling prices (asymmetric cost pass-through). Using an autoregressive distributed lag model, we confirm this hypothesis for the German market

On the Stability of the German Beveridge Curve: A Spatial Econometric Perspective

In this paper, the framework of the aggregated Beveridge curve is used to investigate the effectiveness of the job-matching process using German regional labour market data. For a fixed matching technology, the Beveridge curve postulates a negative relationship between the unemployment rate and the rate of vacancies, which is efficiently estimated using spatial econometric techniques. The eigenfunction ...

Efficiency Analysis of East European Electricity Distribution in Transition: Legacy of the Past?

This paper provides a cross-country efficiency analysis of electricity distribution companies in the East European transition countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. We use common nonparametric efficiency measurement such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Free Disposal Hull (FDH) under different assumptions and apply recent developments of statistical inference in nonparametric ...

Long-Term Contracts and Asset Specificity Revisited: An Empirical Analysis of Producer-Importer Relations in the Natural Gas Industry

This paper discusses long-term contracts as a particular organizational form situated somewhere between full vertical integration and short-term, market-based trading in the natural gas industry. We focus on the determinants of the duration of contracts under changing technical, economic, and institutional conditions. Using 311 long-term contracts we find that duration decreases as international market ...

Sticky Information Phillips Curves: European Evidence

We estimate the Sticky Information Phillips Curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, while in Italy, about once each 6 months.

Shocking! Do Forecasters Share a Common Belief?

We evaluate the interaction of inflation and growth forecast errors based on 17 distinct forecasts for the German economy for the period from 1970 to 2004. The forecasts were produced by 14 institutions. Our findings show that, in general, the forecasters did not share a common belief about the shocks driving the economy at the time at which they made their forecasts. We use a standard textbook aggregate-demand/aggregate-supply ...

Allocative Efficiency Measurement Revisited: Do We Really Need Input Prices?

The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency exploits input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. This paper proves allocative efficiency can be measured as a profit-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit-technical efficiency space. This new approach does not require information on input prices. To validate the new approach, we perform a Monte-Carlo experiment providing ...

Mobile Phone Termination Charges with Asymmetric Regulation

We model competition between two unregulated mobile phone companies with price-elastic demand and less than full market coverage. We also assume that there is a regulated full-coverage fixed network. In order to induce stronger competition, mobile companies could have an incentive to raise their reciprocal mobile-to-mobile access charges above the marginal costs of termination. Stronger competition ...