External refereed essays

Transmission Investment in the Peruvian Electricity Market: Theory and Applications

This research presents an application of the mechanism in Hogan et al. (2010) (HRV) to promote electricity transmission network expansion in the Peruvian electricity transmission system known as SEIN (Sistema Eléctrico Interconectado Nacional). The HRV mechanism combines the merchant and regulatory approaches to promote investment into transmission grids. This mechanism gives incentives for efficient ...

Sovereign Risk Premiums in the European Government Bond Market

This paper provides a study of bond yield differentials among EU government bonds on the basis of a unique data set of issue spreads in the US and DM (Euro) bond market between 1993 and 2009. Interest differentials between bonds issued by EU countries and Germany or the USA contain risk premiums which increase with fiscal imbalances and depend negatively on the issuer's relative bond market size. The ...

Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?

This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over ...

Anyone up for Helping the Fisherman's Wife? More Solidarity with Accidental Misery than with Man-Made Misery

We experimentally examine the willingness to donate depending on whether "misery" has been randomly generated or self-inflicted by too high demands in bilateral negotiations. Wefind that randomness has a positive influence on the total amount of the donation. In the case of self-inflicted "misery", we observe that the subject who may be perceived to have caused the unfavourable situation receives significantly ...

The Role of the Log Transformation in Forecasting Economic Variables

For forecasting and economic analysis many variables are used in logarithms (logs). In time series analysis, this transformation is often considered to stabilize the variance of a series. We investigate under which conditions taking logs is beneficial for forecasting. Forecasts based on the original series are compared to forecasts based on logs. For a range of economic variables, substantial forecasting ...

Labour Market Integration, Occupational Uncertainties, and Fertility Choices in Germany and the UK

The aim of this paper is to investigate how occupational prospects affect first-birth decisions of men and women. Contrasting the continental conservative German welfare state with the liberal market economy of the UK, the focus of analyses rests on how welfare state alignment affects fertility rationales in the context of either promising or bleak occupational prospects. The results based on data ...

Sparmotive von jungen, mittelalten und älteren Erwachsenen: erste Ergebnisse eines neuen Inventars zur Erfassung lebenslaufbezogener Sparmotive

There is some research on personal reasons for saving money in the economic sciences. However, not much is known about the age differences of saving motives. In this vein, the future time perspective (FTP) is known to play a critical role for motivation across the life span. In this study, we introduce a new Saving Motive Inventory (SMI), which also covers saving goals after retirement. Furthermore, ...

Measuring Regional Inequality by Internet Car Price Advertisements: Evidence for Germany

We suggest to use car sale prices from internet advertisements for measuring economic inequality between and within German regions. Our estimates of regional income levels and Gini indices based on advertisements are highly positively correlated with the official figures.

Distributional Effects of the Child Tax Credit in Poland and Its Potential Reforms

Compliance with the Anti-trafficking Protocol

The Anti-trafficking Protocol reflects the interests of the major countries. Due to the high costs of compliance, countries will strategically select those obligations that will satisfy the major countries most efficiently with lower costs of compliance. Among the three main obligations of the Protocol - prevention, protection and prosecution - we predict that ratification leads to the strongest effect ...

Multi-family Households in a Labour Supply Model: A Calibration Method with Application to Poland

Models of cooperative and noncooperative behaviour opened the household "black box" and allowed for individual treatment of partners in couples. However, labour supply literature has so far largely ignored a broader issue - the distinction of single versus multi-family ("complex") households. We propose a method to account for multi-family household structure by borrowing from recent applications of ...

Assets, Shocks, and Poverty Traps in Rural Mozambique

This paper explores welfare dynamics among households in rural Mozambique. Using household panel data, we test whether an asset-based poverty trap exists. Findings indicate that all rural households converge to one stable equilibrium in the medium term, which is close to the poverty line. This may indicate that households in rural Mozambique are collectively trapped in generalized underdevelopment. ...

A Household Study of Self-Regulation in Children: Intergenerational Links and Maternal Antecedents

Delay of gratification (DoG) and delay discounting (DD) are behavioral measures of self-regulation and impulsivity. Whereas DoG refers to the postponement of gratification, DD involves the devaluation of a reward over time. Previous studies have demonstrated associations between paternal self-control, paternal personality traits, parenting styles, maternal intelligence, and children's self-regulation. ...

Naming and War in Modern Germany

This paper analyzes naming behavior in Germany in the context of rapid social change. It begins with an overview of general developments in naming in Germany over the last one hundred years, based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which supplies us with almost 45,000 datasets. The paper focuses on the periods of World War II and the Cold War since we conclude that general developments ...

Affective and Cardiovascular Responding to Unpleasant Events from Adolescence to Old Age: Complexity of Events Matters

Two studies investigated the overpowering hypothesis as a possible explanation for the currently inconclusive empirical picture on age differences in affective responding to unpleasant events. The overpowering hypothesis predicts that age differences in affective responding are particularly evident in highly resource-demanding situations that overtax older adults' capacities. In Study 1, we used a ...

Measuring Time Use in Surveys: Concordance of Survey and Experience Sampling Measures

It is still unclear to what extent time allocation retrospectively reported in questionnaires reflects people's actual behavior. Addressing this research gap, we analyze the congruence oftime use information assessed through retrospective questionnaires and through experience sampling methodology. Participants completed standard survey questions on time allocation. In addition, a mobile-phone-based ...

Respondent-Driven Sampling

Respondent-driven sampling is a network sampling technique typically employed for hard-to-reach populations (for example, drug users, men who have sex with men, people with HIV). Similarly to snowball sampling, initial seed respondents recruit additional respondents from their network of friends. The recruiting process repeats iteratively, thereby forming long referral chains. Unlike in snowball sampling, ...

Welfare-Related Health Inequality: Does the Choice of Measure Matter?

Using representative microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we show that the welfare measure choice has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. To assess the sensitivity of welfare-related health inequality measures, we combine a unique set of income and wealth measures with different subjective, cardinalized, and (quasi-)objective health measures. ...

Investor Protection and the Value of Shares: Evidence from Statutory Rules Governing Variations of Shareholders' Class Rights in an Emerging Market

This article uses a quasi-experimental framework provided by recent changes in Russian corporate law to study the effect of investor protection on the value of shares. The legal change analyzed involves the empowerment of nonvoting shareholders to veto unfavorable changes to their class rights. We take advantage of the presence of well-defined treatment and control groups and use the voting premium, ...

Precautionary and Entrepreneurial Saving: New Evidence from German Households

Various studies interpret the positive correlation between income risk and wealth as evidence of significant precautionary savings. However, these high estimates emerge from pooling non-entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, without controlling for heterogeneity. This article provides evidence for Germany based on representative panel data that includes private wealth balance sheets. Entrepreneurs, who face ...