External refereed essays

Wie verzögert erfolgen Erhaltungsmaßnahmen auf deutschen Autobahnen? - Eine Analyse für den Zeitraum von 1997 bis 2015

What Goes around Comes around: How Large Are Spillbacks from US Monetary Policy?

Spillovers from US monetary policy entail spillbacks to the domestic economy. Applying counterfactual analyses in a Bayesian proxy structural vector-autoregressive model we find that spillbacks account for a non-trivial share of the slowdown in domestic real activity following a contractionary US monetary policy shock. Spillbacks materialise as a monetary policy tightening depresses foreign sales and ...

Dominant-Currency Pricing and the Global Output Spillovers from US Dollar Appreciation

We test for the empirical relevance of partial and asymmetric dominant-currency pricing (DCP), the hypothesis that large but not necessarily identical shares of economies’ export and import prices are sticky in US dollar. We first set up a structural three-country New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model which nests DCP, producer-currency pricing and local-currency pricing. Under ...

The Effects of an Increase in the Retirement Age on Health: Evidence from Administrative Data

This study analyzes the causal effect of an increase in the retirement age on official health diagnoses. We exploit a sizable cohort-specific pension reform for women using a Difference-in-Differences approach. The analysis is based on official records covering all individuals insured by the public health system in Germany and including all certified diagnoses by practitioners. This enables us to gain ...

Kleine Welt: Wenn Deutschland nur mit Demokratien handelt

Mehr Selbstdisziplin macht Politikberatung besser

Competition, Formal Governance and Trust in Alliances: An Experimental Study

We study the role of alliance governance in the behavior of partners in alliances with different degrees of competition. Using data from a lab experiment on 1,009 alliances and 31,662 partners' choices, we explore whether and how alliances succeed in different competitive scenarios, contingent on the use of formal governance mechanisms (termination clauses) and the number of partners in the alliance. ...

Earnings Inequality and Working Hours Mismatch

Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we document a significant rise in monthly earnings in- equality between 1993 and 2018. The main contributors are inter-temporal increases in working hours inequality and increases in the covariance between working hours and hourly wages, while changes in the distribution of hourly wages play a minor role. Applying a novel double decomposition technique ...

Centre-Based Care and Parenting Activities

We examine the relationship between parenting activities and centre-based care using time diary and survey data for mothers in Germany. While mothers using centre-based care spend significantly less time in the presence of their child, we find that differences in the time spent on specific activities such as reading, talking, and playing with the child are relatively small or zero. The pattern of results ...

Urban Land Use Fragmentation and Human Well-Being

We study how land use fragmentation affects the life satisfaction of city dwellers. To this end, we calculate fragmentation metrics based on exact geographical coordinates of land use from the European Urban Atlas and of households from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Using ordinary least squares and fixed effects specifications, we find little effect on life satisfaction when aggregating over land ...

Perspectives on Resilience: Trait Resilience, Correlates of Resilience in Daily Life, and Longer‐Term Change in Affective Distress

Resilience describes successful adaptation in the face of adversity, commonly inferred from trajectories of well‐being following major life events. Alternatively, resilience was conceptualised as a psychological trait, facilitating adaptation through stable individual characteristics. Both perspectives may relate to individual differences in how stress is regulated in daily life. In the present ...

Impact of the COVID‑19 Pandemic on Depression, Anxiety, Loneliness, and Satisfaction in the German General Population: a Longitudinal Analysis

Purpose Cross-sectional studies found high levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, and loneliness during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reported increases were lower in longitudinal population-based findings. Studies including positive outcomes are rare. This study analyzed changes in mental health symptoms, loneliness, and satisfaction. Methods Respondents of the German Socio-Economic ...

Die EZB-Geldpolitik in der Zwickmühle

Den großen Reibach abschöpfen?

Gender Differences in Fairness Evaluations of Own Earnings in 28 European Countries

Women tend to evaluate their own pay more favorably than men. Contented women are speculated to not seek higher wages, thus the ‘paradox of the contented female worker’ may contribute to persistent gender pay differences. We extend the literature on gender differences in pay evaluations by investigating fairness evaluations of own earnings and underlying conceptions of fair earnings, providing a closer ...

Pandemic Depression: COVID-19 and the Mental Health of the Self-Employed

We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...

Geodata in Labor Market Research: Trends, Potentials and Perspectives

This article shows the potentials of georeferenced data for labor market research. We review developments in the literature and highlight areas that can benefit from exploiting georeferenced data. Moreover, we share our experiences in geocoding administrative employment data including wage and socioeconomic information of almost the entire German workforce between 2000 and 2017. To make the data easily ...

Renewable Energy Targets and Unintended Storage Cycling: Implications for Energy Modeling

To decarbonize the economy, many governments have set targets for the use of renewable energy sources. These are often formulated as relative shares of electricity demand or supply. Implementing respective constraints in energy models is a surprisingly delicate issue. They may cause a modeling artifact of excessive electricity storage use. We introduce this phenomenon as “unintended storage cycling”, ...

Overcoming the Disconnect between Energy System and Climate Modeling

The Early Bird Catches the Worm! Setting a Deadline for Online Panel Recruitment Incentives

The literature on the effects of incentives in survey research is vast and covers a diversity of survey modes. The mode of probability-based online panels, however, is still young and so is research into how to best recruit sample units into the panel. This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of a specific type of incentive in this context: a monetary incentive that is paid conditionally upon panel ...