External refereed essays

Life Cycle Environmental Impacts of Electricity from Fossil Fuels in Chile over a Ten-Year Period

This study uses life cycle assessment to evaluate the environmental impacts of electricity generated from fossil fuels in Chile over a ten–year period, from 2004 to 2014. The focus on fossil fuels is highly relevant for Chile because around 60% of electricity currently comes from natural gas, coal and oil. The impacts are first considered at the level of individual technologies, followed by the evaluation ...

Panel Survey Recruitment With or Without Interviewers? Implications for Nonresponse, Panel Consent, and Total Recruitment Bias

Joint Roles of Parenting and Nutritional Status for Child Development: Evidence from Rural Cambodia

Substantial work has demonstrated that early nutrition and home environments, including the degree to which children receive cognitive stimulation and emotional support from parents, play a profound role in influencing early childhood development. Yet, less work has documented the joint influences of parenting and nutritional status on child development among children in the preschool years living ...

Top Incomes in Germany, 1871-2014

This study provides new evidence on top income shares in Germany from industrialization to the present. Income concentration was high in the nineteenth century, dropped sharply after WWI and during the hyperinflation years of the 1920s, then increased rapidly throughout the Nazi period beginning in the 1930s. Following the end of WWII, German top income shares returned to 1920s levels. The German pattern ...

Declining Teen Employment: Minimum Wages, Returns to Schooling, and Immigration

We explore the decline in teen employment in the United States since 2000, which was sharpest for 16–17 year-olds. We consider three main explanatory factors: a rising minimum wage that could reduce employment opportunities for teens and potentially increase the value of investing in schooling; rising returns to schooling; and increasing competition from immigrants that, like the minimum wage, could ...

How to Liberalise Rail Passenger Services? Lessons from European Experience

This paper studies the experience of Europe's three most liberalised railways - Sweden, Germany and Britain - in opening-up rail passenger services to competition by means of competitive tendering, and seeks to draw lessons for countries that are just starting the process, such as France. It also comments on experience of competition in the market in these and other countries (this form of competition ...

Bootstrapping Impulse Responses of Structural Vector Autoregressive Models Identified through GARCH

Different bootstrap methods and estimation techniques for inference for structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models identified by generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) are reviewed and compared in a Monte Carlo study. The bootstrap methods considered are a wild bootstrap, a moving blocks bootstrap and a GARCH residual based bootstrap. Estimation is done by Gaussian maximum ...

Predictors of Refugee Adjustment: The Importance of Cognitive Skills and Personality

In light of the recent worldwide migration of refugees, determinants of a more or less successful integration are heavily discussed, but reliable empirical investigations are scarce and have often focused on sociodemographic factors. In the present study, we explore the role of several individual characteristics for refugee adjustment in the areas of (a) institutional, (b) interpersonal and (c) intrapersonal ...

Medical Malpractice Appeals in a Civil Law System: Do Administrative and Civil Courts Award Noneconomic Damages Differently?

How do courts award noneconomic damages? Does it matter if the state is the defendant? This article addresses these questions in the context of medical malpractice appeals to the Spanish Supreme Court. Moreover, this study provides the first empirical analysis of the quantification of noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases in administrative courts, where the state is the defendant, and in ...

A Novel Framework for Development and Optimisation of Future Electricity Scenarios with High Penetration of Renewables and Storage

Although electricity supply is still dominated by fossil fuels, it is expected that renewable sources will have a much larger contribution in the future due to the need to mitigate climate change. Therefore, this paper presents a new framework for developing Future Electricity Scenarios (FuturES) with high penetration of renewables. A multi-period linear programming model has been created for power-system ...

The Rising Longevity Gap by Lifetime Earnings: Distributional Implications for the Pension System

This study uses German social security records to provide novel evidence on cohort trends of the heterogeneity in life expectancy by lifetime earnings and, additionally, documents the distributional implications of this earnings-related heterogeneity. We find a strong association between lifetime earnings and life expectancy at age 65 and show that the longevity gap is increasing across cohorts. For ...

Measuring Attitudes Toward Distributive Justice: The Basic Social Justice Orientations Scale

Previous research on social inequalities relied primarily on objective indicators. According to recent studies, however, subjective indicators that reflect a person’s perceptions and evaluations of inequalities are also relevant. Such evaluations depend on an individual’s normative orientation, so respective attitudes toward distributive justice need to be accounted for appropriately. This article ...

Life Expectancy and Parental Education

This study analyses the relationship between life expectancy and parental education. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and survival analysis models, we show that maternal education is related to children's life expectancy – even after controlling for children's own level of education. This applies equally to daughters and sons as well as to children's further life expectancies ...

The Impact of Competition Policy Enforcement on the Functioning of EU Energy Markets

We investigate the impact of competition policy enforcement on the functioning of European energy markets while accounting for sectoral regulation. For this purpose, we compile a novel dataset on the European Commission's (EC) and EU member states' competition policy decisions in energy markets and combine it with firm- and sector-level data. We find that EC merger policy has a positive and robust ...

Timing of Communication

Using an experiment, we demonstrate that a communication regime in which a worker communicates about his intended effort is less effective in: (i) soliciting truthful information; and (ii) motivating effort than one in which he communicates about his past effort. Our experiment uses a real-effort task, which additionally allows us to demonstrate the effects of communication on effort over time. We ...

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The Effects of Second-Generation Rent Control on Land Values

Second generation rent control seeks to prevent negative quantity effects by exempting newly built units. The artificially lowered rent in the controlled segment makes renting attractive for households that would otherwise not have rented in the market, replacing households with higher willingness to pay for housing. These households bid up prices in the free market segment, giving rise to an opposite-sign ...

One Size Does Not Fit All: Alternative Values-Based ‘Recipes’ for Life Satisfaction

In most previous research on the determinants of Life Satisfaction (LS), there has been an implicit assumption that ‘one size fits all’. That is, it has usually been assumed that the covariates of LS are the same for everyone, or at least everyone in the Western world. In this paper, using data from the long-running German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-), we estimate statistical models to assess the effects ...

Austerity, Inequality, and Private Debt Overhang

Using panel data of 17 OECD countries for 1980–2011, we find that the distributional consequences of fiscal consolidations depend significantly on the level of private indebtedness. Austerity leads to a strong and persistent increase in income inequality during periods of private debt overhang. In contrast, there are no discernible distributional effects when private debt is low. This result is robust ...

A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of Marijuana Policies and Youth Marijuana Use

Background: Marijuana use carries risks for adolescents’ well-being, making it essential to evaluate effects of recent marijuana policies.Objectives: This study sought to delineate associations between state-level shifts in decriminalization and medical marijuana laws (MML) and adolescent marijuana use.Methods: Using data on 861,082 adolescents (14 to 18+ years; 51% female) drawn from 1999 to 2015 ...