External refereed essays

The Productivity Shock in Business Services

In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by SME, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. Similar developments can be observed in several other European economies. Using a German dataset with 700,000 firm-level observations, we analyze this largely undiscovered phenomenon in professional services, the fourth largest sector of the business economy in the EU-15, ...

Expectation Management of Policy Leaders: Evidence from COVID-19

This paper studies how the communication of political leaders affects the expectation formation of the public. Specifically, we examine the expectation management of the German government regarding COVID-19-related regulatory measures during the early phase of the pandemic. We elicit beliefs about the duration of these restrictions via a high-frequency survey of individuals, accompanied by an addi-tional ...

Signalling Creditworthiness with Fiscal Austerity

Sovereign borrowers may tighten their fiscal stance in order to signal their creditworthiness to lenders. In a model of sovereign debt with incomplete information, I show that a trustworthy country may reduce its debt beyond the optimal level in order to separate itself from less reliable countries. Since austerity is costly, the gains in the price of debt from separating need to be high enough, as ...

Centralized and Decentral Approaches to Succeed the 100% Energiewende in Germany in the European Context – A Model-based Analysis of Generation, Network, and Storage Investments

In this paper, we explore centralized and more decentral approaches to succeed the energiewende in Germany, in the European context. We use the AnyMOD framework to model a future renewable-based European energy system, based on a techno-economic optimization, i.e. cost minimization with given demand, including both investment and the subsequent dispatch of capacity. The model includes 29 regions for ...

Active Learning Improves Financial Education: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

We conduct a randomized field experiment to study the effects of two financial education interventions offered to small-scale retailers in rural western Uganda. The treatments contrast “active learning” with traditional “lecturing” within standardized lesson-plans. After six months, active learning has a positive effect on savings and investment outcomes, in contrast to small or zero effects for lecturing. ...

Longitudinal Bidirectional Associations between Personality and Becoming a Leader

Objective: Leaders differ in their personalities from non- leaders. However, when do these differences emerge? Are leaders “born to be leaders” or does their personality change in preparation for a leadership role and due to increasing leader-ship experience? Method: Using data from the German Socio- Economic Panel Study, we examined personality differences between leaders (N = 2683 leaders, women: ...

Early Retirement of Employees in Demanding Jobs: Evidence from a German Pension Reform

Early retirement options are usually targeted at employees at risk of not reaching their regular retirement age inemployment. An important at-risk group comprises older employees who have worked in demanding jobs formany years. This group may be particularly negatively affected by the abolition of early retirement options. Tomeasure differences in labor market reactions of employees in low- and high-demand ...

Resuming Social Contact after Months of Contact Restrictions: Social Traits Moderate Associations between Changes in Social Contact and Well-being

Humans possess a need for social contact. Satisfaction of this need benefits well-being, whereas deprivation is detrimental. However, how much contact people desire is not universal, and evidence is mixed on individual differences in the association between contact and well-being. This preregistered longitudinal study (N = 190) examined changes in social contact and well-being (life satisfaction, depressivity/anxiety) ...

Wohlstand schaffen oder verteilen? Ein kurzer Blick auf Wahl- und Regierungsprogramme

Wirtschaftspolitik in einer sozialen Marktwirtschaft möchte Wohlstand schaffen und verteilen. Dies zeigt sich in den Wahl- und Regierungsprogrammen auf Bundesebene seit 2002, allerdings mit sehr unterschiedlichen Akzenten. Zur Analyse wird deshalb die relative Häufigkeit der Begriffe „Soziales“ und „Wettbewerb“ in Programmen errechnet. Der daraus gebildete S/W-Koeffizient zeigt die Positionierung ...

Gemeinschaftsdiagnose: ohne russisches Gas droht eine scharfe Rezession in Deutschland

Die deutsche Wirtschaft steuert durch schwieriges Fahrwasser. Die Auftriebskräfte durch den Wegfall der Pandemiebeschränkungen, die Nachwehen der Coronakrise und die Schockwellen durch den Krieg in der Ukraine sorgen für gegenläufige konjunkturelle Strömungen. Allen Einflüssen gemeinsam ist ihre preistreibende Wirkung.

Does Green Public Procurement Trigger Environmental Innovations?

Green public procurement has gained high political priority and is argued to be an effective demand-side policy to trigger environmental innovations. However, the empirical evidence on its innovation impact is limited. We construct a novel firm-level dataset to investigate the effect of winning public procurement tenders with additional environmental award criteria on firms’ introduction of environmental ...

Einkommen und Kreditschulden privater Haushalte

Die wirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen der Coronapandemie haben im Jahr 2020 zu einem deutlichen Rückgang des realen BIP in Deutschland geführt. Für Erwerbstätige führte die Krise zu Arbeitsplatzverlusten, Einkommensverlusten – teilweise kompensiert durch Kurzarbeitergeld – und Rückgängen beim Einkommen aus Selbstständigkeit. Während sich die Einkommensseite für die privaten Haushalte damit schwach bis ...

Educational Selectivity and Immigrants’ Labour Market Performance in Europe

This article depicts the selectivity profiles of first-generation immigrants of multiple origins in 18 European destinations and investigates whether educational selectivity is relevant to their labour market performance. The theoretical account starts from the premise that the relative position individuals occupy in the educational distribution of their origin country represents—frequently unmeasured—characteristics ...

Mentoring as a Grassroots Effort for Integrating Refugees – Evidence from a Randomised Field Experiment

About 80 million people were displaced worldwide at the end of 2020. To support this highly vulnerable group, in recent years, local bottom-up initiatives proliferated to support refugee integration in hosting communities. This study examines a network intervention for refugees in collaboration with a social start-up whose mission is to match refugees and local volunteers to form friendships. We apply ...

Measurement Equivalence in Probability and Nonprobability Online Panels

Nonprobability online panels are commonly used in the social sciences as a fast and inexpensive way of collecting data in contrast to more expensive probability-based panels. Given their ubiquitous use in social science research, a great deal of research is being undertaken to assess the properties of nonprobability panels relative to probability ones. Much of this research focuses on selection bias, ...

The Pricing Structure of Legal Services: Do Lawyers Offer What Clients Want?

We analyze clients’ contract choices in auctions where Dutch law firms compete for standard cases such as labor disputes for individuals and collecting debts for businesses. In the auctions, lawyers can submit bids with any fee arrangement they prefer, including an hourly rate, a fixed fee, and a ‘mixed fee’: a time-capped fixed fee plus an hourly rate for any additional hours should the case take ...

Eine Dateninfrastruktur für die Gesellschaftswissenschaften: Unterstützung in der Arbeit mit Forschungsdaten durch KonsortSWD

Neue Grundsätze im Ethikkodex des Vereins für Socialpolitik

Die Mitglieder des Vereins für Socialpolitik haben auf ihrer Mitgliederversammlung am 8. Dezember 2021 mit deutlicher Mehrheit beschlossen, den seit 2012 bestehenden Ethikkodex um Inhalte der „guten beruflichen Praxis“ zu erweitern. Neben ethischen Standards für die wissenschaftliche Arbeit haben sich die Vereinsmitglieder mit diesem Beschluss auch dem Streben nach Inklusion, Nicht-Diskriminierung ...

Bürgergeld und Kindergrundsicherung als Einstiege ins bedingungslose Grundeinkommen?

Im Beitrag wird diskutiert, ob es sich bei der vorgesehenen Ablösung von Hartz IV durch ein Bürgergeld und den Aufbau einer Kindergrundsicherung eher um einen symbolischen Wandel handelt oder die im Herbst 2021 gewählte Ampel-Koalition einen substanziellen Neuanfang und eine grundlegende Reform des Wohlfahrtsstaates einleitet. Zusammenfassend werden die geplanten Maßnahmen der neuen Bundesregierung ...

Testing the Superstar Firm Hypothesis

Firms with superior productivity, labeled superstar firms, are argued to be the link between rising concentration and the fall of the aggregate labor share in the US. This analysis confirms that similar evidence is found within the European context: the market share and firm size increase, whereas the labor share decreases with productivity. One of the much discussed mechanisms behind this development ...