External refereed essays

Verkehrssicherheit und Zahlungsbereitschaft - ein Überblick zum Stand der Forschung

Familien in Deutschland - FiD

Chinese Renewable Energy Technology Exports: The Role of Policy, Innovation and Markets

Chinese companies have become major technology producers, with the largest shares of their output exported. This paper examines the development of solar PV and wind energy technology component (WETC) exports from China and the competitive position of the country‘s renewable energy industry. We also describe the government’s renewable energy policy and its success in renewable electricity generation ...

Parents Transmit Happiness along with Associated Values and Behaviors to Their Children: A Lifelong Happiness Dividend?

There are strong two-way links between parent and child happiness (life satisfaction), even for ‘children’ who have grown up, moved to their own home and partnered themselves. German panel evidence shows that transmission of (un)happiness from parents to children is partly due to transmission of values and behaviors known to be associated with happiness (Headey et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci 107(42):17922–17926, ...

Noise Expectations and House Prices: The Reaction of Property Prices to an Airport Expansion

We examine the effects of an airport expansion on the prices of houses and apartments located under the planned flight paths. We focus on the role of expectations of aircraft noise during the expansion of Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport. The publication of the flight paths can be seen as an exogenous event. It provides local residents and potential home buyers with reliable information in ...

Compliance with the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative and Impact on Breastfeeding Rates

Objectives: To examine compliance with the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) as well as evaluate the BFHI and its components on breastfeeding initiation and duration overall and according to maternal education level. . - Design: Quasi-experimental study using data from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) from 2004 to 2008. . - Setting: Birth facilities in Maine. . - Participants: ...

Cross-Border Mergers and Domestic-Firm Wages: Integrating "Spillover Effects" and "Bargaining Effects"

Two literatures exist concerning cross-border merger activity's impact on domestic wages: one focusing on positive spillover effects; the other focusing on negative bargaining effects.Motivated by scarce theoretical scholarship spanning these literatures, we nest both mechanisms in a single conceptual framework. Considering the separate phenomena of inward and outward cross-border merger activity, ...

M&A and R&D: Asymmetric Effects on Acquirers and Targets?

Start-up Competitions as an Instrument of Entrepreneurship Policy: The German Experience

The number of aspiring entrepreneurs in high-tech industries who successfully complete the transition from a nascent start-up project towards an operational new venture is comparatively low in Germany. Since the mid-1990s, policy-makers have initiated numerous start-up competitions (SUCs or business plan competitions) to facilitate this important step in the venture creation process. SUCs have two ...

Myopic Governments and Welfare-Enhancing Debt Limits

This paper studies welfare effects of a soft borrowing constraint on sovereign debt. The constraint is modeled as a proportional fine per unit of debt in excess of a specified reference value, resembling features of the Stability and Growth Pact. Sovereign debt is the result of myopic fiscal policy. It reduces welfare in the absence of lump-sum taxes. The paper shows that the borrowing constraint enhances ...

A Retrospective Merger Analysis in the U.K. Videogame Market

We study the effect of a merger in a dynamic high-technology industry—the videogame market—which is characterized by the frequent introduction of new products. To assess the impact of the merger between two large specialist retailers in the United Kingdom—Game Group PLC and Games Station Limited—we perform a difference-in-differences analysis comparing the price evolution of the merging parties with ...

Regional Entrepreneurial Opportunities in the Biotech Industry: Exploring the Transition from Award-Winning Nascent Entrepreneurs to Real Start-Ups

Knowledge of factors that determine the transition from nascent entrepreneurship to real entrepreneurship is of major importance for policies aiming to stimulate start-ups effectively. Scholars have concentrated mainly on person-specific factors to explain transition probabilities, and environmental characteristics have been relatively neglected. Given that entrepreneurship is a strongly localized ...

Empirical Welfare Analysis with Preference Heterogeneity

We apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of preference heterogeneity, derived from structural labour supply models. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the analysis. They also make the ethical priors, implicit in any interpersonal comparison, more explicit. ...

Unemployment and Portfolio Choice: Does Persistence Matter?

Households can rely on private savings or on public unemployment insurance to hedge against the risk of becoming unemployed. These hedging mechanisms are used differently across countries. In this paper, we use a life cycle model to study the effects of unemployment on the portfolio choice of households in the US and in Germany. We distinguish short- and long-term unemployment and find that, in case ...

Do Wealthier Households Save More? The Impact of the Demographic Factor

This paper investigates the relationship between wealth, ageing and saving behaviour of private households by using pooled cross sections of German consumption survey data. Different components of wealth are distinguished, as their impact on the savings rate is not homogeneous. On average, the effect attributed to real estate dominates the other components of wealth. In addition, the savings rate strongly ...

Does the Economic Integration of China Affect Growth and Inflation in Industrial Countries?

The Chinese economic development affects GDP growth and inflation in the advanced countries. The size of the effects is inferred from multivariate time series and structural econometric methods. In particular, the GVAR and the NiGEM are employed to examine the interdependencies between the business cycles in China and industrial countries, including the US, the euro area and Japan. Evidence is based ...

Dispersed Communication by Central Bank Committees and the Predictability of Monetary Policy Decisions

The paper asks whether members of central bank decision-making committees should communicate with the public in a collegial manner, by conveying the consensus or majority view of the committee, or in an individualistic way, by providing the diversity of views among the committee members. It finds that more active as well as more consistent communication by committee members improves the predictability ...

The Pricing of Sovereign Risk and Contagion during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis

The paper analyses the drivers of sovereign risk for 31 advanced and emerging economies during the European sovereign debt crisis. It shows that a deterioration in countries' fundamentals and fundamentals contagion - a sharp rise in the sensitivity of financial markets to fundamentals - are the main explanations for the rise in sovereign yield spreads and CDS spreads during the crisis, not only for ...

The Perfect Finance Minister: Whom to Appoint as Finance Minister to Balance the Budget

The role and influence of the finance minister within the cabinet are discussed with increasing prominence in the theoretical literature on the political economy of budget deficits. It is generally assumed that the spending ministers can enhance their reputation purely with new or more extensive expenditure programs, whereas it is the sole interest of the finance minister to balance the budget. Using ...

Money Demand and the Role of Monetary Indicators in Forecasting Euro Area Inflation

This paper examines the stability of money demand and the forecasting performances of a broad monetary aggregate (M3), excess liquidity and excess inflation in predicting euro area inflation. The out-of sample forecasting performances are compared to a widely used alternative, the spread of interest rates. The results indicate that the evolution of M3 is still in line with money demand, even when observations ...