External refereed essays

Reduction in Emergency Department Visits for Children's Asthma, Ear Infections, and Respiratory Infections after the Introduction of State Smoke-Free Legislation

Despite the benefits of smoke-free legislation on adult health, little is known about its impact on children's health. We examined the effects of tobacco control policies on the rate of emergency department (ED) visits for childhood asthma (N = 128,807), ear infections (N = 288,697), and respiratory infections (N = 410,686) using outpatient ED visit data in Massachusetts (2001 − 2010), New Hampshire ...

Children's Opportunities in Germany - An Application Using Multidimensional Measures

Single parents and unmarried couples are increasingly replacing the traditional nuclear family. This paper investigates if the greater variety in living arrangements contributes to increased resource disparities among children in Germany. Children in single parent families are disadvantaged in at least three dimensions decisive for their later achievements: material standard of living, parental education, ...

Food Intake and the Role of Food Self-Provisioning

This article investigates the role of food self-provisioning for the intake of nutrients of households in Mongolia. We analyse nutritional outcomes within and across urban wage employees, rural households with small herds, and pastoralists with large herds. Food self-provisioning significantly affects dietary quality and quantity. Farming food crops improves the nutrient intake. In contrast, animal ...

Lifting the US Crude Oil Export Ban: A Numerical Partial Equilibrium Analysis

The upheaval in global crude oil markets and the boom in shale oil production in North America brought scrutiny on the US export ban for crude oil from 1975. The ban was eventually lifted in early 2016. This paper examines the shifts of global trade flows and strategic refinery investments in a spatial, game-theoretic partial equilibrium model. We consider detailed oil supply chain infrastructure with ...

Quantifying a Century of State Intervention in Rental Housing in Germany

The paper aims at measuring the general state intervention in rental housing market in Germany from 1913 through 2015. Four policy classes are considered: Incentives for social housing, tenant protection, housing rationing, and rent controls. Based on a legislation analysis, for each class an index measuring the degree of regulation is constructed. The indices reflect dramatic increases in regulations ...

The Effect of Involuntary Maternal Job Loss on Children's Behaviour and Non-cognitive Skills

This paper uses propensity score methods to analyse the effect of involuntary maternal job loss on children's non-cognitive skills. My analyses are based on a rich and nationwide random sample, the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) that includes information about maternal job loss and child behaviour and non-cognitive skills, in addition to a rich conditioning set. The results show that maternal ...

Refuting the Cliché of the Distrustful Manager

Although trust is fundamental to social and organizational functioning, the media often portray managers as distrusting, suggesting that distrust of others is a typical personality variable of successful leaders. This study puts the cliché of the distrustful manager to the test. Both self-report data (N = 32,926) and behavioral data (N = 924) from the German Socio-Economic Panel refute this cliché. ...

Equity Premium Prediction: Are Economic and Technical Indicators Unstable?

We show that technical indicators deliver stable economic value in predicting the US equity premium over the out-of-sample period from 1966 to 2014. The results tentatively improve over time, and beat alternatives over a large continuum of sub-periods. In contrast, economic indicators work well only until the 1970s, but lose predictive power thereafter, even when considering the last crisis. Translating ...

Inevitable? Doping Attitudes among Berliners in 2011: The Role of Socialist State Socialisation and Athlete Experience

To design effective and commonly accepted public health policies against performance-enhancing drugs (PED), it is important to understand general population attitudes. This article elicits PED attitudes in the Berlin population and compares response rates of former athletes (N = 496) with those of non-athletes (N = 1686). In addition, exploiting the natural experiment of the division of Germany, by ...

A Welfare Analysis of Electricity Transmission Planning in Germany

We analyze the electricity transmission planning process in Germany (Netzentwicklungsplan), which separates transmission expansion decisions from generation dispatch. We employ an economic modeling approach to analyze two different network planning settings. In the first setting, there is no trade-off between transmission network development and generation dispatch, as is currently the case in Germany. ...

Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure

In this article we argue that the current endeavors to achieve open access in scientific literature require a discussion about innovation in scholarly publishing and research infrastructure. Drawing on path dependence theory and addressing different open access (OA) models and recent political endeavors, we argue that academia is once again running the risk of outsourcing the organization of its c ...

Short- and Long-Term Participation Tax Rates and Their Impact on Labor Supply

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period 1993–2010, we find that recent reforms in Germany increased work incentives at the extensive margin measured by ...

The SOEP Innovation Sample (SOEP IS)

Das Potential von Mikrodaten sozial- und wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Erhebungen und amtlicher Statistiken für die zeithistorische Forschung

The source-critical analysis and use of statistical micro data from official statistical sources and surveys continues to present methodological and conceptual challenges for contemporary historical research as well as for the social, economic, and behavioral sciences themselves. Up to now, historical studies have cited statistical findings essentially as objective facts, with almost no critical examination ...

Using Person-Fit Measures to Assess the Impact of Panel Conditioning on Reliability

Panel conditioning has posed one of the main challenges to panel studies since their inception in the social sciences. Aside from the risk of reactivity to previous interviews, there is reason to expect that cumulative survey experience increases the reliability of data emanating from panel studies relative to cross-sectional surveys. This positive aspect of recurrent interviewing for data quality ...

Bereitstellung von Regelleistung durch Elektrofahrzeuge: Modellrechnungen für Deutschland im Jahr 2035

Sowohl beim Ausbau erneuerbarer Energien als auch im Bereich der Elektromobilität hat sich die Bundesregierung ambitionierte Ziele gesetzt. Im Kontext der Energiewende soll der Anteil fluktuierender erneuerbarer Energien an der Stromerzeugung weiter deutlich steigen. Dies erfordert tendenziell eine erhöhte Vorhaltung von Regelleistung. Gleichzeitig sinkt die Stromerzeugung aus thermischen Kraftwerken, ...

How to Counter Union Power? Equilibrium Mergers in International Oligopoly

We re-examine the common wisdom that cross-border mergers are the most effective merger strategy for firms facing powerful unions. In contrast, we obtain a domestic merger outcome whenever firms are sufficiently heterogeneous (in terms of productive efficiency and product differentiation). A domestic merger unfolds a “wage-unifying” effect which limits the union's ability to extract rents. When products ...

Family Instability and Locus of Control in Adolescence

Investigating the impact of family instability is important as more and more children experience different family changes in many industrialized countries. In this paper we examine the dynamics of family structure, looking at the potential effect of yearly maternal partnership transitions on adolescents’ locus of control. We aim at combining research on family instability with research on non-cognitive ...

Credit Rating Agency Downgrades and the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crises

This paper studies the reaction of the Euro's value against major currencies to sovereign rating announcements from Moody's, S&P and Fitch CRAs during the Eurozone debt crisis in 2010–2012 based on event study methodology combined with GARCH models. We also analyze how the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish government long-term bonds were affected by CRA announcements. Our results reveal ...

The Self-Medication Hypothesis: Evidence from Terrorism and Cigarette Accessibility

We use single equation and system instrumental variable models to explore if individuals smoke during times of stress (the motivation effect) and if they are successful in self-medicating short-term stress (the self-medication effect). Short-term stress is a powerful motivator of smoking, and the decision to smoke could trigger biological feedback that immediately reduces short-term stress. We use ...