External refereed essays

Collusion through Joint R&D: An Empirical Assessment

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We show that a sufficient condition for identifying collusive behavior is a decline in the market share of RJV-participating firms. Using information from the U.S. National Cooperation Research Act, we estimate a market share equation correcting for the endogeneity of RJV participation and R&D expenditures. We find robust ...

Competition Policy and Productivity Growth: An Empirical Assessment

This paper estimates the impact of competition policy on total factor productivity (TFP) growth for 22 industries in 12 OECD countries over 1995-2005. We find a positive and significanteffect of competition policy as measured by newly created indexes. We provide results based on instrumental variables estimators and heterogeneous effects to support the causal nature of the established link. The effect ...

Early Childhood Education Activities and Care Arrangements of Disadvantaged Children in Germany

We examine how children aged zero to 6 years with migration background and those who live with lone parents, or on low income or social assistance differ from other less disadvantaged groups in their use of formal ECEC services and non-formal education activities. Previous studies have shown that attendance rates are lower for children in some of these groups, who might benefit disproportionately from ...

SHARELIFE - One Century of Life Histories in Europe

Welfare state interventions shape our life courses in almost all of their multiply linked domains. In this introduction, we sketch how cross-nationally comparative retrospective data can be fruitfully employed to better understand these links and the long-run effects of the welfare state at the same time. We briefly introduce SHARE, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, and SHARELIFE, ...

Spillover Effects of Maternal Education on Child's Health and Health Behavior

This study investigates the effects of maternal education on child's health and health behavior. We draw on a rich German panel data set containing information about three generations. This allows instrumenting maternal education by the number of her siblings while conditioning on grandparental characteristics. The instrumental variables approach has not yet been used in the intergenerational context ...

Distributional Effects of Energy Transition: Impacts of Renewable Electricity Support in Germany

The discussion of the support for renewable energy must consider the distributional impact of cost allocation. The public is sensitive to social imbalances caused by rising power prices that might jeopardize the acceptance of energy transformation. By the end of 2012 about 19 percent of German power is produced with renewables other than hydropower. As a result, German consumers will pay for global ...

Evaluating Continuous Training Programmes by Using the Generalized Propensity Score

The paper assesses the heterogeneity of treatment effects arising from variation in the duration of training. We use German administrative data that have the extraordinary feature that the amount of treatment varies continuously from 10 days to 395 days (i.e. 13 months). This feature allows us to estimate a continuous dose-response function that relates each value of the dose, i.e. days of training, ...

Household Survey Data for Research on Well-Being and Behavior in Central Asia

This paper summarizes the micro-level survey evidence from Central Asia generated and analyzed in the period 1992-2012. We provide an exhaustive overview over all accessible individual and household-level surveys undertaken inKazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - and of all academic papers published using these datasets. We argue that Central Asia is a fascinating region ...

In-Sample and Out-of-Sample Prediction of Stock Market Bubbles: Cross-Sectional Evidence

We evaluate the informational content of ex post and ex ante predictors of periods of excess stock (market) valuation. For a cross-section comprising 10 OECD economies and a time span of at most 40 years, alternative binary chronologies of price bubble periods are determined. Using these chronologies as dependent processes and a set of macroeconomic and financial variables as explanatory variables, ...

An Early Warning System to Predict Speculative House Price Bubbles

In this paper, the authors construct country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1-2009:Q4. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental approach and a filter approach. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one which provides the highest concordance between these two techniques. In addition, the authors suggest ...

Forecasting Life Satisfaction across Adulthood: Benefits of Seeing a Dark Future?

Anticipating one's future self is a unique human capacity that contributes importantly to adaptation and health throughout adulthood and old age. Using the adult life span sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, age range 18 to 96 years), we investigated age-differential stability, correlates, and outcomes of accuracy in anticipation of future life satisfaction across ...

Check Verbraucherpolitik und Verbraucherbeteiligung: Empfehlungen für eine evidenzbasierte Verbraucherpolitik

The paper discusses the opportunities for an empirically grounded decision support system as an instrument for independent and scientifically based consumer policy consulting. To date, consumer policy is dominated by the information paradigm and the leitbild of the rational, sovereign and information-seeking consumer. Yet, both everyday practice and research in behavioural economics show that this ...

Individual Differences in Social Comparison and Its Consequences for Life Satisfaction: Introducing a Short Scale of the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure

Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency to compare one's own opinions and abilities with those of other people, raising the question of whether social comparisons are psychological dispositions. To test the empirical validity of this proposition, Gibbons and Buunk (1999) created an instrument, the Iowa-Netherlands Comparison Orientation Measure (INCOM), that measures ...

Intertemporal Labor Supply and Involuntary Unemployment

We estimate a model of intertemporal male labor supply behavior which explicitly accounts for the effect of income taxation and the transfer system. Moreover, we model the demand-side driven rationing risk that prevents agents from choosing the optimal labor supply state. Our results show that elasticities derived in an unconstrained pure choice model are significantly higher compared to a model with ...

Are Couples with Young Children More Likely to Split up When the Mother Is the Main or an Equal Earner?

This study examines how a mother being the main or an equal earner impacts the relationship stability of heterosexual couple parents, using the UK's Millennium Cohort Survey. Various theories alternatively predict that such couples experience a higher or lower risk of divorce than male-breadwinner couples. Alternatively the characteristics of these couples may predispose them to relatively higher or ...

Validating Abbreviated Measures of Effort-Reward Imbalance at Work in European Cohort Studies: The IPD-Work Consortium

Cohort Profile: The Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II)

Partnership Longevity and Personality Congruence in Couples

Evidence of assortative mating according to personality was reported in a previous SOEP-based study (Rammstedt & Schupp, 2008). Based on population representative data of almost 7000 couples, high levels of congruence between spouses were found, which increased with marriage duration. Almost 5000 of these couples were tracked over a five-year period with personality assessed at the beginning and end ...

Current Account Imbalances in the Euro Area: Does Catching up Explain the Development?

In the debate on global imbalances, the euro area countries received inreasing attention since the outbreak of the financial crisis. While the current account is on balance for the entire area, divergences between individual member states have increased since the introduction of the common currency and are part of the excessive imbalances procedure. This paper explores the determinants of the imbalances ...

Need for Conclusive Evidence that Positive and Negative Reciprocity Are Unrelated