External refereed essays

The Greener, the Happier? The Effect of Urban Land Use on Residential Well-Being

We investigate the effect of urban land use on residential well-being in major German cities, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and cross-section data from the European Urban Atlas. We reduce concerns about endogeneity by employing fixed-effects (within) estimators, with individual and city of residence fixed effects, while controlling for a rich set of observables. The results ...

Fiscal Policy Rules, Budget Deficits, and Forecasting Biases

In this paper, we analyze the impact fiscal policy rules have on budget deficits and forecasting biases in official budget outlooks. Persistent budget deficits and over-optimistic budget forecasts have been observed in many countries in the past, especially in the euro area. To prevent such developments from happening in the future, fiscal rules have been revised or implemented with the aim to strengthen ...

Jumps and Stochastic Volatility in Crude Oil Futures Prices Using Conditional Moments of Integrated Volatility

We evaluate alternative models of the volatility of commodity futures prices based on high-frequency intraday data from the crude oil futures markets for the October 2001–December 2012 period. These models are implemented with a simple GMM estimator that matches sample moments of the realized volatility to the corresponding population moments of the integrated volatility. Models incorporating both ...

The Mayor's Advantage: Causal Evidence on Incumbency Effects in German Mayoral Elections

Are We Architects of Our Own Happiness? The Importance of Family Background for Well-Being

This paper analyzes whether individuals have equal opportunity to achieve happiness (or well-being). We estimate sibling correlations and intergenerational correlations in self-reported life satisfaction, satisfaction with household income, job satisfaction, and satisfaction with health. We find high sibling correlations for all measures of well-being. The results suggest that family background explains, ...

Stability and Change in Risk-Taking Propensity across the Adult Life Span

Can risk-taking propensity be thought of as a trait that captures individual differences across domains, measures, and time? Studying stability in risk-taking propensities across the life span can help to answer such questions by uncovering parallel, or divergent, trajectories across domains and measures. We contribute to this effort by using data from respondents aged 18 to 85 in the German Socio-Economic ...

Editorial: From Panel Data to Longitudinal Analytical Designs: A Note on Contemporary Research Based on Data from the Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP)

The Potential of Electromobility in Austria: Evidence from Hybrid Choice Models under the Presence of Unreported Information

This paper analyses the impact of the introduction of electromobility in Austria, focusing specifically on the potential demand for electric vehicles in the automotive market. We estimate discrete choice behavioral mixture models considering latent variables; these allows us to deal with this potential demand as well as to analyze the effect of different attributes of the alternatives over the potential ...

Personal Taxation of Capital Income and the Financial Leverage of Firms

Tax competition for capital has led to a trend where many countries levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. This study analyzes the effect on firm debt usage. We exploit Germany’s 2009 tax reform, which introduced a final withholding tax on interest income with a flat rate 18 percentage points below the unchanged tax rate on ...

Maintaining Perceived Control with Unemployment Facilitates Future Adjustment

Unemployment is a major challenge to individuals' development. An important personal resource to ameliorate the negative impact of unemployment may be perceived control, a general-purpose belief system. Little is known, however, about how perceived control itself changes with the experience of unemployment and what the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of such change in perceived control are ...

Wealth Effects on Job Preferences

Preferences over jobs depend on wages and non-wage aspects. Variation in wealth may change the importance of income as a motivation for working. Higher wealth levels may make good non-wage characteristics relatively more important. This hypothesis is tested empirically using a reduced form search model in which differential job leaving rates identify willingness to pay for non-wage aspects of jobs. ...

Benefits of Coordinating Congestion Management in Electricity Transmission Networks: Theory and Application to Germany

This article analyzes the coordination of congestion management in the electricity grid and identifies the benefits from closer cooperation among Transmission System Operators. Mimicking the German situation with four Transmission System Operators in charge of relieving grid congestion, in particular by redispatch of power plants, we set up a model with shared transmission network constraints. Through ...

Dubious versus Trustworthy Faces: What Difference Does It Make for Tax Compliance?

We find experimental evidence that the decision problem of tax compliance changes if subjects’ declarations are not randomly assessed, but is based on their appearance as captured by pictures of their faces, even if the aggregate audit probability does not change. Some subjects may fear that their picture looks rather dubious, whereas others may believe that their picture looks more trustworthy than ...

Sports and Exercise at Different Ages and Leukocyte Telomere Length in Later Life: Data from the Berlin Aging Study II (Base-II)

Physical activity and sports have repeatedly been reported to be associated with telomere length. We studied the association of different types of sports across different stages of life on relative leukocyte telomere length (rLTL) in advanced age.815 participants (397 men) from the Berlin Aging Study II aged over 61 years were included in the analysis. rLTL was measured by real time PCR and physical ...

Entrepreneurship versus Joblessness: Explaining the Rise in Self-Employment

A large share of the workforce throughout the developing world is self-employed, and this proportion has increased in recent decades. Assessments of this development vary, with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs. Using a long panel dataset from Ghana, we empirically investigate the changing structure of earnings ...

Between the Hammer and the Anvil: The Impact of Economic Sanctions and Oil Prices on Russia's Ruble

Childhood Roots of Financial Literacy

Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in a new survey study and examine their relation to financial literacy, while controlling for established socio-demographic ...

A Generalized Approach for Measuring the Marginal Social Costs of Road Transport in Europe

Social marginal cost pricing requires bottom-up calculations of social marginal costs for all circumstances. Because this is not practicable for policymaking, we suggest an approach to generalize available cost estimates and present results from this for two case studies. We conclude that in the peak period congestion costs are the most important externality of road use, and that accidents, wear and ...

Einkommensnachteile von Müttern im Vergleich zu kinderlosen Frauen in Deutschland

Wie in anderen OECD-Staaten hat auch in Deutschland die Frauen- und Müttererwerbsbeteiligung stark zugenommen, allerdings bestehen noch immer Lohnunterschiede zwischen Männern und Frauen, welche für Frauen mit Kindern am größten ausfallen. Diese werden oft mit Humankapitalentwertung, der Signalwirkung von (langen) Erwerbsunterbrechungen und der möglichen Diskriminierung von Frauen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt ...

Terminal Decline in Well-Being Differs between Residents in East Germany and West Germany

Lifespan research has long been interested in how contexts shape individual development. Using the separation and later reunification of Germany as a kind of natural experiment we examine whether and how living and dying in the former East or West German context has differentially shaped late-life development of well-being. We apply multi-level growth models to annual reports of life satisfaction collected ...