External refereed essays

On the Sensitivity of Firms' Investment to Cash Flow and Uncertainty

We investigate the analytical and empirical linkages between cash flow, uncertainty, and firms' capital investment behavior. Our empirical approach constructs measures of own- and market-specific uncertainty from firms' daily stock returns and S&P 500 index returns along with a CAPM-based risk measure. Our results indicate that even in the presence of important firm-specific variables, uncertainty ...

Determinanten kindlicher Geduld: Ergebnisse einer Experimentalstudie im Haushaltskontext

Patience as a basis for life success is not just a question of biology and heredity: Rather, the early interaction between parent and child and socialization in early childhood appear to be the "cradle of action" in the area of time preferences as well. In this study, we use an experimental dataset collected in the framework of the longitudinal German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study to investigate ...

The Research Data Center (RDC) of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Eastern Germany on the Brink of Closing the Productivity Gap? Firm Level Evidence from Manufacturing

After 20 years of transition, productivity in Eastern Germany is still considerably below the Western level. We study the development of the East-West productivity gap at the firm level and link it to firms' product policy. Redesigning their product range was a major challenge for Eastern enterprises as they sought their place in the international division of labour. Based on data from manufacturing ...

The Problem of Money Illusion in Economics

Money illusion in economic theory has been an assumption rejected by academic economists for quite some time. However, with the gradual diffusion of behavioural economics based on experimental research this has changed. Now, it has become a respected fact to accept money illusion as a stylized fact of human behaviour. However, it still needs a better understanding why monetary phenomena especially ...

"Marginal Employment" and the Demand for Heterogeneous Labour-Elasticity Estimates from a Multi-Factor Labour Demand Model for Germany

We develop a structural multi-factor labour demand model which distinguishes between eight labour categories including marginal employment, i.e. low-paying jobs with only a few working hours and partially exempted from employee's social security contributions. Using a new panel data set for Germany, the model is estimated both for the number of workers and total working hours. For unskilled and skilled ...

Can Minimum Prices Assure the Quality of Professional Services?

This paper studies the effects of a minimum price fixed by a bureaucratic non-monopolistic professional association on service quality and consumer surplus. It shows that the price set by a Niskanen-type professional association will maximize consumer surplus only if consumers demand the highest possible average quality. If consumers demand services of lesser quality, the association's price will be ...

Collecting Genetic Samples in Population Wide (Panel) Surveys: Feasibility, Nonresponse and Selectivity

Collecting biomarkers as part of general purpose surveys offers scientists - and social scientists in particular - the ability to study biosocial phenomena, e.g. the relation between genes and human behavior. We explore the feasibility of collecting buccal cells for genetic analyses with normal interviewers as part of a pretest for the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) using a probability sample. ...

A Dynamic Incentive Mechanism for Transmission Expansion in Electricity Networks: Theory, Modeling, and Application

We propose a price-cap mechanism for electricity-transmission expansion based on redefining transmission output in terms of financial transmission rights. Our mechanism applies the incentive-regulation logic of rebalancing a two-part tariff. First, we test this mechanism in a three-node network. We show that the mechanism intertemporally promotes an investment pattern that relieves congestion, increases ...

Who Is Who? Die Sozialstruktur der Soziologie-Professorenschaft in Deutschland

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich vor dem Hintergrund spezifischer Rekrutierungsmuster im Berufsfeld Wissenschaft mit der sozialstrukturellen Zusammensetzung der Professorenschaft im Fach Soziologie. Grundlage ist eine Gesamterhebung der Professorinnen und Professoren an universitären soziologischen Fachinstituten und ausgewählten außeruniversitären wissenschaftlichen Einrichtungen. Untersuchte ...

Long-Running German Panel Survey Shows that Personal and Economic Choices, Not Just Genes, Matter for Happiness

Psychologists and economists take contradictory approaches to research on what psychologists call happiness or subjective well-being, and economists call subjective utility. A directtest of the most widely accepted psychological theory, set-point theory, shows it to be flawed. Results are then given, using the economists' newer "choice approach" - an approach also favored by positive psychologists ...

Naming Differences in Divided Germany

This article analyzes differences in naming between East and West Germany. After World War II, Germany was split by the allied forces. Two Germanies emerged: the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The country's division lasted about forty years (1949-1989), a time span in which vastlydifferent geo-political frameworks - Eastern bloc versus Western bloc - shaped ...

A Natural Experiment on Sick Pay Cuts, Sickness Absence, and Labor Costs

This study estimates the reform effects of a reduction in statutory sick pay levels on sickness absence behavior and labor costs. German federal law reduced the legal obligation of German employers to provide 100% continued wage pay for up to six weeks per sickness episode. In 1996 statutory sick pay was decreased to 80% of foregone gross wages. Within the reform's target group - private sector employees ...

The Effect of Lone Motherhood on the Smoking Behavior of Young Adults

We provide evidence that living with an unmarried mother during childhood raises smoking propensities for young adults in Germany.

Network Formation under Mutual Consent and Costly Communication

We consider two different approaches to describe the formation of social networks under mutual consent and costly communication. First, we consider a network-based approach; in particular Jackson-Wolinsky's concept of pairwise stability. Next, we discuss a non-cooperative game-theoretic approach, through a refinement of the Nash equilibria of Myerson's consent game. This refinement, denoted as monadic ...

Where People Live and Die Makes a Difference: Individual and Geographic Disparities in Well-Being Progression at the End of Life

Life-span psychological research has long been interested in the contextual embeddedness of individual development. To examine whether and how regional variables relate to between-person disparities in the progression of late-life well-being, we applied three-level growth curve models to 24-year longitudinal data from deceased participants of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (N = 3,427; age at ...

Examining the Gender Wealth Gap

Economic research on the determinants of gender differences in economic outcomes particularly in income and consumption is well established. Extending these investigations to other outcomes such as wealth up till now has been limited due to lack of individual-level data. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we find a significant "raw" gender wealth gap of 50,000€ for married partners. Decomposition ...

Inclusion of Latent Variables in Mixed Logit Models: Modelling and Forecasting

Travel demand models typically use mainly objective modal attributes as explanatory variables. Nevertheless, it has been well known for many years that attitudes and perceptions also influence users' behaviour. The use of hybrid discrete choice models constitutes a good alternative to incorporate the effect of subjective factors. We estimated hybrid models in a short-survey panel context for data among ...

Technological Innovation Systems for Microgeneration in the UK and Germany: A Functional Analysis

This paper examines the deployment of microgeneration in Germany and the UK from a technological innovation systems (TIS) perspective. Based on the TIS functions approach, we condense supportive and obstructive factors and discuss the differences in the respective national setting for small-scale renewable and combined heat and power (CHP) technologies. The findings underline the relevance of legitimation ...

Distributional Effects of Imputed Rents in Five European Countries

Most empirical distributional studies of well-being in developed countries rely on distributions of disposable income. From a theoretical point of view this practice is contentious since a household's command over resources is determined not only by its spending power over commodities it can buy in the market but also on resources available to the household members through non-market mechanisms such ...