External refereed essays

International Market Integration for Natural Gas? A Cointegration Analysis of Prices in Europe, North America and Japan

This paper investigates the degree of integration of natural gas markets in Europe, North America and Japan in the time period between the early 1990s and 2004. The relationship between international gas market prices and their relation to the oil price are explored through principal components analysis and Johansen likelihood-based cointegration procedure. Both of them show a high level of natural ...

The Role of Technological Change for a Sustainable Development: Editorial

Technological change has become a major focus in environmental policy as well as in energy and climate policy. Indeed, there is a growing body of knowledge about how and in which direction technological change might have an impact on environmental resource constraints and how environmental policy might have an impact on this direction. In this article we introduce the contributions to this special ...

Freizeitverhalten als Ausdruck sozialer Ungleichheiten oder Ergebnis individualisierter Lebensführung? Zur Bedeutung von Einkommen und Bildung im Zeitverlauf

In den modernen Gesellschaften ist die Freizeit eine Dimension des Lebens, die immer mehr an Bedeutung gewinnt und die Erklärung von Unterschieden im Freizeitverhalten soziologisch interessant macht. Die "subjektzentrierte" Lebensstilforschung vertritt die Ansicht, dass sozio-ökonomische Unterschiede auf Grund der langfristigen Verbesserung der materiellen Lebensumstände an Bedeutung verloren haben ...

A Comment on Choi, Kristiansen and Nahm

Can EU Conditionality Remedy Soft Budget Constraints in Transition Countries?

Soft budget constraints (SBCs) are a persistent feature of transition economies and have been blamed for a lack of fiscal consolidation and sluggish growth. EU eastward enlargement has been conditioned on tackling SBCs. This paper analyzes such outside conditionality theoretically and empirically. First, by modeling the SBC problem as a war of attrition between the applicant countries' governments ...

Automatic Identification of Faked and Fraudulent Interviews in the German SOEP

A Comparison of the Relationship between Obesity and Earnings in the U.S. and Germany

International Outsourcing and German Manufacturing Wages

Transitions from Welfare to Employment: Does the Ratio between Labor Income and Social Assistance Matter?

Distributional Effects of the German Tax Reform 2000: A Behavioral Microsimulation Analysis

Student Aid, Repayment Obligations and Enrolment in Higher Education in Germany: Evidence from a "Natural Experiment"

Influence of Paternal Age on the Risk of Spontaneous Abortion

The frequency of chromosomal anomalies in spermatozoa appears to increase with male age. Because these anomalies play a role in the etiology of spontaneous abortion, an influence of paternal age on risk of spontaneous abortion is plausible but not established. The aim was to characterize this influence in a prospective study among 5,121 California women, who as members of a prepaid health plan were ...

Banking Crises, Regulation, and Growth: The Case of Russia

Recent empirical analyses of the relationship between financial system development and economic growth find that financial system development causes economic growth, is a good predictor of growth and that its impact is relatively large. Moreover, the empirical literature predicts that the adverse effects of banking crises on economic growth will rise in the absence of an adequate response by the government. ...

An Econometric Analysis of Motorway Renewal Costs in Germany

The analysis of motorway renewal costs presented in this paper was driven by two research questions: First, to analyse the economic process of motorway renewal work and to identify whether there exist economies of scale; and second to identify the influence of traffic volume on renewal costs and to derive an estimate of marginal infrastructure costs as part of optimal road user charges. The analysis ...

Item Nonresponse on Income Questions in Panel Surveys: Incidence, Imputation and the Impact on Inequality and Mobility

On the Effect of Item Nonresponse on the Estimation of a Two-Panel-Waves Wage Equation

Characteristics and Impact of Faked Interviews in Surveys: An Analysis of Genuine Fakes in the Raw Data of SOEP

Transporting Russian Gas to Western Europe: A Simulation Analysis

Cost Structure Surveys for Germany

Implementing the Kyoto Protocol without Russia

This paper examines implementation of the Kyoto Protocol without Russia. It concludes that implementation without Russia is possible, although it requires political will on the part of the countries that wish to proceed with the Protocol. It would lead to higher compliance costs for Annex B buyer regions, but other regions, except Russia, would benefit financially. Russia would forego revenue of at ...