External refereed essays

Telling the Truth May Not Pay Off: An Empirical Study of Centralized University Admissions in Germany

Matching university places to students is not as clear cut or as straightforward as it ought to be. By investigating the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions in medicine and related subjects, we show that a procedure designed to give an advantage to students with excellent school grades actually harms them. The reason is that the three-step process employed ...

Modeling and Analysis of the International Steam Coal Trade

Coal continues to play an important role in the global energy sector and with the increase in international trade a global market for steam coal has developed. We investigate market structure and recent price developments with a numerical modeling approach and develop two partial equilibrium models, a quantity based model and a model additionally incorporating energy values. We compare two possible ...

The World Gas Model: A Multi-Period Mixed Complementary Model for the Global Natural Gas Market

We provide the description, mathematical formulation and illustrative results of the World Gas Model, a multi-period complementarity model for the global natural gas market with explicit consideration of market power in the upstream market. Market players include producers, traders, pipeline and storage operators, LNG (liquefied natural gas) liquefiers and regasifiers as well as marketers. The model ...

Conflict and Education Demand in the Basque Region

The relationship between conflict and education has been studied before. However, previous authors have always focused strongly on the supply-side effects, whereas this article examines the influence of conflict on the demand for education. It is theoretically shown that, under relatively general conditions, individuals living in a conflict area have an incentive to increase their level of education ...

The Impact of Risk Attitudes on Entrepreneurial Survival

Risk attitudes influence the complete life cycle of entrepreneurs. Whereas recent research underpins the theoretical proposition of a positive correlation between risk attitudes and the decision to become self-employed, the effects on survival are not as straightforward. Psychological research posits an inverse U-shaped relationship between risk attitudes and entrepreneurial survival. On the basis ...

Late-Life Decline in Well-Being across Adulthood in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States: Something Is Seriously Wrong at the End of Life

Throughout adulthood and old age, levels of well-being appear to remain relatively stable. However, evidence is emerging that late in life well-being declines considerably. Using long-term longitudinal data of deceased participants in national samples from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we examined how long this period lasts. In all 3 nations and across the adult age range, well-being ...

Accidents, Liability Obligations and Monopolized Markets for Spare Parts

We analyze the effects of accidents and liability obligations on the incentives of car manufacturers to monopolize the markets for their spare parts. We show that monopolized markets for spare parts lead to inefficiently high prices for spare parts. Furthermore, monopolization induces the manufacturers to choose inefficiently high qualities. The key for these results is the observation that high prices ...

Do Forecasters Inform or Reassure? Evaluation of the German Real-Time Data

The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast / revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private consumption data are the most reliable. In addition, early forecasts of GDP, private consumption, and investment ...

How Important Is the Capacity of Local Governments for Improvements in Welfare? Evidence from Decentralised Uganda

Decentralisation is often claimed to be effective for improvements in welfare and hence the reduction of poverty but empirical evidence is scarce. This paper seeks to gain further insights into the relationship between decentralisation and welfare by investigating the role of local governments' capacity for household consumption and school enrolment in Uganda. Using household survey data, it finds ...

Die Auswirkungen der Geldmenge und des Kreditvolumens auf die Immobilienpreise: ein ARDL-Ansatz für Deutschland

Die aktuellen Finanzmarktturbulenzen wurden durch Entwicklungen im Immobiliensektor ausgelöst. Vor diesem Hintergrund analysiert dieser Beitrag den Zusammenhang zwischen den Immobilienpreisen und der Geldmengen- und Kreditvolumensentwicklung für den Zeitraum 1992 -2006 (westdeutsche Preisdaten) bzw. 1997 bis 2006 (ostdeutsche Preisdaten). Die Untersuchung konzentriert sich erstmals auf die Bundesrepublik ...

A Survey of the Global Economic Costs of Conflict

This paper defines the global economic costs of conflict and suggests two key criteria, namely comprehensiveness and consistency, which are necessary for a valid calculation of such costs. A critical review of the literature reveals that most studies focus on national income losses, using counterfactual regression models, finding a negative impact on growth both for conflict countries themselves and ...

Financial Constraints and Continental Business Groups: Evidence from German Konzerns

Using a unique large panel of German firms, we examine whether participation in business groups (Konzerns) reduces the sensitivity of investment to cash flow. The main finding is that the investment sensitivity is significantly reduced for small firms. On the other hand, we do not find clear evidence that medium-sized and large firms participating in Konzerns have different sensitivity compared to ...

Smart Capital in German Start-ups: An Empirical Analysis

What kind of smart capital relational investors actually supply, especially in a bank-based financial system such as the German one, is still an open question. We divide smart capital into single components and conduct a survey with 85 German suppliers of start-up finance. The results show that the degree of 'smartness' is determined by the financial product used and partly also by the financiers' ...

Bad Bank(s) and the Recapitalisation of the Banking Sector

Locational Conditions, Cooperation, and Innovativeness: Evidence from Research and Company Spin-offs

This paper has two goals. First, it analyzes the extent to which the innovativeness of spin-offs, originating either in a research facility or from another company, is influenced by locational conditions. Second, it provides evidence on how important local cooperation links are in comparison to nonlocal ones. Using a sample of approximately 1,500 East German firms from knowledge-intensive sectors, ...

Empowering Young Scientists

The Vancouver Olympics reveal stark differences between the worlds of sports and science. In both, young people from around the world try to surpass all previous accomplishments in pursuit of world records or scientific discoveries. Selected entirely on merit, athletes receive honor just for participating in the games, spurring the next generation of young people in each nation to excel. And as star ...

A Nonparametric Efficiency Analysis of German Public Transport Companies

In this paper, we present a nonparametric comparative efficiency analysis of 179 communal public transport bus companies in Germany (1990-2004). We apply both deterministic data envelopment analysis (DEA) and bootstrapping to test the robustness of our estimates and to test the hypothesis of global and individual constant returns to scale. We find that the average technical efficiency of German bus ...

Investigating M3 Money Demand in the Euro Area

Euro area monetary growth has exceeded its target since 2001. Likewise, recent empirical studies did not find evidence in favour of a stable long-run money demand function. In contrast to the bulk of the literature, we are able to identify a stable long-run money demand relationship. This result is obtained when the analysis is done without the short run homogeneity restriction between money and prices. ...

A Selection Model for Panel Data: The Prospects of Green Party Support

Although sample selection bias is a frequent problem of applied research, there has been no generalization of sample selection models with binary dependent variables of interest to data with temporal error correlations. We suggest a generalized estimating equation approach to panel data selection models, considering binary responses in both equations. We demonstrate the utility of this model by a simulation ...

Does Distance Determine Who Attends a University in Germany

We analyze the role of distance to the nearest university in the demand for higher education in Germany. Distance could matter due to transaction costs or due to neighbourhood effects. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) combined with a database on university postal codes to estimate a discrete choice model of the demand for higher education. We show that - controlling for other ...