External refereed essays

Teams Promise but Do Not Deliver

Individuals and two-person teams play a hidden-action trust game with pre-play communication. We replicate previous results for individuals that non-binding promises increase cooperation rates, but this does not extend to teams. While teams promise to cooperate at the same rate as individuals, they consistently renege on those promises. Additional treatments begin to explore the basis for team behavior. ...

Decentralization and Public Procurement Performace: New Evidence from Italy

We exploit a new dataset based on European Union (EU) procurement award notices to investigate the relationship between the degree of centralization of public procurement and its performance. We focus on the case of Italy, where all levels of government, along with a number of other public institutions, are involved in procurement and are subject to the same EU regulation. We find that (a) municipalities ...

Early Education and Care Quality: Does It Matter for Maternal Working Hours?

This study investigates whether mothers whose children enter early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers of higher quality are more likely to work longer hours. The empirical analysis links the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Study with the K2iD-SOEP extension study, which collected ECEC quality information from childcare centers across Germany. Based on a sample of 556 mothers of 628 children with ...

The Effect of Restructuring Electricity Distribution Systems on Firms' Persistent and Transient Efficiency

We evaluate the efficiency of electricity distribution operators (DSOs) as providers of local public infrastructure. In particular, we consider two types of efficiency, i.e., short-term (transient) and long-term (persistent). We apply the recently developed four-component stochastic frontier model, which allows identifying determinants of the two types of efficiency, after controlling for firm heterogeneity ...

Looking for the Missing Rich: Tracing the Top Tail of the Wealth Distribution

We analyse the top tail of the wealth distribution in France, Germany, and Spain using the first and second waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be under-represented in household surveys, we integrate big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto distribution, and impute the missing rich. In addition to the Forbes list, we rely on national rich ...

Family Separation and Refugee Mental Health: a Network Perspective

How do the structure and relational features of family networks affect refugees’ mental health after migration, particularly when refugees are geographically separated from their family? Using the first wave of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees, which is representative of the population of refugees who arrived in Germany between 2013 and 2016, this study finds that the size of the nuclear family ...

Zehn Jahre nach dem großen Knall: wie ist es um die Stabilität der internationalen Immobilienmärkte bestellt?

Zehn Jahre nach der weltweiten Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise, die ihren Ursprung auf dem US-amerikanischen Immobilienmarkt hatte, steigen angesichts weltweit zunehmender Preise für Wohneigentum die Sorgen vor neuen Immobilienpreisblasen. Dieser Beitrag zeigt auf Basis von OECD-Daten für 20 Länder, dass die Sorge nicht unberechtigt ist: In acht Ländern deutet die Immobilienpreisentwicklung auf ein spekulatives ...

Analyzing Scenarios for the Integration of Renewable Energy Sources in the Mexican Energy System: An Application of the Global Energy System Model (GENeSYS-MOD)

This paper uses numerical techno-economic modelling to analyse the effect of current national renewable targets and climate goals on the cost and structural composition of the Mexican energy system. For this, we construct a scenario base analysis to compare current policies with two alternative states of the world—one without climate policies and one attaining full decarbonization. Furthermore, an ...

Emissions Trading in Regulated Electricity Markets

The Effects of Pricing Waste Generation: A Synthetic Control Approach

To internalize pollution externalities into household waste generation, Unit Pricing Systems (UPS) have been adopted worldwide. This paper evaluates the causal effects of a UPS on the disposal of municipal solid waste in Trento, Italy. Using a unique panel dataset of monthly waste generation in Italian municipalities, we employ the synthetic control method, which allows us to account for possible time-varying ...

Deutschland: ein Land der Mieter? Die Rolle von Erwartungen über zukünftige Immobilienpreisentwicklungen

Mehr als die Hälfte aller Haushalte in Deutschland wohnen zur Miete – ein im internationalen Vergleich sehr hoher Wert. Bisherige Studien haben vor allen Dingen den regulatorischen Rahmen des Immobilienmarkts hervorgehoben, der Mietwohnungen in Deutschland systematisch begünstigt. Allerdings gibt es keine Studien, die diese Erklärungen empirisch eindeutig untermauern können: einige Arbeiten betonen ...

Notes about Comparing Long-Term Care Expenditures across Countries: Comment on "Financing Long-Term Care: Lessons from Japan"

The comparison of long-term care (LTC) expenditures is a difficult task. National LTC systems differ widely in terms of eligibility criteria, level of benefits, institutional variety and regional heterogeneity. In this commentary I will first give some general remarks on cross country comparisons. Then I discuss the role of the informal sector which is the most important pillar of all LTC systems. ...

Exit Expectations and Debt Crises in Currency Unions

We study a sovereign debt crisis in a small member state of a currency union. If the country exits the currency union, it may redenominate its liabilities and reduce the real value of debt through depreciation and inflation. We analyze formally how the anticipation of this possibility, “exit expectations”, impact the dynamics of the sovereign debt crisis. First, we show that public debt accumulates ...

Poor Glucose Regulation is Associated with Declines in Well-Being among Older Men, but not Women

Glucose regulation is a key aspect of healthy aging and has been linked to brainfunctioning and cognition. Here, we examined the role of glucose regulation for withinpersonlongitudinal trajectories of well-being. We applied growth models to data fromthe Berlin Aging Study II (N = 1,437), using insulin resistance as an index of glucoregulatorycapacity. We found that poor glucose regulation (higher insulin ...

Comparing Administrative and Survey Data: Is Information on Education from Administrative Records of the German Institute for Employment Research Consistent with Survey Self-Reports?

In research on stratification and inequality, administrative data are popular for their wide coverage and assumed high quality. Yet, the quality of the data depends crucially on the aim of data collection. In this paper, we investigate the quality of information on education in administrative data from social security records provided by the German Federal Institute for Employment Research where education ...

Can Happiness Apps Generate Nationally Representative Datasets? - a Case Study Collecting Data on People’s Happiness Using the German Socio-Economic Panel

In the last few years, apps have become an important tool to collect data. Especially in the case of data on people’s happiness, two projects have received substantial attention from both the media and the scientific world: “Track your happiness” from Killingsworth and Gilbert (Science, 330, 932-932, 2010), and “Mappiness,” from MacKerron (2012). Both happiness apps used the experience sampling method ...

Closing Routes to Retirement for Women: How Do They Respond?

We study the employment effects of a large increase in the early retirement age (ERA) of women. Raising the ERA has the potential to extend contribution periods and to reduce the number of pensioners at the same time. However, workers may not be able to work longer or may choose other social support programs as exit routes from employment. Results suggest that the reform increases employment, unemployment ...

Parental Leave Policies and Socio-Economic Gaps in Child Development: Evidence from a Substantial Benefit Reform Using Administrative Data

This paper examines the effects of substantial changes in paid parental leave on child development and socio-economic development gaps. We analyse a German reform that replaced a means-tested with an earnings-related benefit scheme. Higher-income households benefited relatively more from the reform than low-income households. The reform expanded paid leave in the first year, while it removed paid leave ...

The Fayherriot Command for Estimating Small-Area Indicators

We introduce a command, fayherriot, that implements the Fay–Herriot model (Fay and Herriot, 1979, Journal of the American Statistical Association 74: 269–277), which is a small-area estimation technique (Rao and Molina, 2015, Small Area Estimation), in Stata. The Fay–Herriot model improves the precision of area-level direct estimates using area-level covariates. It belongs to the class of linear mixed ...

Industry Conversion Tables for German Firm-Level Data