External refereed essays

The Effects of Expanding the Generosity of the Statutory Sickness Insurance System

This article evaluates an expansion of employer-mandated sick leave from 80% to 100% of forgone gross wages in Germany. We employ and compare parametric difference-in-difference (DID), matching DID and mixed approaches. Overall workplace absences increased by at least 10% or 1 day per worker per year. We show that taking partial compliance into account increases coefficient estimates. Further, heterogeneity ...

Analyzing Regional Variation in Health Care Utilization Using (Rich) Household Microdata

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature,our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may contribute to the geographic variation in health care utilization. The raw data suggest that state-level hospitalization ...

A Note on Allowing Negative Energy Prices in a Discretely Constrained MPEC

The Returns to Education for Opportunity Entrepreneurs, Necessity Entrepreneurs, and Paid Employees

We assess the relevance of formal education on the productivity of the self-employed, distinguishing between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to education between these groups due to different levels of control over the use of their human capital. The analysis ...

Personal Bankruptcy Law, Wealth, and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from the Introduction of a "Fresh Start" Policy

A personal bankruptcy law that allows for a "fresh start" not only reduces the individual risk involved in entrepreneurship, but may also lead to higher interest rates charged by creditors. Both effects are less relevant for wealthy potential entrepreneurs. This paper illustrates these effects in a model and tests the hypotheses derived by exploiting the introduction of a "fresh start" policy in Germany ...

Stability and Change in Affective Experience across the Adult Life Span: Analyses with a National Sample from Germany

Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data from a national sample spanning the adult life span, age differences in anger and sadness were explored. The cross-sectional and longitudinal findings consistently suggest that the frequency of anger increases during young adulthood, but then shows a steady decrease until old age. By contrast, the frequency of sadness remains stable over most of adulthood ...

Short-Time Work: The German Answer to the Great Recession

At the height of the economic crisis in mid-2009, the number of Germany's shorttime workers peaked at 1.5 million. Unemployment would otherwise have increased by approximately twice as much as it did. But while short-time work certainly helped to cushion the labour market impact of the crisis in Germany, the authors caution that the country's specific circumstances preclude simple generalizations regarding ...

An Empirical Assessment of the 2004 EU Merger Policy Reform

We evaluate the economic impact of the change in European merger legislation in 2004 and propose a general framework focusing on four different policy dimensions: predictability, decision errors, reversion of anti-competitive rents and deterrence. We find that after the reform, the predictability and the accuracy of decisions have improved. Yet, the policy shift away from prohibitions, which entail ...

Self-Employment and Conflict in Colombia

Many Colombians are confronted with the ongoing conflict that influences their decision making in everyday life, including their behavior in labor markets. This study focuses on the impact of violent conflict on self-employment, enlarging the usual determinants with a set of conflict variables. Our estimation strategy compares three different estimates: one from fixed-effects panel data (OLS-FE), estimates ...

Consent When Linking Survey Data with Administrative Records: The Role of the Interviewer

Linking survey data with administrative records is becoming more common in the social sciences in recent years. Regulatory frameworks require the respondent's consent to this procedure in most cases. Similar to non-response, non-consent may lead to selective samples and could pose a problem when using the combined data for analyses. Thus investigating the selectivity and the determinants of the consent ...

Choices which Change Life Satisfaction: Similar Results for Australia, Britain and Germany

Using data from national socio-economic panel surveys in Australia, Britain and Germany, this paper analyzes the effects of individual preferences and choices on subjective well-being (SWB). It is shown that, in all three countries, preferences and choices relating to life goals/values, partner's personality, hours of work, social participation and healthy lifestyle have substantial and similar effects ...

Does the Box-Cox Transformation Help in Forecasting Macroeconomic Time Series?

The paper investigates whether transforming a time series leads to an improvement in forecasting accuracy. The class of transformations that is considered is the Box-Cox power transformation, which applies to series measured on a ratio scale. We propose a nonparametric approach for estimating the optimal transformation parameter based on the frequency domain estimation of the prediction error variance, ...

Forecasting Contemporaneous Aggregates with Stochastic Aggregation Weights

Many contemporaneously aggregated variables have stochastic aggregation weights. We compare different forecasts for such variables, including univariate forecasts of the aggregate, a multivariate forecast of the aggregate that uses information from the disaggregated components, a forecast which aggregates a multivariate forecast of the disaggregate components and the aggregation weights, and a forecast ...

Linking Concurrent Self-Reports and Retrospective Proxy Reports about the Last Year of Life: A Prevailing Picture of Life Satisfaction Decline

OBJECTIVE: We examined the extent to which retrospective proxy reports of well-being mirror participant self-reports at 12-24 months before death and how proxy reports of well-being change over the last year of life. We also explored the role of sociodemographic, cognitive, and health factors of both participants and proxies in moderating such associations.Method.We used retrospective proxy ratings ...

Endogenous Production Capacity Investment in Natural Gas Market Equilibrium Models

The large-scale natural gas equilibrium model applied in Egging, 2013 combines long-term market equilibria and investments in infrastructure while accounting for market power by certain suppliers. Such models are widely used to simulate market outcomes given different scenarios of demand and supply development, environmental regulations and investment options in natural gas and other resource markets.. ...

Meet the Parents? Family Size and the Geographic Proximity between Adult Children and Older Mothers in Sweden

The aim of this study is to estimate the causal effect of family size on the proximity between older mothers and adult children by using a large administrative data set from Sweden. Our main results show that adult children in Sweden are not constrained by sibship size in choosing where to live: for families with more than one child, sibship size does not affect child-mother proximity. For aging parents, ...

Effizienzanalysen frühkindlicher Bildungs- und Betreuungsprogramme: das Beispiel von Kosten-Nutzen-Analysen

In social science literature there is a wide range of effectiveness studies for early education and care programmes for young children. But these studies usually distinguish the effects of these programmes without considering their costs. This is where efficiency analysis studies in Economics begin. This article presents three fundamental approaches to efficiency analysis before looking in more detail ...

Validating an Ultra-Short Survey Measure of Patience

This study presents results of the validation of an ultra-short survey measure of patience included in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Survey responses predict intertemporal choice behavior in incentive-compatible decisions in a representative sample of the German adult population.

The Effect of Unemployment on the Mental Health of Spouses: Evidence from Plant Closures in Germany

Studies on health effects of unemployment usually neglect spillover effects on spouses. This study specifically investigates the effect of an individual's unemployment on the mental health of their spouse. In order to allow for causal interpretation of the estimates, it focuses on plant closure as entry into unemployment, and combines difference-in-difference and matching based on entropy balancing ...

Effective Taxation of Top Incomes in Germany

We exploit a dataset that includes the individual tax returns of all taxpayers in the top percentile of the income distributionin Germany to pin down the effective income taxation of households with very high incomes. Taking tax base erosion intoaccount, we find that the top percentile of the income distribution pays an effective average tax rate of 30.5% and contributes more than a quarter of total ...