External refereed essays

Patientenverfügungen in Deutschland: Bedingungen für ihre Verbreitung und Gründe der Ablehnung

Hintergrund: Bislang ist die Verbreitung von Patientenverfügungen in der prä-klinischen Bevölkerung (das heißt, bevor es zu einer Krankenhausaufnahme kommt) noch kaum bekannt, da sich Studien hierzu zumeist auf Patienten- bzw. Arztbefragungen beziehen. Somit ist unklar, welche prä-klinischen Bedingungen die Verbreitung von Patientenverfügungen begünstigen. Von Interesse sind insbesondere persönliche ...

The Political Economy of Natural Disaster Insurance: Lessons from the Failure of a Proposed Compulsory Insurance Scheme in Germany

Wem viel gegeben worden ist, bei dem wird man auch viel suchen: ein sozialethischer Beitrag zum Thema Reichtum und Armut

What Makes an Entrepreneur and Does It Pay? Native Men, Turks, and Other Migrants in Germany

This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial endeavours of immigrants' and natives in Germany, concentrating on Turks, Germany's largest immigrant group and one under-studied in the literature. Self-employed Turks in Germany represent about 70 per cent of all Turkish entrepreneurs in the European Union. We use data from the German Socio-economic Panel to study patterns of self-employment. First, we identify ...

The Economics of Migrant Ethnicity

Unternehmensstatistik: Belastung und Nutzen

Die amtliche Statistik - kein großer bürokratischer Belastungsfaktor: Ergebnisse einer Studie über die Belastung der Unternehmen in Deutschland durch die Erhebungen der Statistischen Ämter

Produktvielfalt und Produktivität der IKT-Produzenten: eine Analyse unter Nutzung verbundener amtlicher Unternehmensdaten

Composantes familiales des impots sur le revenu en Allemagne et en France: les différences pertinentes

Mehr Beschäftigung durch Subventionierung der Sozialbeiträge? Eine empirische Evaluation aktueller Reformvorschläge

What Shapes Attitudes toward Paying Taxes? Evidence from Multicultural European Countries

Objectives. Considerable evidence suggests that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance. To resolve this puzzle of tax compliance, several researchers have argued that citizens' attitudes toward paying taxes, defined as tax morale, helps to explain the high degree of tax compliance. However, most studies have treated tax morale as a black box, without discussing which ...

Road Pricing in Britain

This paper outlines recent developments regarding road pricing in Britain. Given the widespread view that the London congestion pricing scheme has been a success, it was generally expected that road pricing would be more widely applied in Britain, and successive reports, including an official study for the Department for Transport, have examined the issue at a national level. However, implementation ...

Sustainability Impacts of Car Road Pricing: A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis for Austria

Nationwide car road pricing schemes are discussed across Europe. We analyse the impacts of such schemes with respect to environmental, economic and social indicators of sustainability, also quantifying the trade-offs among these three dimensions under different charging principles and revenue recycling options. In our analysis we employ a computable general equilibrium (CGE) approach, develop a modelling ...

Theories of Behavior in Principal-Agent Relationship with Hidden Action

In a laboratory experiment, we investigate behavior in a principal-agent situation with moral hazard. We evaluate the predictive success of two theories. One is the standard agency theory, which assumes that the agent will accept any contract offer that satisfies his participation constraint, typically requiring zero expected utility. The other is the "fair-offer" theory suggested by Keser and Willinger ...

Desired Lifetime and End-of-Life Desires across Adulthood from 20 to 90: A Dual-Source Information Model

How long do people want to live, and how does scientific research on aging affect such desires? A dual-source information model proposes that aging expectations and desires are informed differently by two sources: personal experiences on the one hand, and scientific and societal influences on the other. Two studies with independent German national samples explored desires regarding length of life and ...

Voluntary Contributions to Reduce Expected Public Losses

We examine voluntary private contributions to reduce the probability of a public loss in the experimental economics laboratory. In several treatments, we examine how loss probability, initial wealth and ambiguity affect the contribution level. We observe that, in contrast to the risk-neutral Nash equilibrium, participants do make positive contributions although the contribution level is lower than ...

Employment Fluctuations and Dynamics of the Aggregate Average Wage in Poland, 1996-2003

The aggregate average wage is often used as an indicator of economic performance and welfare, and as such often serves as a benchmark for changes in the generosity of public transfers and for wage negotiations. Yet if economies experience a high degree of (non-random) fluctuation in employment, the composition of the employed population will have a considerable effect on the computed average. In this ...

Versteigern statt Verschenken! Warum es sinnvoll ist, eine vollständige Versteigerung der Emissionsrechte anzustreben

Liability for Climate Change: The Benefits, the Costs, and the Transaction Costs

And then there Were Four ... How Many (and Which) Measures of Active Labor Market Policy Do We Still Need?