External refereed essays

Reasonable Sample Sizes for Convergence to Normality

The central limit theorem says that, provided an estimator fulfills certain weak conditions, then, for reasonable sample sizes, the sampling distribution of the estimator converges to normality. We propose a procedure to find out what a “reasonably large sample size” is. The procedure is based on the properties of Gini's mean difference decomposition. We show the results of implementations of the procedure ...

Opening the Black Box of Energy Modelling: Strategies and Lessons Learned

The global energy system is undergoing a major transition, and in energy planning and decision-making across governments, industry and academia, models play a crucial role. Because of their policy relevance and contested nature, the transparency and open availability of energy models and data are of particular importance. Here we provide a practical how-to guide based on the collective experience of ...

Is It the Family or the Neighborhood? Evidence from Sibling and Neighbor Correlations in Youth Education and Health

In this paper, we present sibling and neighbor correlations in school grades and cognitive skills, as well as indicators of physical and mental health, for a sample of German adolescents. In a first step, we estimate sibling correlations and find a substantial influence of shared family and community background on all outcomes. To further disentangle the influence of family background and neighborhood, ...

The Reciprocal Relationship between Material Factors and Health in the Life Course: Evidence from SHARE and ELSA

The widely established health differences between people with greater economic resources and those with fewer resources can be attributed to both social causation (material factors affecting health) and health selection (health affecting material wealth). Each of these pathways may have different intensities at different ages, because the sensitivity of health to a lack of material wealth and the degree ...

Power-To-Heat for Renewable Energy Integration: a Review of Technologies, Modeling Approaches, and Flexibility Potentials

A flexible coupling of power and heat sectors can contribute to both renewable energy integration and decarbonization. We present a literature review of model-based analyses in this field, focusing on residential heating. We compare geographical and temporal research scopes and identify state-of-the-art analytical model formulations, particularly considering heat pumps and thermal storage. While numerical ...

Historical Trends in Modifiable Indicators of Cardiovascular Health and Self-Rated Health among Older Adults: Cohort Differences over 20 Years between the Berlin Aging Study (Base) and the Berlin Aging Study II (Base-II)

BackgroundThe last decades have seen great advances in the understanding, treatment, and prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Although mortality rates due to CVD have declined significantly in the last decades, the burden of CVD is still high, particularly in older adults. This raises the question whether contemporary populations of older adults are experiencing better or worse objective as ...

Wind Electricity Subsidies — a Windfall for Landowners? Evidence from a Feed-In Tariff in Germany

Subsidies for renewable energy sources are increasing around the globe and amounted to more than 100 billion euro in 2013. This study aims to answer whether the subsidies only ensure that green electricity plants are profitable or whether other market participant – as, for example, landowners – benefit from the subsidy in the form of windfall gains as well. To identify the causal effect of the subsidies, ...

Levels of and Changes in Life Satisfaction Predict Mortality Hazards: Disentangling the Role of Physical Health, Perceived Control, and Social Orientation

It is well documented that well-being typically evinces precipitous decrements at the end of life. However, research has primarily taken a postdictive approach by knowing the outcome (date of death) and aligning, in retrospect, how well-being has changed for people with documented death events. In the present study, we made use of a predictive approach by examining whether and how levels of and changes ...

Local and Spatial Cointegration in the Wage Curve – a Spatial Panel Analysis for German Regions

The wage curve introduced by Blanchflower and Oswald (1990, 1994b) postulates a negative correlation between wages and unemployment. Empirical studies use different channels for a theoretical underpinning the relationship. Panel data models mostly draw on bargaining power or the efficiency wage hypothesis. Spatial econometric approaches can be rationalized by monopsonistic competition. However, the ...

Finding the Right Yardstick: Regulation of Electricity Networks under Heterogeneous Environments

Revenue cap regulation is often combined with systematic benchmarking to reveal the managerial inefficiencies when regulating natural monopolies. One example is the European energy sector, where benchmarking is based on actual cost data, which are influenced by managerial inefficiency as well as operational heterogeneity. This paper demonstrates how a conditional nonparametric method, which allows ...

Validation of the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire Short Scale (NARQ-S) in Convenience and Representative Samples

Due to increased empirical interest in narcissism across the social sciences, there is a need for inventories that can be administered quickly while also reliably measuring both the agentic and antagonistic aspects of grandiose narcissism. In this study, we sought to validate the factor structure, provide representative descriptive data and reliability estimates, assess the reliability across the trait ...

The Effect of Increasing Education Efficiency on University Enrollment: Evidence from Administrative Data and an Unusual Schooling Reform in Germany

We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling on university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time. Based on a difference-in-differences approach and using administrative ...

Simulating Climate and Energy Policy with Agent-Based Modelling: the Energy Modelling Laboratory (Emlab)

We present an approach to simulate climate and energy policy for the EU, using a flexible and modular agent-based modelling approach and a toolbox, called the Energy Modelling Laboratory (EMLab). The paper shortly reviews core challenges and approaches for modelling climate and energy policy in light of the energy transition. Afterwards, we present an agent-based model of investment in power generation ...

R&D Investments and Corporate Cash Holdings

This paper presents evidence about how research and development (R&D) expenditures affect corporate cash holdings in European country groups that differ in their innovation capacity. In theory, one can expect intangible investments such as R&D to result in higher cash stocks than fixed investments, particularly because intangible capital is less suitable as collateral for obtaining external funds. ...

Capital Taxation and Government Debt Policy with Public Discounting

This paper characterizes capital taxation and public debt policy in a quantitative macroeconomic model with an impatient government and uncertainty. The government has access to linear taxes on capital and labor, and to non-state-contingent bonds. Government impatience generates positive and empirically realistic long-run levels of both capital taxes and public debt. Prior predictive analysis shows ...

Environmental Factors in Frontier Estimation – a Monte Carlo Analysis

We compare three recently developed frontier estimators, namely the conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005; 2007b), the latent class SFA (Greene, 2005; Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004), and the StoNEZD approach (Johnson and Kuosmanen, 2011) by means of Monte Carlo simulation. We focus on their ability to identify production frontiers and efficiency rankings in the presence of environmental factors. Our simulations ...

Comparing Observed and Unobserved Components of Childhood: Evidence From Finnish Register Data on Midlife Mortality From Siblings and Their Parents

In this study, we argue that the long arm of childhood that determines adult mortality should be thought of as comprising an observed part and its unobserved counterpart, reflecting the observed socioeconomic position of individuals and their parents and unobserved factors shared within a family. Our estimates of the observed and unobserved parts of the long arm of childhood are based on family-level ...

How to Measure and Proxy Permanent Income: Evidence from Germany and the U.S.

Permanent income (PI) is an enduring concept in the social sciences and is highly relevant to the study of inequality. Nevertheless, there has been insufficient progress in measuring PI. We calculate a novel measure of PI with the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Advancing beyond prior approaches, we define PI as the logged average of 20+ years of post-tax ...

Grenzen der Technologieneutralität: Infrastrukturförderung als notwendiger Pull für den Übergang zur Elektromobilität

Effectiveness of Early Retirement Disincentives: Individual Welfare, Distributional and Fiscal Implications

In aging societies, information on how to reform pension systems is essential to policy makers. This study scrutinizes effects of early retirement disincentives on retirement behavior, individual welfare, pensions and public budget. We employ administrative pension data and a detailed model of the German tax and social security system to estimate a structural dynamic retirement model. We find that ...