External refereed essays

Intended College Enrollment and Educational Inequality: Do Students Lack Information?

Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented in universities. In this regard, the economics literature has focused on the role of financial constraints as a cause of these observed differences in educational choices. Our knowledge of potential effects of other constraints regarding university education is ...

Car Ownership and Hedonic Adaptation

Using panel data from the UK, we study the long-term effect of purchase decisions of automobiles on individuals’ happiness. We find a significant and sizable decrease in individual happiness in the years after a car purchase. We develop a model of hedonic adaptation that can explain these results. Applying the model to the data indicates a strong degree of habit persistence of around 80%, and that ...

Structural Vector Autoregressions with Smooth Transition in Variances

In structural vector autoregressive analysis identifying the shocks of interest via heteroskedasticity has become a standard tool. Unfortunately, the approaches currently used for modeling heteroskedasticity all have drawbacks. For instance, assuming known dates for variance changes is often unrealistic while more flexible models based on GARCH or Markov switching residuals are difficult to handle ...

Reduced Cross-Border Lending and Financing Costs of SMEs

This paper investigates how the withdrawal of banks from their cross-border business impacted the borrowing costs of European firms since the crisis. We combine aggregate information on total and cross-border credit with firm-level survey data for the period 2010 - 2014. We find that the decline in cross-border lending led to a deterioration in the borrowingconditions of small firms. In countries with ...

Designing a Model for the Global Energy System - GENeSYS-MOD: An Application of the Open-Source Energy Modeling System (OSeMOSYS)

This paper develops a path for the global energy system up to 2050, presenting a new application of the open-source energy modeling system (OSeMOSYS) to the community. It allows quite disaggregate energy and emission analysis: Global Energy System Model (GENeSYS-MOD) uses a system of linear equations of the energy system to search for lowest-cost solutions for a secure energy supply, given externally ...

Does Index Insurance Help Households Recover from Disaster? Evidence from IBLI Mongolia

This article investigates the impact of indemnity payments from index insurance on the asset recovery of households following a catastrophic weather disaster. Our focus is on the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) in Mongolia. We analyze the effect of IBLI indemnity payments after a once-in-50-year winter disaster struck Mongolia over the 2009/10 winter. The analysis is based on three waves of ...

Making Work Pay: Increasing Labour Supply of Secondary Earners in Low Income Families with Children

In-work support through the tax-benefit system has proved to be an effective way of increasing thelabor supply of lone mothers and first earners in couples in a number of OECD countries. At the sametime, these instruments usually create negative employment incentives for secondary earners. This inturn reduces the potential of in-work support to address the joint objectives of higher employmentand lower ...

Germany Must Go Back to Its Low-Carbon Future

In Search of Features that Constitute an "Enriched Environment" in Humans: Associations between Geographical Properties and Brain Structure

Enriched environments elicit brain plasticity in animals. In humans it is unclear which environment is enriching. Living in a city has been associated with increased amygdala activity in a stress paradigm, and being brought up in a city with increased pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) activity. We set out to identify geographical characteristics that constitute an enriched environment affecting ...

14 Years of PID Services at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB): Connected Frameworks, Research Data and Lessons Learned from a National Research Library Perspective

In an ideal research world, any scientific content should be citable and the coherent content, as well as the citation itself, should be persistent. However, today’s scientists do not only produce traditional research papers – they produce comprehensive digital resources and collections. TIB’s mission is to develop a supportive framework for a sustainable access to such digital content – focusing on ...

Decoupling Nominal and Real Rigidities: A Reexamination of the Canonical Model of Price Setting under Menu Costs

We revisit Ball and Romer’s (1990) canonical model of price setting with menu costs that exhibits multiple equilibria. We show that changes to firms’ markups move nominal and real rigidities in opposite directions. Using game-theoretic tools to derive a unique equilibrium, we find that accounting for agents’ endogenous adjustment of price expectations further weakens the link between real and nominal ...

Gender Role Asymmetry and Stock Market Participation: Evidence from Four European Household Surveys

This study investigates the importance of social norms for shaping women's and men's decision to participate in the stock market, aiming to disentangle the different channels playing a role in this decision. Gender role asymmetry is indicated by the country's rank in the gender equality index of the World Economic Forum. Using data from four national household surveys, we find that in Italy – the country ...

Speculative Price Bubbles in Urban Housing Markets: Empirical Evidence from Germany

In the light of the unconventional monetary policies implemented by most large central banks around the world, there is an intense debate about the potential impact on the prices of capital assets. Particularly in Germany, skepticism about the sustainability of the current policy by the European Central Bank is wide spread and concerns about the emergence of a speculative price bubble in the housing ...

FFTrees: A Toolbox to Create, Visualize, and Evaluate Fast-And-Frugal Decision Trees

Fast-and-frugal trees (FFTs) are simple algorithms that facilitate efficient and accurate decisions based on limited information. But despite their successful use in many applied domains, there is no widely available toolbox that allows anyone to easily create, visualize, and evaluate FFTs. We fill this gap by introducing the R package FFTrees. In this paper, we explain how FFTs work, introduce a new ...

CO2 Emission Intensity and Exporting: Evidence from Firm-Level Data

This paper analyses whether exporting firms are less CO2 emission-intensive than non-exporting competitors. It exploits a novel and unique dataset for Germany, a major exporting country. Due to the direct link between CO2 emissions and fuels consumed, we argue that it is necessary to employ a production function framework to consistently analyse CO2 emission intensity. We show that such an approach ...

Arbeitszeiten und Arbeitszeitwünsche: Unterschiede zwischen Mikrozensus und SOEP

Nach Ergebnissen des Mikrozensus hatten im Jahr 2015 gut 2,7 Millionen Erwerbstätigeim Alter von 15 bis 74 Jahren den Wunsch nach zusätzlichen Arbeitsstunden,während 1 Million Erwerbstätige weniger arbeiten wollten. Für dasselbe Berichtsjahrermittelte das DIW Berlin auf Basis des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels knapp 5,3 MillionenErwerbstätige im Alter von 18 bis 64 Jahren mit Wunsch nach einer Erhöhung ...

Market Power and Heterogeneous Pass-Through in German Electricity Retail

We analyze the pass-through of cost changes to retail tariffs in the German electricity market over the 2007–2014 period. We find an average pass-through rate of around 60%. This significantly varies with demand factors: while the pass-through rate to baseline tariffs, where firms have greater market power because customers are less willing to switch, is only 50%, it increases to 70% in the competitive ...

Can Facts Trump Unconditional Trust? Evidence-Based Information Halves the Influence of Physicians' Non-Evidence-Based Cancer Screening Recommendations

Informed decision making in medicine, defined as basing one’s decision on the best current medical evidence, requires both informed physicians and informed patients. In cancer screening, however, studies document that these prerequisites are not yet met. Many physicians do not know or understand the medical evidence behind screening tests, do not adequately counsel (asymptomatic) people on screening, ...

Data Sharing as a Social Dilemma: Influence of the Researcher's Personality

It is widely acknowledged that data sharing has great potential for scientific progress. However, so far making data available has little impact on a researcher’s reputation. Thus, data sharing can be conceptualized as a social dilemma. In the presented study we investigated the influence of the researcher's personality within the social dilemma of data sharing. The theoretical background was the appropriateness ...

How Does Availability of County-Level Healthcare Services Shape Terminal Decline in Well-Being?

Both lifespan psychology and life course sociology highlight that contextual factors influence individual functioning and development. In the current study, we operationalize context as county-level care services in inpatient and outpatient facilities(e.g., number of care facilities, privacy in facilities) and investigate how the care context shapes well-being in the last years of life. To do so, we ...