External refereed essays

Armut in Deutschland: Ein Vergleich zwischen den beiden Haushaltspanelstudien SOEP und PASS

Die Ergebnisse von Armutsanalysen auf Basis von Befragungsdaten unterliegen statistischen Unsicherheiten und möglichen systematischen Verzerrungen, deren Ursachen sowohl in der Pre-Data-Collection-Phase (z. B. bei der Stichprobenziehung), der Data-Collection-Phase (Unit- bzw. Item-Non-Response), als auch in der Post-Data-Collection-Phase (Gewichtung, Datengenerierung) liegen können. Um diese studienspezifischen ...

Information Asymmetries between Parents and Educators in German Childcare Institutions

Economic theory predicts market failure in the market for early childhood education and care (ECEC) due to information asymmetries. We empirically investigate information asymmetries between parents and ECEC professionals in Germany, making use of a unique extension of the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SEOP). We compare quality perceptions by parents and by professionals across 734 institutions. We detect ...

The Prosociality of Intuitive Decisions Depends on the Status Quo

Previous research came to contradictory conclusion about the prosocial nature of intuitive decisions, as compared to deliberate decisions. This paper proposes the prosociality of the status quo allocation as a determinant of the prosociality of intuitive decisions. I present results from two experiments (N = 1,649) that manipulate time pressure and elicit response times in a binary dictator game. One ...

Welfare Effects of TTIP in a DSGE Model

We analyze the welfare effects of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). Earlier TTIP studies analyze welfare effects in a framework where output and welfare coincide. We believe that the utility function of households, which depends on consumption and employment, is the best criterion for assessing TTIP. We measure the ...

Regression Discontinuity Designs Based on Population Thresholds: Pitfalls and Solutions

In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to measure the effects of these threshold‐based policies on political and economic outcomes. Using evidence ...

Video Data Analysis: A Methodological Frame for a Novel Research Trend

Since the early 2000s, the proliferation of cameras, whether in mobile phones or CCTV, led to a sharp increase in visual recordings of human behavior. This vast pool of data enables new approaches to analyzing situational dynamics. Application is both qualitative and quantitative and ranges widely in fields such as sociology, psychology, criminology, and education. Despite the potential and numerous ...

On the Emissions–Inequality and Emissions–Welfare Trade-Offs in Energy Taxation: Evidence on the German Car Fuels Tax

By using estimates from a Demographically-Scaled Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (DQUAIDS), we investigate how the German car fuels tax changes the private households’ CO2 emissions, living standards, and post-tax income distribution. Our results show that the tax implies a trade-off between the aim to reduce emissions and vertical equity, which refers to the idea that people with a greater ability ...

The Joint Distribution of Net Worth and Pension Wealth in Germany

The research on wealth inequality has generally focused on real and financial assets, while giving little attention to pension wealth: the present value of future pension entitlements from public and company pension schemes. This is surprising given the important role pension plans play in guaranteeing material security and well‐being for a majority of the population, and suggests that they should ...

Distributional Effects of Subsidizing Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Germany

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the income distribution, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme is almost distributionally neutral in terms of standard inequality measures. Two effects offset ...

Inequality-Minimization with a Given Public Budget

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, it can be solved by an interior-point algorithm. If it is quasiconvex, the bisection method can be used. Using artificial and real-world data, we implement ...

Labor Supply Effects of Long-Term Care Reform in Germany

Many informal caregivers are of working age, facing the double burden of providing care and working. Negative labor supply effects can severely reduce the comparative cost advantage of informal over formal care arrangements. When designing long‐term care (LTC) policies, it is crucial to understand the effects not only on health outcomes but also on labor supply behavior of informal caregivers. We evaluate ...

The Valley of Death, the Technology Pork Barrel, and Public Support for Large Demonstration Projects

Moving non-incremental innovations from the pilot scale to full commercial scale raises questions about the need and implementation of public support. Heuristics from the literature put policy makers in a dilemma between addressing a market failure and acknowledging a government failure: incentives for private investments in large scale demonstrations are weak (the valley of death) but the track record ...

Capturing Affective Well-Being in Daily Life with the Day Reconstruction Method: A Refined View on Positive and Negative Affect

In the last years, there has been a shift from traditional measurements of affective well-being to approaches such as the day reconstruction method (DRM). While the traditional approaches often assess trait level differences in well-being, the DRM allows examining affective dynamics in everyday contexts. The latter may ultimately explain why some people feel more happy than others (e.g., because they ...

The Impact of Complex Family Structure on Child Well‐Being: Evidence from Siblings

Evidence from the United Kingdom Millennium Cohort on children at ages 3 and 5 with older siblings addresses the questions of whether those living with both biological parents and only full siblings have better emotional and behavior outcomes than other children, and whether nonfull siblings affect children's outcomes independently of parents' partnership status. Adjusting for measured family circumstances ...

Estimation of Structural Impulse Responses: Short-Run versus Long-Run Identifying Restrictions

There is evidence that estimates of long-run impulse responses of structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models based on long-run identifying restrictions may not be very accurate. This finding suggests that using short-run identifying restrictions may be preferable. We compare structural VAR impulse response estimates based on long-run and short-run identifying restrictions and find that long-run ...

The Dynamic Impact of Macroeconomic News on Long-Term Inflation Expectations

Well-anchored inflation expectations should not react to macroeconomic news. This paper analyzes the dynamics of inflation expectations in a proxy SVAR model, where macro news shocks are identified by their correlation with surprises from macroeconomic news announcements. Our results confirm that macro news shocks have no impact on U.S. long-term inflation expectations in the long run. In the short ...

Social Causation Versus Health Selection in the Life Course: Does Their Relative Importance Differ by Dimension of SES?

A person’s socioeconomic status (SES) can affect health (social causation) and health can affect SES (health selection). The findings for each of these pathways may depend on how SES is measured. We study (1) whether social causation or health selection is more important for overall health inequalities, (2) whether this differs between stages of the life course, and (3) between measures of SES. Using ...

How Does Education Improve Cognitive Skills? Instructional Time versus Timing of Instruction

This paper investigates two mechanisms through which education may affect cognitive skills in adolescence, exploiting a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment to identify causal effects: between 2001 and 2007, years at academic-track high school were reduced by one, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. First, I exploit the variation over time and ...

China's Emissions Trading Takes Steps Towards Big Ambitions

China recently announced its national emissions trading scheme, advancing market-based approaches to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Its evolution over coming years will determine whether it becomes an effective part of China’s portfolio of climate policies.

A Review of Technology and Policy Deep Decarbonization Pathway Options for Making Energy-Intensive Industry Production Consistent with the Paris Agreement