External refereed essays

SOEP 2010: The 9th International Socio-Economic Panel User Conference: Editorial

Individual Risk Attitudes and the Composition of Financial Portfolios: Evidence from German Household Portfolios

This paper explores the relationship between the self-declared risk aversion of private investors and their propensity to hold incomplete portfolios of financial assets. The analysis is based on household survey data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) that provides a reliable measure of individual attitudes toward financial risk. Our findings suggest that more risk averse households tend to ...

Assessment of Bottom-up Sectoral and Regional Mitigation Potentials

The greenhouse gas mitigation potential of different economic sectors in three world regions are estimated using a bottom-up approach. These estimates provide updates of the numbers reported in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4). This study is part of a larger project aimed at comparing greenhouse gas mitigation potentials from bottom-up and top-down ...

EU Banks Rating Assignments: Is There Heterogeneity between New and Old Member Countries?

We model EU countries' bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. Our aim is to assess whether "old" and "new" EU countries are rated differently and to determine whether "new" ones areassigned lower ratings, ceteris paribus, than "old" ones. We find that country-specific factors (in the form of heterogeneous intercepts) are a crucial determinant of ratings. ...

Stock Market Integration between Three CEECs, Russia, and the UK

This paper estimates a trivariate VAR-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean model to examine linkages between the stock markets of three Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), specifically the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and both the UK and Russia. The adopted framework allows to analyze interdependence by estimating volatility spillovers, and also contagion by testing for possible shifts in the transmission ...

Global Integration of Central and Eastern European Financial Markets: The Role of Economic Sentiments

This paper examines the importance of different economic sentiments for the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) during the transition process. We first analyze the importance of economic confidence with respect to the CEECs' financial markets. Since the integration of formerly strongly-regulated markets into global markets can also lead to an increase in the dependence of the CEECs' economies ...

Long-Run Cost Functions for Electricity Transmission

Electricity transmission has become the pivotal industry segment for electricity restructuring. Yet, little is known about the shape of transmission cost functions. Reasons for this can be a lack of consensus about the definition of transmission output and the complexitity of the relationship between optimal grid expansion and output expansion. Knowledge of transmission cost functions could help firms ...

The Effect of Student Aid on the Duration of Study

In this paper I evaluate the effect of student aid on the success of academic studies. I focus on two dimensions, the duration of study and the probability of actually graduating with a degree. To determine the impact of financial student aid, I estimate a discrete-time duration model allowing for competing risks to account for different exit states (graduation and dropout) using individual level panel ...

Modeling Storage and Demand Management in Power Distribution Grids

Storage devices and demand control may constitute beneficial tools to optimize electricity generation with a large share of intermittent resources through inter-temporal substitution of load. This paper quantifies the related cost reductions in a simulation model of a simplified stylized medium-voltage grid (10 kV) under uncertain demand and wind output. Benders Decomposition Method is applied to create ...

Do Ethnic Minorities "Stretch" Their Time? UK Household Evidence on Multitasking

This paper investigates the effect of ethnicity on time spent on secondary household production, work and leisure activities employing the 2000 UK Time Use Survey. We find that, unconditionally, white females manage to "stretch" their time the most by almost four additional hours per day and non-white men "stretch" their time the least. The three secondary activities most often combined with other ...

Germany's Next Top Manager: Does Personality Explain the Gender Career Gap?

Many studies have focused on the influence of human capital and other 'objective' factors on career achievement. In our study, we go a step further by also looking at the impact of self-reported personality traits on differences in career chances. For the first time - to our knowledge - we compare managers and other white-collar employees in Germany's private sector and find evidence that personality ...

Entrepreneurship: The Role of Extreme Events

We use aggregate country data as well as individual surveys to uncover, for the first time, the effect of extreme events such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks on entrepreneurial activity. We find that natural disasters and terrorist attacks influence individual perceptions of the rewards to entrepreneurship and, more surprisingly, extreme events affect entrepreneurship rates positively in ...

Long-Term Antecedents and Outcomes of Perceived Control

Perceived control plays an important role in shaping development throughout adulthood and old age. Using data from the adult lifespan sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, covering 25 years of measurement), we explored long-term antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of perceived control and examined if associations differ with age. Targeting correlates and antecedents ...

Strict Nash Networks and Partner Heterogeneity

This paper extends the two-way flow model of network formation initiated by Bala and Goyal (Econometrica 68(5):1181-1230, 2000) by allowing for partner heterogeneity.In our model if a player i forms a link with player j, then she pays a cost of c j and gets benefits of V j . Our main result consists of the characterization of strict Nash networks. We find that the introduction of partner heterogeneity ...

Practicalities of Individual Producer Responsibility under the WEEE Directive: Experiences in Germany

In theory, individual producer responsibility (IPR) creates incentives for "design-for-recycling". Yet in practice, implementing IPR is challenging, particularly if applied to waste electric and electronic equipment. This article discusses different options for implementing IPR schemes and producers' under German WEEE legislation. In addition, practical aspects of a German "return share" brand sampling ...

Electric Vehicles in Imperfect Electricity Markets: The Case of Germany

We use a game-theoretic model to analyze the impacts of a hypothetical fleet of plug-in electric vehicles on the imperfectly competitive German electricity market. Electric vehicles bring both additional demand and additional storage capacity to the market. We determine the effects on prices, welfare, and electricity generation for various cases with different players in charge of vehicle operations. ...

Does War Influence Individual Expectations?

We analyse the effect of mass violent conflict on individual expectations in Northern Uganda. We find that the expectations of the future economic situation are negatively affected by recent conflict while the effect on broadly defined welfare is less robust.

Parental Unemployment and Young People's Extreme Right-Wing Party Affinity: Evidence from Panel Data

The paper investigates the extent to which parental unemployment affects young people's far right-wing party affinity. Cross-sectional estimates from the German Socio-Economic Panel show a positive relationship between growing up with unemployed parents and support for the extreme right. The paper uses differences in parental unemployment experience during childhood across siblings to investigate a ...

Success Factors and Pitfalls of Regional Rail Franchising in Germany

Since 1996 regional rail passenger services in Germany have been subject to franchising. The franchising framework is characterised by a strong decentralisation of responsibilities, a considerable degree of freedom for the responsible authorities regarding contract design, a sound financial basis for awarding contracts, and the free choice of authorities between tendering procedures and direct awarding ...

The Performance of German Water Utilities: A Semi-Parametric Analysis

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article, we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis to determine the utilities' Technical Efficiency (TE) scores based on cross-sectional data from ...