External refereed essays

Secondary Use of Personal Data: An Economic Analysis

The European Commission is currently overhauling the most important instrument for the regulation of cross-border flows of personal data, the Data Protection Directive of 1995 (Directive 95/46/EC). Among the most tedious legal issues is the use of personal data for secondary purposes. Such use occurs if data collected for one purpose (such as credit granting) are later used for another purpose (e.g. ...

Wealth Distribution within Couples

While most studies on wealth inequality focus on the inequality between households, this paper examines the distribution of wealth within couples. For this purpose, we make use of unique individual level micro data from the German socio-economic panel study. In married and cohabiting couples men's net worth, on average, is 33,000euros higher than women's. We look at five different sets of factors (demographics, ...

Growing out of the Crisis: Hidden Assets to Greece's Transition to an Innovation Economy

Greece's currently planned institutional reforms will help to get the country going with limited economic growth. With an economy based primarily on tourism, trade, and agriculture, Greece lacks an established competitive industry and an innovation-friendly environment, resulting in a low export ratio given the small size of the country andits long-time EU-membership. Instead, Greece exports only its ...

Outside of the Laboratory: Associations of Working-Memory Performance with Psychological and Physiological Arousal Vary with Age

We investigated age differences in associations among self-reported experiences of tense and energetic arousal, physiological activation indicated by heart rate, and working-memory performance in everyday life. The sample comprised 92 participants aged 14–83 years. Data were collected for 24 hr while participants pursued their normal daily routines. Participants wore an ambulatory biomonitoring system ...

Does Religion Make You Healthier and Longer Lived? Evidence for Germany

Researchers in the US have consistently reported substantial - not just statistically significant - links between religious belief and practice, and improved health and longevity. In this paper we report evidence for Germany, using data from thelong-running, nationally representative German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP 1984). The SOEP dataset includes multiple measures of health, plus many "controls" ...

Divided Government versus Incumbency Externality Effect: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Multiple Voting Decisions

This paper explores the causal relationship between vote outcomes in different elections. We ask: (1) Does the partisan identity of the mayor influence the voter's decision in subsequent town council elections? (2) Do voters condition their vote for the mayor on the result of the last council election? The analysis mainProd. Type: FLPly relies on a regression discontinuity design focusing on close ...

Taxation of Married Couples in Germany and the UK: One-Earner Couples Make the Difference

A large body of literature points out that joint taxation of married couples with full income splitting (Ehegattensplitting) is an important reason for the relatively low labor force participation of married women in Germany. This paper investigates the relative gains of joint taxation for married couples by comparing effective tax burdens for three groups of tax units between Germany and the UK. Using ...

Gross Fixed Capital Formation in the German Empire: An Investment Matrix for 1936

The Infrastructure Implications of the Energy Transformation in Europe until 2050: Lessons from the EMF28 Modeling Exercise

This paper summarizes the approaches to and the implications of bottom-up infrastructure modeling in the framework of the EMF28 model comparison "Europe 2050: The Effects of Technology Choices on EU Climate Policy". It includes models covering all the sectors currently under scrutiny by the European Infrastructure Priorities: Electricity, natural gas, and CO2. Results suggest that some infrastructure ...

Market Driven Power Plant Investment Perspectives in Europe: Climate Policy and Technology Scenarios until 2050 in the Model EMELIE-ESY

In the framework of the Energy Modeling Forum 28, we investigate how climate policy regimes affect market developments under different technology availabilities on the European power markets. We use the partial equilibrium model EMELIE-ESY with focus on electricity markets in order to determine how private investors optimize their generation capacity investment and operation over the horizon 2010 to ...

Co-national and Cross-National Pulls in International Migration to Spain

A large literature documents that migrants are attracted to destinations that already host migrants of their same nationality (co-national pull). Drawing on aggregate migration data from Spain, detailed by country of origin and province of destination for the period 1996-2006, we find that migrants are also attracted to destinations that already host migrants from nationalities that are adjacent to ...

Institutional Rearing Is Associated with Lower General Life Satisfaction in Adulthood: Brief Report

We analyzed whether individuals reared in institutions differ in their general life satisfaction from people raised in their families. The data comprised of 19,210 German adults (51.5% female) aged from 17 to 101 years and were provided by the SOEP, an ongoing, nationally representative longitudinal study in Germany. Compared to people raised in families, individuals reared in institutions reported ...

Generating Skilled Self-Employment in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

We study a government program in Uganda designed to help the poor and unemployed become self-employed artisans, increase incomes, and thus promote social stability. Young adults in Uganda's conflict-affected north were invited to form groups and submit grant proposals for vocational training and business start-up. Funding was randomly assigned among screened and eligible groups. Treatment groups received ...

Nonparametric Measures of Returns to Scale: An Application to German Water Supply

The evaluation of market structures and the quantification of returns to scale in network industries usually are of high interest for researchers and policy makers. Regarding the debate on optimal market structures in German potable water supply, we use a cross-sectional sample of 364 German water utilities observed in 2006 to derive a nonparametric measure of scale elasticity for the water industry. ...

Comparison of Methods for Constructing Joint Confidence Bands for Impulse Response Functions

In vector autoregressive analyses, confidence intervals for individual impulse responses are typically reported in order to indicate the sampling uncertainty in the estimation results. Various methods are reviewed, and a new method for the construction of joint confidence bands, given a prespecified coverage level, for the impulse responses at all horizons considered simultaneously, is proposed. The ...

Long-Term Absenteeism and Moral Hazard: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This paper shows that long-term sick employees are unlikely to be very responsive to moderate monetary labor supply incentives. The paper, theoretically and empirically, evaluates the labor supply effects of cuts in statutory sick pay levels on long-term absenteeism in Germany. Cutting sick pay did not significantly reduce the average incidence and duration of sick leave periods longer than six weeks. ...

Assessing the Effectiveness of Health Care Cost Containment Measures: Evidence from the Market for Rehabilitation Care

This study empirically evaluates the effectiveness of different health care cost containment measures. The measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral hazard and public health expenditures in the market for rehabilitation care. Of the analyzed measures, doubling the daily copayments was clearly the most effective cost containment measure, resulting in a reduction in utilization ...

Development Scenarios for the North and Baltic Seas Grid: A Welfare Economic Analysis

The North and Baltic Seas Grid is one of the largest pan-European infrastructure projects, increasing the potential of harnessing large amounts of renewable energy. This paper addresses the economic implications of different development scenarios of the North and Baltic Seas Grid on individual countries and stakeholders which may raise concerns about the implementation in largely nationally dominated ...

Improving Congestion Management: How to Faciliate the Integration of Renewable Generation in Germany

In this paper the German congestion management regime is analyzed and future congestion management costs are assessed given a higher share of intermittent renewable generation. In this context, cost-based re-dispatching of power plants and technical flexibility through topology optimization are considered as market-based and technical congestion management methods. To replicate the current market regime ...

Using Personal Car Register for Measuring Economic Inequality in Countries with a Large Share of Shadow Economy: Evidence for Latvia

We suggest using information from the state register of personal cars as an alternative indicator of economic inequality in countries with a large share of shadow economy. We illustrate our approach using the Latvian pool of personal cars. Our main finding is that the extent of household economic inequality in Latvia is much larger than officially assumed. According to Eurostat, the officially published ...