External refereed essays

The Shadow Economy in International Comparison: Options for Economic Policy Derived from an OECD Panel Analysis

Building on new behavioral theories, using a data set of about 450 variables and augmenting the Sala-i-Martin definition of robustness, we find evidence in support of the hypothesis that the standard causes of the shadow economy (SE), taxes, the administrative burden and labor market regulations, are not per se crucial in determining the size of the SE. Many of the robust influences emanate from relatively ...

Shadow Economy, Tax Evasion, and Transfer Fraud: Definition, Measurement, and Data Problems

The paper tries to shed some light on the definition of the shadow economy, in order to separate shadow activities from market activities and household production. A total income concept is applied, which is based on the labor force being engaged in market, shadow and household activities. Based on such a clear concept, tax evasion can be defined and identified in the market sector and is also usually ...

Shadow Economy in High Income Countries - Much Ado about Nothing? Editors' Introduction

Locational Conditions and Firm Performance: Introduction to the Special Issue

Pitfalls of Post-model-selection Testing: Experimental Quantification

Traditional specification testing does not always improve subsequent inference. We demonstrate by means of computer experiments under which circumstances, and how severely, data-driven model selection can destroy the size properties of subsequent parameter tests, if they are used without adjusting for the model-selection step. The investigated models are representative of macroeconometric and microeconometric ...

Incentive Effects of Fiscal Equalization: Has Russian Style Improved?

The effects of intergovernmental fiscal arrangements on variation in regional economic growth are analyzed for Russia, a country with large cross-regional differences and considerable fiscal redistribution. Moreover, fiscal reforms implemented in the first half of the 2000s, which to some extent followed scientific advice, make analysis of this case particularly interesting. We observe that postreform ...

Does Aging Influence Structural Change? Evidence from Panel Data

Our study represents a first attempt to single out the effects of aging on the entire structure of the economy that is approximated by employment shares in different sectors. We find that even after controlling for the effects of other relevant factors - e.g., income per capita, share of trade in GDP, government consumption share in GDP, population size - aging does have a statistically significant ...

The Heckscher-Ohlin Model and the Network Structure of International Trade

This paper estimates for 28 product groups a characteristic parameter that reflects the topological structure of its tradingnetwork. Using these estimates, it describes how the structure of international trade has evolved during the 1980-2000 period. Thereafter, it demonstrates the importance of networks in international trade by explicitlyaccounting for their scaling properties when testing the prediction ...

Benchmarking and Firm Heterogeneity: A Latent Class Analysis for German Electricity Distribution Companies

In January 2009, the German Federal Network Agency introduced incentive regulation for the electricity distribution sector based on results obtained from econometric and nonparametric benchmarking analysis. One main problem for the regulator in assigning the relative efficiency scores is unobserved firm-specific factors such as network and technological differences. Comparing the efficiency of different ...

Gone with the Wind? Electricity Market Prices and Incentives to Invest in Thermal Power Plants under Increasing Wind Energy Supply

The increased wind energy supplied to many electricity markets around the world has to be balanced by reliably ramping units or other complementary measures when wind conditions are low. At the same time wind energy impacts both, the utilization of thermal power plants and the market prices. While the market prices tend to decrease, the impact on the utilization of different plant types is at the outset ...

Participation in Micro Life Insurance and the Use of Other Financial Services in Ghana

This article investigates households' decisions to take up micro life insurance and to use other financial services. It estimates a multivariate probit model based on Ghanaian household survey data. The results suggest a mutually reinforcing relationship between the use of insurance and the use of other formal financial services. Risk-averse households and households who consider themselves more exposed ...

Kinship Institutions and Sex Ratios in India

This article explores the relationship between kinship institutions and sex ratios in India at the turn of the twentieth century. Because kinship rules vary by caste, language, religion, and region, we construct sex ratios by these categories at the district level by using data from the 1901 Census of India for Punjab (North), Bengal (East), and Madras (South). We find that the male-to-female sex ratio ...

Reflections on Implementing EU ETS : Pricing Carbon: The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. A Denny Ellerman ... , Cambridge University Press, New York 2010, 390 pp: Book Review

Forecasting the Fragility of the Banking and Insurance Sectors

Linkages between banks and insurance companies are important when forecasting the fragility of the banking and insurance sectors. We propose a novel empirical framework that allows us to estimate unobserved linkages in panel data sets that contain observed regressors. We find that taking unobserved common factors into account reduces the root mean square forecasts error of firm specific forecasts by ...

Transitions to Employment and Marriage among Young Men in Egypt

We examine in this paper the transition from school to work and the transition to marriage among young men with at least a secondary education in Egypt, with particular attention to how the first transition affects the second. In examining the transition from school to work, we analyze the determinants of the duration of transition to first employment after school completion, as well as the type and ...

Der Gender Pay Gap in Führungspositionen: warum die Humankapitaltheorie zu kurz greift

Quality Distortions in Vertical Relations

This paper examines how delivery tariffs and private quality standards are determined in vertical relations that are subject to asymmetric information. We consider an infinitely repeated game where an upstream firm sells a product to a downstream firm. In each period, the firms negotiate a delivery contract comprising the quality of the good as well as a non-linear tariff. Assuming asymmetric information ...

Economic Gains from Educational Transfers in Kind in Germany

The aim of this paper is to estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from publicly provided education and to analyze their impact on the income distribution and on economic inequality in Germany. Using representative micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and taking into consideration regional and education-specific variation, the overall result is an expected leveling effect ...

Analysing Convergence in Europe Using the Non-linear Single Factor Model

We investigate convergence in European price level, unit labour cost, income and productivity data over the period of 1960-2006 using the non-linear time-varying coefficients factor model proposed by Philips and Sul (2007 Econometrica 75:1771-1855). This approach is extremely flexible in order to model a large number of transition paths to convergence. We find regional clusters in consumer price level ...

Infrastructure, Regulation, Investment and Security of Supply: A Case Study of the Restructured US Natural Gas Market

In this paper, we discuss the relationship between infrastructure regulation and investment in light of the emerging "security of supply" debate. We approach the subjectby surveying the literature of the past two decades, especially examining the interactions among restructuring, regulation, and investment. The empirical section of this paper relies on case studies of the relationship between the regulatory ...