External refereed essays

A Wealth Tax on the Rich to Bring down Public Debt? Revenue and Distributional Effects of a Capital Levy in Germany

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crisis is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the political agenda in Germany. We use survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and estimate the net wealth distribution ...

The Impact of Labour Market Reform Policies on Insiders' and Outsiders' Low-Wage Risk

Taking a cross-national comparative perspective, this study analyses differences in individual determinants of the low-wage risk across institutional settings. It builds on previous research that dealt with the impact of labour market reform measures on the distribution of labour market risks in advanced economies. It is widely held that such reforms have a particularly adverse effect on labour market ...

Responsive Feed-in Tariff Adjustment to Dynamic Technology Development

This paper reviews the adjustments of the feed-in tariffs for new solar photovoltaic (PV) installations in Germany. As PV system prices declined rapidly since 2009, the German government implemented automatic mechanisms to adjust the remuneration level for new installations in response to deployment volumes. This paper develops an analytic model to simulate weekly installations of PV systems of up ...

Business Cycles, Unemployment and Entrepreneurial Entry: Evidence from Germany

We investigate whether people are more willing to become self-employed during boom periods or during recessions and to what extent business cycles and unemployment levels influence entries into entrepreneurship. Our analysis for Germany reveals that there is a positive relationship between unemployment rates and start-up activities. Moreover, new business formation is higher during recessions than ...

Entrepreneurs and Their Impact on Jobs and Economic Growth

Entrepreneurs are a rare species. Even in innovation-driven economies, only 1–2% of the work force starts a business in any given year. Yet entrepreneurs, particularly innovative entrepreneurs, are vital to the competitiveness of the economy. The gains of entrepreneurship are only realized, however, if the business environment is receptive to innovation. In addition, policymakers need to prepare for ...

The Welfare Impact of Parallel Imports: A Structural Approach Applied to the German Market for Oral Anti-Diabetics

We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel dataset containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 649 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of demand, and on the basis of an oligopolistic model of multi-product firms, we then recover the marginal costs ...

The Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: Not Just a Matter of Personality

Why do entrepreneurship rates differ so markedly by gender? Using data from a large representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent personality traits, human capital, and the employment history influence the start-up decision and can explain the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Applying a decomposition analysis, we observe that the higher risk aversion among women explains a large ...

(De)Centralization and Voter Turnout: Theory and Evidence from German Municipalities

A vast academic literature illustrates that voter turnout is affected by the institutional design of elections (e.g., compulsory voting, electoral system, postal or Sunday voting). In this article, we exploit a simple Downsian theoretical framework to argue that the institutional framework of public good provision—and, in particular, the distribution of political and administrative competences across ...

Market Design and Supply Security in Imperfect Power Markets

Supply security in imperfect power markets is modelled under different market designs. In a uniform price auction for electricity with two firms, strategic behaviour may leave firms offering too few capacities and unable to supply all realized demand. Market design that relies on capacity markets increases available generation capacities for sufficiently high capacity prices and consequently decreases ...

Standardisierte Kurzskalen zur Erfassung psychologischer Merkmale in Umfragen

Psychologische Merkmale gewinnen zunehmend an Bedeutung in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Umfrageforschung. Da psychologische Instrumente vielfach einen individualdiagnostischen Entstehungshinter-grund haben, sind sie meist viel zu umfangreich für einen Einsatz in Umfragen. Für solche Erhebungssituationen sind extrem kurze aber auch für die gesamte Bevölkerungsbreite validierte Verfahren angemessener. ...

Die NUBBEK-Ergebnisse: ihre Relevanz aus bildungs- und familienökonomischer Perspektive ; Diskussion zum Schwerpunktthema

Financial Support for Families with Children and Its Trade-Offs: Balancing Redistribution and Parental Work Incentives

Financial support for families with children implies inherent trade-offs some of which are less obvious than others. In the end these trade-offs determine the effectiveness of policy with respect to the material situation of families and employment of their parents. We analyse several kinds of trade-offs involved using a careful selection of potential changes to the system of financial support for ...

Happiness Is Pleasant, or Is It? Implicit Representations of Affect Valence Are Associated with Contra-hedonic Motivation and Mixed Affect in Daily Life

People typically want to feel good. At times, however, they seek to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect. The prevalence of such contrahedonic motivation has been related to simultaneous experiences of positive and negative (i.e., mixed) affect. We investigated the role that implicit mental representations of affect valence may play in this regard in a study with N = 400 ...

Sales at a Loss: Who Benefits?

Pricing and selling strategies in the retail sector are hotly debated in policy circles. This article analyses the impact of sales below cost on the negotiation outcomes in intermediate goods markets. Assuming that consumers have a sufficiently strong preference for one-stop shopping, we model below-cost pricing as the result of a profit-maximising cross-subsidisation strategy of a multi-product retailer. ...

Zur Rolle von Forschungsdatenzentren beim Management von publikationsbezogenen Forschungsdaten: Ergebnisse einer Befragung von wissenschaftlichen Infrastrukturdienstleistern im Bereich der Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften

Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die Ergebnisse einer Analyse zusammengefasst, in der untersucht wurde, ob, und wenn ja welche Services für das Management von publikationsbezogenen Forschungsdaten gegenwärtig bei wissenschaftlichen Infrastrukturdienstleistern in den Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften bestehen. Die Analyse wurde Mithilfe von Desktop-Research sowie einer Online-Befragung, an der sich ...

Regulation of Pharmaceutical Prices: Evidence from a Reference Price Reform in Denmark

Reference price systems for prescription drugs constitute widely adopted cost containment tools. Under these regimes, patients co-pay a fraction of the difference between a drug's pharmacy retail price and a reference price that is set by the government. Reference prices are either externally (based on drug prices in other countries) or internally (based on domestic drug prices) determined. We study ...

Belief Precision and Effort Incentives in Promotion Contests

The career concerns literature predicts that incentives for effort decline as beliefs about ability become more precise (Holmström, 1982, 1999). In contrast, we show that effort can increase with belief precision when agents compete for promotions to better paid jobs that are assigned on the basis of perceived abilities. In this case, an intermediate level of precision provides the strongest incentive ...

Future Public Pensions and Changing Employment Patterns across Birth Cohorts

We analyse the impacts of changing employment patterns and pension reforms on the future level of public pensions across birth cohorts in Germany. The analysis is based on a microsimulation model and a rich data set that combines household survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and process-produced microdata from the German pension insurance. We account for cohort effects in ...

On Distributive Effects of Optimal Regulation for Power Grid Expansion

To date, the distributive implications of incentive regulation on electricity transmission networks have not been explicitly studied in the literature. More specifically, the parameters that a regulator might use to achieve distributive efficiency under price-cap regulation have not yet been identified. To discern these parameters is the motivation for the research presented in this paper. We study ...

Is Sequential Estimation a Suitable Second Best for the Estimation of Hybrid Choice Models?

The simultaneous estimation method has overtaken the sequential approach as the preferred estimation method for hybrid discrete choice models. Notwithstanding, the computational cost of the simultaneous estimation can be prohibitive when models become more involved, and in such cases sequential estimation can still be a potent option. In previous work a theoretical analysis was conducted that led to ...