External refereed essays

Explaining the Absence of Climate Change Integration in Low-Carbon Sectoral Policies: An Analysis of Brazil’s Maritime Cabotage Policy

Although maritime cabotage emits comparatively less CO2 per tonne kilometre than other means of transportation, the potential contribution of Brazil’s cabotage policy toward tackling climate change remained largely unexplored throughout its legislative process. Hence, to gather insights into how climate change can be integrated into sectoral policies, we apply Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) ...

Measurement Instruments for Fast and Frequent Data Collection during the Early Phase of COVID-19 in Germany: Reflections on the Mannheim Corona Study

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a vast increase in the demand for fast, frequent, and multi-faceted data to study the impact of the pandemic on people’s lives. Existing data collection infrastructures had to be adapted quickly during the early phase of the pandemic to meet this data demand. Our research group contributed to this by conducting the Mannheim Corona Study (MCS), a longitudinal ...

Bridges over Troubled Waters: Climate Clubs, Alliances, and Partnerships as Safeguards for Effective International Cooperation?

Driven by the motivation to raise the ambition level of climate action and to foster the transformation of economies, current climate policy discourse revolves around ways to improve cooperation between industrialized countries and emerging economies. We identify three broad types of initiatives—multilateral-cross sectoral, multilateral, sector specific, and climate and development partnerships—and ...

Does Family Structure Account for Child Achievement Gaps by Parental Education? Findings for England, France, Germany and the United States

This paper explores the role of family trajectories during childhood in explaining inequalities by maternal education in children's math and reading skills using harmonized, longitudinal, and nationally representative surveys, which follow children over the course of primary and lower secondary school in four high-income countries (England, France, Germany, and the United States). As single parenthood ...

Does Gender of Firm Ownership Matter? Female Entrepreneurs and the Gender Pay Gap

We examine how the gender of business owners is related to the wages paid to female relative to male employees working in their firms. Using Finnish register data and employing firm fixed effects, we find that the gender pay gap is—starting from a gender pay gap of 11 to 12%—two to three percentage points lower for hourly wages in female-owned firms than in male-owned firms. Results are robust to how ...

Shared Pooled Mobility: Expert Review from Nine Disciplines and Implications for an Emerging Transdisciplinary Research Agenda

Shared pooled mobility has been hailed as a sustainable mobility solution that uses digital innovation to efficiently bundle rides. Multiple disciplines have started investigating and analyzing shared pooled mobility systems. However, there is a lack of cross-community communication making it hard to build upon knowledge from other fields or know which open questions may be of interest to other fields. ...

What is the Difference between Fossil Fuel Embargo and Price Shocks?

In this paper, we model a fossil fuel embargo as a temporary quantity constraint on fossil fuel imports and wecompare the impact with the effect of a fossil fuel price shock. We show that while both shocks have similar responses of output and inflation, they differ with respect to the reaction of other macroeconomic components,such as consumption, exports and the trade balance. In particular, an embargo ...

Collaborative Investor Engagement with Policymakers: Changing the Rules of the Game?

Purpose – Applying universal ownership theory and drawing on a multiplecase study design, this study aims to analyze what drives institutional investors to engage with government entities and what challengesthey find in the process.Design/methodology/approach – The authors relied on document analysis and conducted 12 semistructured interviews with representatives from asset owners, assetmanagers, investor ...

Labour Supply and Survivor Insurance in the Netherlands

This paper investigates the effects of survivor benefits (SB) on the labour supply of widows. Using richadministrative data on the Dutch population and a reform that considerably restricted eligibility to SB, weidentify the causal effect of SB on labour supply. Using a regression discontinuity design strategy based onthe cohort-based implementation of the reform, we show that labour income after spousal ...

Long-Run Consequences of Informal Elderly Care and Implications of Public Long-Term Care Insurance

We estimate a dynamic structural model of labor supply, retirement, and informal caregiving to study short and long-term costs of informal caregiving in Germany. Incorporating labor market frictions and the German tax and benefit system, we find that in the absence of Germany’s public long-term insurance scheme, informal elderly care has adverse and persistent effects on labor market outcomes and, ...

Assessing the Social and Environmental Impacts of Critical Mineral Supply Chains for the Energy Transition in Europe

Advanced technologies are inherently dependent on critical minerals and their related metals. The mining extraction of these critical minerals leads to significant social and environmental impacts that extend beyond the regions where those advanced technologies are ultimately used. This study explores the global socio-environmental challenges arising from the European Climate Law's aim for net-zero ...

A HANK2 Model of Monetary Unions

How does a monetary union alter the impact of business cycle shocks at the household level? We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model of two countries (HANK) and show in closed form that a monetary union shifts the adjustment to a shock horizontally across countries, within the brackets of the union-wide wealth distribution, rather than vertically, that is, across the brackets of the union-wide ...

Questioning Nuclear Scale-up Propositions: Availability and Economic Prospects of Light Water, Small Modular and Advanced Reactor Technologies

This paper addresses the pressing need for rapid decarbonization of energy systems by examining the role of nuclear power in future energy scenarios collected in the IPCC database. Despite their explorative character, energy scenarios can influence decision-makers or might be used to promote certain technology developments. They are increasingly subject to the integration into real-world settings and ...

Avoid, Shift or Improve Passenger Transport? Impacts on the Energy System

Agglomeration Economies: Different Effects on TFP in High-tech and Low-tech Industries

We study the impact of agglomeration effects on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) for industry groups defined by technology intensity. This allows for non-uniform effects on firms depending on their technological level. We find that urban economies have the largest impact on firm productivity in high-technology industries, while they have no effectin low-technology industries. For firms in the ...

Is Interest Rate Hiking a Recipe for Missing Several Goals of Monetary Policy—Beating Inflation, Preserving Financial Stability, and Keeping up Output Growth?

levelsof all goods in the US and Europe rose surprisingly quickly and persistently. TheFED began in March 2022 and the ECB in July 2022 with historically unique interestrate increases to combat the wage-price spiral that had not yet begun. In this article weshow that energy, commodities and food were the main drivers of inflation. For this reason,central banks’ goal of weakening demand for labor through ...

Airbnb and Rental Markets: Evidence from Berlin

Foreign Debt, Capital Controls, and Secondary Markets: Theory and Evidence from Nazi Germany

We investigate how internal distribution motives can affect the implementation of an important macroeconomic policy: capital controls. To do this, we study one of history’s largest debt repatriations, which took place under strict capital controls in 1930s Germany, providing a wealth of quantitative and historical evidence. We show that the authorities kept private repatriations under strict control, ...

The Long-term Consequences of Early School Absences for Educational Attainment and Labour Market Outcomes

School absences can negatively impact a child's schooling, including the loss of teacher-led lessons, peer interactions, and, ultimately, academic achievement. However, little is known about the long-term consequences of school absences for overall educational attainment and labour market outcomes. In this paper, we used data from the 1970 British Cohort Study to examine long-term associations between ...

Establishing a Probability Sample in a Crisis Context: The Example of Ukrainian Refugees in Germany in 2022

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, more than one million refugees have arrived in Germany. These Ukrainian refugees differ in many aspects from Germany’s past forced migration experiences and there exists an urgent need for sound data and information for politics, practitioners, and academics. In response, the IAB-BiB/FReDA-BAMF-SOEP study was established to provide high-quality ...