External refereed essays

The Long-Run Effects of Sports Club Vouchers for Primary School Children

Childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21st century. While small-scale experiments change behaviors among adults in the short-run, we know little about the effectiveness of large-scale policies or the longer-run impacts due to habit formation among children. To nudge primary school children into a long-term habit of exercising, the German state of Saxony distributed ...

Model-Related Outcome Differences in Power System Models with Sector Coupling: Quantification and Drivers

This paper presents the results of a multi-model comparison to determine outcome deviations resulting from differences in power system models. We apply eight temporally and spatially resolved models to 16 stylized test cases. These test cases differ in their renewable energy supply share, technology scope, and optimization scope. We focus on technologies for balancing the variability of power generation, ...

R&D Spillovers through RJV Cooperation

We investigate how R&D spillovers propagate across firms linked through Research Joint Ventures (RJVs). Building on the framework developed by Bloom et al. (2013) which considers the opposing effects of knowledge spillovers and product market rivalry, we extend the model to account for RJV cooperation. Since the firm’s decision to join a RJV is endogenous, we build a model of RJV participation. The ...

Inequality over the Business Cycle: The Role of Distributive Shocks

This paper examines how wealth and income inequality dynamics are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution over the business cycle. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016, although inequality is, on average countercyclical and significantly associated with the capital share, one-third of the countries display a pro- or noncyclical relationship. To analyze ...

Impacts of Power Sector Model Features on Optimal Capacity Expansion: A Comparative Study

The transition towards decarbonized energy systems requires the expansion of renewable and flexibility technologies in power sectors. Many powerful tools exist to find optimal capacity expansion. In a stylized comparison of six models, we evaluate the capacity expansion results of basic power sector technologies. The technologies under investigation include base- and peak load power plants, electricity ...

The Dynamics of Recent Refugees’ Language Acquisition: How Do Their Pathways Compare to Those of Other New Immigrants?

Do the processes underlying destination-language acquisition differ between recently arrived refugees and other new immigrants? Based on a well-established model of language learning according to which language fluency is a function of efficiency, incentives, and exposure, this study addresses general processes of language learning as well as conditions specific to refugees. Longitudinal data on refugees ...

Destination-Language Acquisition of Recently Arrived Immigrants: Do Refugees Differ from Other Immigrants?

Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden Muster des Spracherwerbs von Neuzuwanderern beschrieben, welche in jüngerer Zeit nach Deutschland gekommen sind. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Vergleich syrischer Geflüchteter mit Migranten aus Italien, Polen und der Türkei, die als Arbeitsmigranten, im Zuge der Familienzusammenführung oder für Bildungszwecke eingewandert sind. Die theoretischen Überlegungen beruhen auf ...

The Education of Recently Arrived Refugees in Germany: Conditions, Processes, and Outcomes

Around the world, the number of refugees is at a record high. Although most forciblydisplaced persons seek refuge within their home country or in a neighboringstate (UNHCR, 2020), a large number of refugees have reached Europe in recentyears, and many of them have settled in Germany (Eurostat, 2020).1As many refugees were children and adolescents when they arrived in Germany(Bundesamt für Migration ...

Foreign Accents in the Early Hiring Process: A Field Experiment on Accent-Related Ethnic Discrimination in Germany

Based on a field experiment conducted in Germany between October 2014 and October 2015, this article focuses on the disadvantages associated with the presence of a foreign accent in the early hiring process, when applicants call in response to a job advertisement to ask whether the position is still available. We examine whether a foreign accent influences employers’ behaviors via productivity considerations ...

A Domain-Differentiated Approach to Everyday Emotion Regulation from Adolescence to Older Age

Flexibly using different emotion-regulation (ER) strategies in different situational contexts, such as domains, has been argued to promote effective emotion regulation. Additionally, emotion regulation processes may change with age as narrowing time horizons shift emotion-regulation preferences. The purpose of the present study was to examine the occurrence and effectiveness of flexible emotion regulation ...

Marriage, the Risk of Overeducation, and Selection into Both: Evidence from Germany

Two competing theories of social support and role specialization have been invoked to explain how marital status affects labour market outcomes. Whereas evidence of beneficial labour market outcomes among married men and employed married women favours a social support perspective, evidence of married women’s reduced labour market participation corresponds to a role specialization perspective. We make ...

Modeling Flexibility in Energy Systems — Comparison of Power Sector Models Based on Simplified Test Cases

Model-based scenario analyses of future energy systems often come to deviating results and conclusions when different models are used. This may be caused by heterogeneous input data and by inherent differences in model formulations. The representation of technologies for the conversion, storage, use, and transport of energy is usually stylized in comprehensive system models in order to limit the size ...

A Scheme for Jointly Trading off Costs and Risks of Solar Radiation Management and Mitigation under Long-Tailed Climate Sensitivity Probability Density Distributions

Side effects of “solar-radiation management” (SRM) might be perceived as an important metric when society decides on implementing SRM as a climate policy option to alleviate anthropogenic global warming. We generalize cost-risk analysis that originally trades off expected welfare loss from climate policy costs and risks from transgressing climate targets to also include risks from applying SRM. In ...

How Can Solar Geoengineering and Mitigation Be Combined under Climate Targets?

So far, scientific analyses have mainly focused on the pros and cons of solar geoengineering or solar radiation management (SRM) as a climate policy option in mere isolation. Here, we put SRM into the context of mitigation by a strictly temperature-target-based approach. As the main innovation, we present a scheme that extends the applicability regime of temperature targets from mitigation-only to ...

The Implication of the Paris Targets for the Middle East through Different Cooperation Options

The core of the 36th round of the Energy Modeling Forum project shows that it is more likely that major fossil-fuel exporters, such as the Middle East, are highly affected because of the decrease in fossil-fuel extractions required for the worldwide fulfillment of the Paris agreement. We employ a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model of global trade and energy to examine the ...

The Assessment of Substitution through Event Studies: An Application to Supply-Side Substitution in Berlin’s Rental Market

Face Masks Increase Compliance with Physical Distancing Recommendations during the COVID‑19 Pandemic

Governments across the world have implemented restrictive policies to slow the spread of COVID-19. Recommended face mask use has been a controversially discussed policy, among others, due to potential adverse effects on physical distancing. Using a randomized field experiment (N = 300), we show that individuals kept a significantly larger distance from someone wearing a face mask than from an unmasked ...

Warheads of Energy: Exploring the Linkages between Civilian Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons in Seven Countries

This paper focuses on the causal determinants of the accumulation of nuclear weapons, also known as vertical nuclear proliferation, in China, France, India, Pakistan, Russia, UK, and the US. It empirically analyzes the causal relationships between the civilian uses of nuclear energy, military expenditures, trade openness, and the stockpiling of nuclear warheads. Results from the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) ...

One Hundred Years of Rent Control in Argentina: Much Ado about Nothing

Following World War I, rent control became a standard policy response to the housing shortage and the resulting rent increases. Typically, economists blame it for creating inefficiencies in the housing market and beyond. We investigate whether rental market regulations (including rent control, protection of tenants from eviction, and housing rationing) had any effects in a middle-income Latin American ...

Protecting the Ego: Motivated Information Selection and Updating

We investigate whether individuals self-select feedback that allows them to maintain their motivated beliefs. In our lab experiment, subjects can choose the information structure that gives them feedback regarding their rank in the IQ distribution (ego-relevant treatment) or regarding a random number (control). Although beliefs are incentivized, individuals are less likely to select the most informative ...