External refereed essays

Energy Taxes, Reforms and Income Inequality: An Empirical Cross-Country Analysis

Environmentally-motivated taxes on energy products can effectively induce households and firms to take into account the environmental externalities of energy transformation and use. The levy of such taxes is, however, often hampered by public concerns over possible distributional effects. This paper analyses the macroeconomic relationship between taxes on energy products and income inequality. It also ...

Civil Liberties vs. Security: Why Citizens Accept or Reject Digital Security Measures

Fundamental changes to security policy in European democracies raise the question of the acceptance of new security measures. This paper aims to explain why new measures are accepted (or not). It combines three core elements that are typically analysed separately in the literature: individual attitudes (especially trust), social context and cost/benefit balancing. Comparing Germany and the UK, the ...

Short-Run Fuel Price Responses: At the Pump and on the Road

We provide evidence that motorists respond to short-run fluctuations in fuel prices at the gas pump and not on the road. Employing variants of censored panel regression to control for censoring of the dependent variable, we find that the fuel price has a negative impact on the quantity of fuel purchased, but no consistently significant impact on the subsequent distance driven until the next refill. ...

Intangible Investments and International Business Cycles

Intangible capital is an increasingly important factor of production in advanced economies. Governments in Europe and elsewhere promote investment in intangible assets. However, the potential role of intangibles for business cycles and the international transmission of shocks is not well understood. In this paper, we investigate the international business cycle effects of intangible capital. To this ...

Personal Income Tax Progressivity and Output Volatility: Evidence from OECD Countries

This paper investigates empirically the effect of personal income tax progressivity on output volatility using macro data from a sample of OECD countries over the period 1982–2009. Our measure of progressivity is based on the difference between the marginal and the average personal income tax rate for the average production worker. We find supportive empirical evidence for the hypothesis that higher ...

Locus of Control and Mothers' Return to Employment

The Economics of the EU ETS Market Stability Reserve: Introduction

Longitudinal Wealth Data and Multiple Imputation: An Evaluation Study

Statistical analysis in surveys is generally facing missing data. In longitudinal studies for some missing values there might be past or future data points available. The question arises how to successfully transform this advantage into improvedimputation strategies. In a simulation study the authors compare six combinations of cross-sectional and longitudinal imputation strategies for German wealth ...

Think National, Forecast Local: A Case Study of 71 German Urban Housing Markets

In this article, we examine whether the local indicators are able to predict the city-level housing prices and rents better than national indicators. For this purpose, we assess the forecasting ability of 126 indicators and 21 types of forecast combinations using a sample of 71 large German cities. There are several predictors that are especially useful, namely price-to-rent ratios, national-level ...

Offset Credits in the EU ETS: A Quantile Estimation of Firm-Level Transaction Costs

International carbon offset certificates were cheaper than European Union Allowances, although they were substitutes within the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). Thus, firms had a strong incentive to use offset certificates. However, a considerable number of firms did not exhaust their offset quota and, by doing so, seemingly forwent profits. While most literature on emissions trading evaluates ...

Empirics on the Long-Run Effects of Building Energy Codes in the Housing Market

We study the effectiveness of building energy codes, taking a long-run perspective. The focus is on regulation’s impact on energy demand in both high- and low-quality residences, in other words, the diffusion and the entry of “green” buildings in the housing market. We develop a measure for regulation intensity and apply this to a panel-error-correction regression model for energy requirements of a ...

Genetic Variants Linked to Education Predict Longevity

Educational attainment is associated with many health outcomes, including longevity. It is also known to be substantially heritable. Here, we used data from three large genetic epidemiology cohort studies (Generation Scotland, n = ∼17,000; UK Biobank, n = ∼115,000; and the Estonian Biobank, n = ∼6,000) to test whether education-linked genetic variants can predict lifespan length. We did so by using ...

The Informed Consent to Record Linkage in Panel Studies: Optimal Starting Wave, Consent Refusals, and Subsequent Panel Attrition

Social scientists increasingly link survey data with administrative records. However, data protection legislation often requires respondents’ informed consent prior to record linkage. This has confronted research with nontrivial refusal rates in combination with selectivity of the consent decision. In longitudinal surveys, linkage requests may also increase attrition rates in subsequent waves, as many ...

Genome-Wide Analysis Identifies 12 Loci Influencing Human Reproductive Behavior

The genetic architecture of human reproductive behavior—age at first birth (AFB) and number of children ever born (NEB)—has a strong relationship with fitness, human development, infertility and risk of neuropsychiatric disorders. However, very few genetic loci have been identified, and the underlying mechanisms of AFB and NEB are poorly understood. We report a large genome-wide association study of ...

Ehegattenbesteuerung aus wirtschafts- und sozialpolitischer Perspektive: mehr Individualbesteuerung

Kant, das geltende Recht und die Einstellungen der Bürger zu Flüchtlingen und anderen Migranten

Welche Zuwanderer sollten nach Deutschland kommen dürfen? Auf Basis einer repräsentativen Umfrage zeigen wir, dass sich die Meinungen der Befragten mit dem geltenden Recht und seiner philosophischen Begründung durch Kant decken. (1) Sie plädieren trotz erwarteter Nachteile für eine Aufnahme von Flüchtlingen, solange legitime Fluchtgründe bestehen. (2) Zu regulären Migranten überwiegen Nützlichkeitsüberlegungen: ...

Klimaschutzpolitik: Wie kann ein Politikmix gestaltet werden?

Zum Schutz des Klimas ergreift die Politik in Deutschland und Europa eine Vielzahl an Maßnahmen. So wird der europäische Emissionshandel durch zahlreiche Maßnahmen zur Innovations- und Investitionsförderung ergänzt, aber auch durch Informationsbereitstellung und Regulierungsmaßnahmen zur Nutzung neuer Technologien. Dieser Politikmix wirft die Frage auf, welche Politikinstrumente benötigt werden und ...

Zur Bedeutung nationalsozialistischer Statistiken und Statistiker nach dem Krieg: Rolf Wagenführ und der United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS)

After the war, NS-statistics were put to manifold uses. Indeed, the industrial census of 1936 served both as a benchmark for the restrictions on German production imposed by the allied powers and as an indispensable input for the introduction of the planned economy in East Germany. In addition the NS-statisticians involved were also considered indispensable for interpreting and implementing these statistics. ...

European Scenarios of CO2 Infrastructure Investment

Based on a review of the current state of the Carbon Capture, Transport and Storage (CCTS) technology, this paper analyzes the layout and costs of a potential CO2 infrastructure in Europe at the horizon of 2050. We apply the mixed-integer model CCTS-Mod to compute a CCTS infrastructure network for Europe, examining the effects of different CO2 price paths with different regional foci. Scenarios assuming ...

Renewable Energy Support, Negative Prices, and Real-Time Pricing

We analyze the welfare effects of two different renewable support schemes designed to achieve a given target for the share of fluctuating renewable electricity generation: a feed-in premium (FiP), which can induce negative wholesale prices, and a capacity premium (CP), which does not. For doing so we use a stylized economic model that differentiates between real-time and flat-rate pricing and is loosely ...