External refereed essays

The WBdigital Database: A Digital Repository for the Historical DIW-Wochenbericht, 1928–1968

Economic and social scientists are increasingly interested in historical data, but many relevant sources are still available in analog form, limiting accessibility and research potential. This article introduces the WBdigital database, which aims to improve this situation. The database provides digital access to the DIW Wochenbericht (1928–1968), including its economic texts and time series data covering ...

Change in Body Weight of Older Adults before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Longitudinal Results from the Berlin Aging Study II

ObjectivesChange in body weight during the COVID-19 pandemic as an unintended side effect of lockdown measures has been predominantly reported for younger and middle-aged adults. However, information on older adults for which weight loss is known to result in adverse outcomes, is scarce. In this study we describe the body weight change in older adults before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdown ...

Assessing the Measurement Quality of Justice Evaluations of Earnings in Europe

How individuals perceive the fairness of their pay carries profound implications for individuals and society. Perceptions of pay injustice are linked to a spectrum of negative outcomes, including diminished well-being, poor health, increased stress, and depressive symptoms, alongside various detrimental effects in the work domain. Despite the far-reaching impact of these justice evaluations, validity ...

The Performance of Multiple Imputation in Social Surveys with Missing Data from Planned Missingness and Item Nonresponse

Designs using planned missingness, such as the split questionnaire design, are becoming more and more important in social survey research. To ensure an acceptable questionnaire length, these approaches typically entail large amounts of planned missing data, which can be imputed after data collection. However, social surveys typically also include other types of missingness such as item nonresponse ...

Cumulative Socioeconomic Risk Factors and Infant Temperament

The Non-linear Impact of Risk Tolerance on Entrepreneurial Profit and Business Survival

Entrepreneurs tend to be risk tolerant but is higher risk tolerance always better? In a sample of about 2100 small businesses, we find an inverted U-shaped relation between risk tolerance and profitability. This relationship holds in a simple bilateral regression, and even after controlling for a large set of individual and business characteristics. Apparently, one major transmission goes from risk ...

(Re)Integrating Radioactive Materials and Waste into a Global Sustainable Development Context

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, established in 2015, aim to achieve global sustainability by 2030 through the improvement of environmental, social, and economic parameters. However, unlike earlier concepts such as the Agenda 21 of 1992, the SDGs overlook radioactive waste management and related challenges of radiation itself. First, we investigate the historic consideration ...

Measuring the Dunkelflaute: How (not) to Analyze Variable Renewable Energy Shortage

As variable renewable energy (VRE) sources increasingly gain importance in global energy systems, there is a growing interest in understanding periods of VRE shortage ('Dunkelflauten'). Defining, quantifying, and comparing such shortage events across different renewable generation technologies and locations presents a surprisingly intricate challenge. Various methodological approaches exist in different ...

External Costs of Water Pollution in the Drinking Water Supply Sector

Nitrate pollution from agricultural production is a major threat to water resources worldwide. This study quantifies the consequences of groundwater nitrate pollution for the drinking water supply sector by estimating the effect of groundwater nitrate pollution on the costs of water utilities. In doing so, we contribute to the estimation of the external costs of agricultural nonpoint pollution associated ...

Trajectories of School Absences across Compulsory Schooling and Their Impact on Children’s Academic Achievement: An Analysis Based on Linked Longitudinal Survey and School Administrative Data

Prior research has identified that school absences harm children’s academic achievement. However, this literature is focused on brief periods or single school years and does not consistently account for the dynamic nature of absences across multiple school years. This study examined dynamic trajectories of children’s authorised and unauthorised absences throughout their compulsory school career in ...

Restrictions to Civil Liberties in a Pandemic and Satisfaction with Democracy

In times of crises, democracies face the challenge of balancing effective interventions with civil liberties. This study examines German states’ responses during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the trade-off between civil liberties and public health. Using state-level variation in mobility restrictions, we employ a difference-in-differences design to show that stay-at-home orders ...

Repurposing Natural Gas Pipelines for Hydrogen: Limits and Options from a Case Study in Germany

We investigate the challenges and options for repurposing existing natural gas pipelines for hydrogen transportation. Challenges of re-purposing are mainly related to safety and due to the risk of hydrogen embrittlement of pipeline steels and the smaller molecular size of the gas. From an economic perspective, the lower volumetric energy density of hydrogen compared to natural gas is a challenge. We ...

Crowded-out? Changes in Informal Childcare during the Expansion of Formal Services in Germany

Informal childcare care by grandparents, other relatives or friends is an important source of support in many Western countries, including Germany. Yet the role of this type of care is often overlooked in accounts of social policies supporting families with children, which tend to focus on formal childcare. This article examines whether the large formal childcare expansion occurring in Germany in the ...

The Role of Regulation and Regional Government Quality for High Growth Firms: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

High-growth firms (HGFs) are important for job creation and productivity growth. We investigate the relationship between product and labour market regulations, as well as the quality of regional governments that implement these regulations, and the development of HGFs across European regions. Using data from Eurostat, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Economic ...

Women’s Labour Market Attachment and the Gender Wealth Gap

This article examines the evolution of the gender wealth gap in Germanyduring the first decade of the XXI century. This period is characterized byan increase in labour supply of women and change in occupational structure dueto numerous reforms undertaken by the government. We use the Firpo, Fortin,Lemieux detailed decomposition technique throughout the wealth distribution toidentify the main factors ...

Klimasozialpolitik als Pfeiler der Nachhaltigkeitswende

In der Literatur zum Klimawandel taucht der Sozialstaat kaum auf – und diesgilt auch für die politischen Diskurse. Zur Verkoppelung der Energie- und Klimakrise mit einer Weiterentwicklung des Systems der sozialen Sicherung führen wir den Begriff der Klimasozialpolitik ein, um den sozial unausgewogenen „Weiter-So“-Pfad zu verlassen. Mit Hilfe eines pauschalen Direktzahlungsmechanismus kann ein Instrument ...

Energy Asset Stranding in Resource-Rich Developing Countries and the Just Transition: A Framework to Push Research Frontiers

Climate policy will inevitably lead to the stranding of fossil energy assets such as production and transport assets for coal, oil, and natural gas. Resource-rich developing countries are particularly affected, as they have a higher risk of asset stranding due to strong fossil dependencies and wider societal consequences beyond revenue disruption. However, there is only little academic and political ...

Decommissioning of Commercial Nuclear Power Plants: Insights from a Multiple-Case Study

The decommissioning of nuclear power plants is a complex and lengthy process. But so far, of the 204 already closed reactors, only eleven with more than 100 MW of electrical capacity have been fully decommissioned, while another 200 reactors are expected to reach the end of their operational lifetime in the next two decades. Against this backdrop, this comparative cross-country case study investigates ...

Comparison of the Environmental Impacts of Heating Systems in Chile by Life Cycle Assessment

The present study conducts a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to evaluate the environmental impacts of heating technologies commonly used in Chile based on six environmental indicators: Climate Change (CC), Human Toxicity (HT), Formation of Particulate Matter (PM), Formation of Photochemical Oxidants (PO), Ozone Destruction (OD), and Water Depletion (WD). Due to the extensive length of the territory studied, ...

Patience, Risk-Taking, and Human Capital Investment Across Countries

Patience and risk-taking—two preference components that steer intertemporal decision-making—are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international skill differences, we combine Programme for International Student Assessment tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together ...