External refereed essays

Money Velocity and Asset Prices in the Euro Area

Aiding Violence or Peace? The Impact of Foreign Aid on the Risk of Civil Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper considers the impact of foreign aid flows on the risk of civil conflict. We improve on earlier studies on this topic by addressing the problem of the endogenous aid allocation using GDP levels of donor countries as instruments. A more structural addition to the literature is that we efficiently control for unobserved country specific effects in typical conflict onset and conflict continuation ...

Adult Height and Childhood Disease

Taller populations are typically richer populations, and taller individuals live longer and earn more. In consequence, adult height has recently become a focus in understanding the relationship between health and wealth. We investigate the childhood determinants of population adult height, focusing on the respective roles of income and of disease. Across a range of European countries and the United ...

Does Democracy Foster Trust?

The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals' attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique natural experiment that allows us to conduct such a study. Using data from the German General Social Survey ...

Childhood Family Structure and Schooling Outcomes: Evidence for Germany

We analyze the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a non-intact family in Germany. We find that this experience is associated with worse outcomes according to estimates from models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and educational performance. Evidence of adverse effects emerges also when endogeneity is accounted for. ...

Measuring People's Trust

We measure trust and trustworthiness in British society with a newly designed experiment using real monetary rewards and a sample of the British population. The study also asks the typical survey question that aims to measure trust, showing that it does not predict 'trust' as measured in the experiment. Overall, about 40% of people were willing to trust a stranger in our experiment, and their trust ...

On the Treatment of Non-Original Sample Members in the German Household Panel Study (SOEP)

The Preadult Origins of Post-Materialism: A Longitudinal Sibling Study

Using a research design that traces siblings' preferences for postmaterialist values in Germany over two decades, this article provides new evidence on the origins of value preferences. Focusing on Inglehart's thesis of value change, the combined socialisation and scarcity hypothesis is tested against the social learning hypothesis - a prominent rival account of preadult value preference formation. ...

Russlands Energieexporte: Potentiale, Strategien, Perspektiven

Russia's oil and natural gas exports are of great importance for Europe's energy supplies. The future extent and direction of supplies will depend on Russia's energy policy as well as its export strategies. The amount of exports mentioned in prognoses can only be achieved if energy efficiency in Russia increases, coal replaces natural gas, price controls are eliminated, and considerable investments ...

Entrepreneurs' Gender and Financial Constraints: Evidence from International Data

This paper examines whether financial institutions discriminate against entrepreneurs on the basis of gender. Using the cross-country Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS), we find some evidence that, compared to male-managed counterparts, female-managed firms are less likely to obtain a bank loan. In addition, our analysis suggests that female entrepreneurs are charged higher ...

Die Bündelung familienbezogener Leistungen bei einem Parafiskus: eine Zusammenfassung bisheriger Überlegungen und eine Einordnung in die aktuelle Debatte

In Germany, support for families includes diverse types of financial and material aid. These different programs are not aligned and coordinated, but rather stand alone alongside each other and are far from being transparent. This article argues that this situation could be remedied by grouping the various family-related support measures within a single family support agency as a parafiscal institution. ...

Small Business Survival and Inheritance: Evidence from Germany

This paper investigates whether small businesses face financial constraints that affect their survival. A model of moral hazard is developed in which financial constraints arise endogenously. The model predicts that higher private assets relax financial constraints and have a positive effect on the firm's probability of survival. The empirical analysis confirms that the entrepreneur has a higher propensity ...

Does the Dispersion of Unit Labor Cost Dynamics in the EMU Imply Long-Run Divergence? Results from a Comparison with the USA and Germany

Welfare States, Labour Market Institutions and the Working Poor: A Comparative Analysis of 20 European Countries

This article regards the incidence of in-work poverty and how it is reduced by the payment of social transfers in 20 European countries. It combines a micro- and a macro-level perspective in two-level models. The basis for the analysis is micro-data from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2005 and macro-data from sources such as the OECD and Eurostat. The broad comparative ...

Persistence and Determinants of Firm Profit in Emerging Markets

Fortschritte und Herausforderungen der informationellen Infrastruktur in Deutschland

Financial Risks of Natural Hazards: Markets and the Role of the State ; Symposium

From Transition to Competition: Dynamic Efficiency Analysis of Polish Electricity Distribution Companies

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the economic transition toward a market economy increases the efficiency of firms. We study 32 Polish electricity distribution companies between 1997 and 2002, by applying common benchmarking methods to the panel: the non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA), the free disposal hull (FDH), and, as a parametric approach, the stochastic frontier analysis ...

First Evidence of Asymmetric Cost Pass-through of EU Emissions Allowances: Examining Wholesale Electricity Prices in Germany

We test the hypothesis that rising prices of emission allowances have a stronger impact on wholesale electricity prices than falling prices (asymmetric cost pass-through). Using an autoregressive distributed lag model, we confirm this hypothesis for the German market

On the Stability of the German Beveridge Curve: A Spatial Econometric Perspective

In this paper, the framework of the aggregated Beveridge curve is used to investigate the effectiveness of the job-matching process using German regional labour market data. For a fixed matching technology, the Beveridge curve postulates a negative relationship between the unemployment rate and the rate of vacancies, which is efficiently estimated using spatial econometric techniques. The eigenfunction ...