External refereed essays

Inform Me When It Matters: Cost Salience, Energy Consumption, and Efficiency Investments

Using a large-scale natural experiment in staggered billing dates for energy use in Germany and a unique billing dataset for multi-apartment buildings, this paper shows that the month of billing is a significant determinant of heat energy consumption. A large set of residential buildings demand significantly more heat energy annually, when the bill is issued during off-winter months. The paper finds ...

Abkopplung von Russland: Wie weit sich die EU bei Gas und Öl gelöst hat

Mit der Invasion Russlands in die Ukraine im Februar 2022 wurde die Abhängigkeit der Europäischen Union von Energieimporten aus Russland offenbar. Die EU-Kommission reagierte mit dem Programm „REPowerEU“. Es hat zum Ziel, die Abhängigkeit von fossilen Brennstoffen aus Russland zu beenden, die europäische Energieversorgung zu diversifizieren, die Energieeffizienz zu erhöhen und die Energiewende durch ...

Patience and Subnational Differences in Human Capital: Regional Analysis with Facebook Interests

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. This paper shows that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data – Facebook interests – to construct novel regional measures of patience within Italy and the United ...

Age and Cognitive Skills: Use It or Lose It

Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier. If accurate, such age-driven skill losses pose a major threat to the human capital of societies with rapidly aging populations. We estimate actual age-skill profiles from individual changes in literacy and numeracy skills at different ages. We use the unique German longitudinal component of the ...

How Long Will You Be a Widow? Trends and Income Gradient in Widowhood

Understanding widowhood duration is essential for individuals and effective widow support policies, yet widowhood duration remains an understudied topic. In this article, we provide a quantitative estimation of the impact of three primary determinants of expected widowhood duration at age 60 in a unified framework: (1) the degree of overlap between male and female mortality distributions, (2) the spousal ...

Does Perceived Social Cohesion Moderate the Effect of Parental Stressors on Depressive Symptoms? A Longitudinal, Multi-Level Analysis Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background Perceived social cohesion (PSC) is a protective factor for mental health. Yet, evidence on social mechanisms influencing mental health is scarce. Aims We examined the moderating role of PSC between parental stressors and depressive symptoms before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We performed a multilevel moderated linear regression analysis using German Socio-Economic Panel ...

Integrating Renewable Energy Resources in Electricity Distribution Systems—a Firm-Level Efficiency Analysis for Sweden Controlling for Weather Conditions

Sweden is at the forefront of the transition of its energy sector to low-carbon technologies with profound consequences for both energy generation and its distribution. However, the impact of this transition on the performance of Electricity Distribution System Operators (DSOs) has not been thoroughly studied. The article addresses this gap by using a novel approach and detailed georeferenced firm-level, ...

Is Russian Gas Still Needed in the European Union? Model-Based Analysis of Long-Term Scenarios

Aligned with the war in Ukraine, Russia has significantly withheld natural gas exports to Europe since 2021. As there are no EU-wide sanctions on imports of Russian natural gas, the Ukraine transit as well as imports via Turkey and LNG have remained active during 2022–24. However, the Russian-Ukrainian transit agreement expires at the end of 2024 and discussions about new sanctions on natural gas as ...

Let's Switch to the Cloud: Cloud Usage and Its Effect on Labor Productivity

The advent of cloud computing promises to improve the way firms use IT solutions. Firms are expected to replace large and inflexible fixed-cost investments in IT with more targeted, variable spending on cloud solutions. This is also expected to increase firms' productivity by allowing them to quickly adapt their IT infrastructure to their specific needs. We assess this claim using firm-level data provided ...

Social Security and Retirement around the World: Lessons from a Long-Term Collaboration

Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research's International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related ...

Long-Term Effects of Equal Sharing: Evidence from Inheritance Rules for Land

Einkommens- und Vermögensverteilung in Deutschland

This article outlines income and wealth distribution trends in Germany since the 19th century, compared to other Westernindustrialised countries. We first discuss the evolution of aggregate wealth-to-income ratios. We then explore how the concentration ofincome and wealth among the top percentile evolved since the 19th century. For the period after 1990, we analyse the entire distributionsfrom top ...

Grüne Transformation in Deutschland – nur mit echter Energiewende ein ökologischer und ökonomischer Erfolg

In order to achieve climate targets, a comprehensive energy transition is necessary in which nearly all energy comes from renewable sources. The switch to renewable energies is not only of enormous strategic importance in terms of climate protection. In combination with the technological innovations it triggers, renewable energy also creates the scope for climate-neutral growth.

The Reputation Effect of Repeated Green-Bond Issuance and Its Impact on the Cost of Capital

This study explores the effect of frequent green-bond issuance on a firm's financing costs. Using a sample of listed Swedish real estate companies issuing a total of 1074 bonds over the period from 2011 to 2021, difference-in-differences analyses and instrumental variable estimations are applied to identify the causal impact of frequent green-bond vis-à-vis frequent non-green-bond issuance on a firm's ...

Reply on “Comments on ‘Uncertainties in Estimating Production Costs of Future Nuclear Technologies: A Model-Based Analysis of Small Modular Reactors’ [Energy 281 (2023) 128204]”

This reply aims to address the points raised in an analysis provided in the comment entitled “Comments on ‘Uncertainties in estimating production costs of future nuclear technologies: A model-based analysis of small modular reactors’ [Energy 281 (2023) 128204]”, specifically on the used scaling coefficients and cost assumptions.

Plausibilisierung: Eine Handreichung zum Umgang mit inkonsistenten Daten in den Sozialwissenschaften

Die vorliegende Handreichung zeigt, dass in quantitativen, sozialwissenschaftlichen Erhebungen Unplausibilitäten entstehen können, die möglicherweise zu Auswertungsproblemen und Fehlanalysen führen. Ziel der Handreichung ist, die möglichen Probleme zu systematisieren und konkrete Hilfestellungen bei der Identifikation, dem Umgang und der Vermeidung von Unplausibilitäten zu geben. Außerdem werden Dokumentationsempfehlungen ...

Who Opts Out? The Customisation of Marriage in the German Matrimonial Property Regime

This study examines the prevalence of marital contracts across marriage cohorts (1990–2019) in Germany. We further investigate the characteristics of spouses who signed a marital contract. Using cross-sectional data from the German Family Panel (pairfam, 2018/19), we employ complementary log–log and multinomial logistic regression models to predict the prevalence and the type of marital contracts. ...

State of DDI Cloud

As the DDI community continues to grow, an increasing number of repositories are providing their metadata in various DDI formats. However, the current landscape of DDI metadata standards usage is not well understood. Understanding this landscape is crucial as it helps identifying usage patterns, improve interoperability, and guide future developments. To address this research gap, we investigated the ...

Mode Choice Inertia and Shock: Three Months of Almost Fare-Free Public Transport in Germany

This study analyses travellers’ behavioural responses to two temporal measures implemented by the German government: the reduction in public transport prices, making it almost fare-free, and a decrease in fuel taxes to the minimum level permitted by European law. Based on a panel dataset of GPS-tracked trips collected before and during the price intervention from a representative sample of 276 individuals, ...

How Many Brackets Should We Ask for to Derive Adequate Metric Information for Income and Wealth?

This paper investigates how the number of brackets and the choice of upper cutoffs in grouped data affect the metric approximation of income and wealth. The literature currently lacks a definition of what should be considered too few brackets or too-low cut-offs. Using German survey data, we show that more than six (eight) brackets and an upper cut-off at the 95th (97th) percentile are sufficient to ...