External refereed essays

Social Dynamics and Affect: Investigating Within-Person Associations in Daily Life Using Experience Sampling and Mobile Sensing

Social interactions are crucial to affective well-being. Still, people vary interindividually and intraindividually in their social needs. Social need regulation theories state that mismatches between momentary social desire and actual social contact result in lowered affect, yet empirical knowledge about this dynamic regulation is limited. In a gender- and age-heterogenous sample, German-speaking ...

Green or Greedy: The Relationship between Perceived Benefits and Homeowners’ Intention to Adopt Residential Low-carbon Technologies

Transitioning to a net-zero economy requires a nuanced understanding of homeowners’ decision-making pathways when considering the adoption of Low Carbon Technologies (LCTs). These LCTs present both personal and collective benefits, with positive perceptions critically influencing attitudes and intentions. Our study analyses the relationship between two primary benefits: the household-level financial ...

The Heterogeneous Effects of Social Assistance and Unemployment Insurance: Evidence from a Life-Cycle Model of Family Labor Supply and Savings

We empirically analyze the heterogeneous welfare effects of unemployment insurance and social assistance. We estimate a structural life-cycle model of singles' and married couples' labor supply and savings decisions. The model includes heterogeneity by age, education, wealth, sex and household composition. In aggregate, social assistance dominates unemployment insurance; however, the opposite holds ...

Unilateral Tax Policy in the Open Economy

This paper examines the effects of a unilateral reform of a redistributive tax-transfer system in an open economy. Compared to autarky, a tax increase leads to a smaller decline in aggregate income in the open economy, and it is also more effective at reducing income inequality, provided the tax rates are sufficiently low. Aggregating effects on income and income inequality using an Atkinson social ...

Digitalisation and Modernity of Capital Stock in Europe

Gesundheitsdaten: Von Nachbarländern lernen

Immigration, Female Labour Supply and Local Cultural Norms

We study the local evolution of female labour supply and cultural norms in West Germany in reaction to the sudden presence of East Germans who migrated to the West after reunification. These migrants grew up with high rates of maternal employment, whereas West German families mostly followed the traditional breadwinner-housewife model. We find that West German women increase their labour supply and ...

Policy Complementarity and the Paradox of Carbon Pricing

We present an economics framework appropriate to the exceptionally broad scope of the climate change problem. This considers that economic and social processes, particularly those involved in purposive transitions of energy technologies and systems, involve the interplay between three distinct domains of decision-making and associated actors. The first concerns small-scale and often short-term decision-making, ...

Entrepreneurship, Management, and Cognitive Reflection: A Preregistered Replication Study With Extensions

Intuition is a central element of entrepreneurial decision-making. We conceptually replicate a published study by using new representative data from 1961 adults and the widely used Cognitive Reflection Test, which assesses the ability to avoid intuitive decisions and to switch to an analytical process. We extend the analysis by exploring occupational sorting versus environmental influence as mechanisms, ...

Have the Effects of Shocks to Oil Price Expectations Changed? Evidence from Heteroskedastic Proxy Vector Autoregressions

Studies of the crude oil market based on structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models typically assume a time-invariant model and transmission of shocks and possibly allow for heteroskedasticity by using robust inference procedures. We assume a heteroskedastic reduced-form VAR model with time-invariant slope coefficients and explicitly consider the possibility of time-varying shock transmission due ...

Brothers in Arms: The Value of Coalitions in Sanctions Regimes

This paper examines the impact of coalitions on the economic costs of the 2012 Iran and 2014 Russia sanctions. By estimating and simulating a quantitative general equilibrium trade model under different coalition setups, we (1) dissect welfare losses for sanctions senders and target; (2) compare prospective coalition partners; (3) investigate ‘optimal’ coalitions that maximize payoff from sanctions; ...

Adding Household Surveys to the Behavioral Economics Toolbox: Insights from the SOEP Innovation Sample

While laboratory and field experiments are the major items in the toolbox of behavioral economists, household panel studies can complement them and expand their research potential. We introduce the German Socio-Economic Panel’s Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS), which offers researchers detailed panel data and the possibility to collect personalized experimental and survey data for free. We discuss what ...

Disentangling COVID-19, Economic Mobility, and Containment Policy Shocks

We study the dynamic interaction between COVID-19, economic mobility, and containment policy. We use Bayesian panel structural vector autoregressions with daily data for 44 countries, identified through traditional and narrative sign restrictions. We find that incidence shocks and containment shocks have large and persistent effects on mobility, morbidity, and mortality that last for one to two months. ...

Perceiver Effects and Socioeconomic Background: Contrasting Parent-reports against Teacher-reports of Elementary School Students' Personality

familial socioeconomic background can impact not only academic success, but also the personality of offspring. Yet, there is little evidence on whether it might influence how parents describe their children’s personality. To fill this gap, we used latent multitrait-multimethod (CTCM-1) models to examine familial socioeconomic background as possible predictor of parental perceiver effects regarding ...

The Air Quality and Well-being Effects of Low Emission Zones

This study provides the first evidence of the subjective well-being impacts of low emission zones (LEZs) while also undertaking a comprehensive analysis of their air quality effects. We identify causal impacts by exploiting the zones’ introduction date with difference-in-differences designs robust to staggered implementations and time-varying treatment effects. Results show air quality improvements ...

Mass Vaccination and Educational Attainment: Evidence from the 1967–68 Measles Eradication Campaign

We show that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–68, which reduced reported measles incidence by 90 percent within two years. Our results suggest that mass vaccination against ...

Recent Methodological Advances in Panel Data Collection, Analysis, and Application: [Editorial]

Panel studies have become an indispensable part of today's research world especially when addressing causal questions and tracking changes over time. Three conditions are essential for effective panel data analysis: 1) having a sufficiently long time series with a substantial number of observations, 2) ensuring measurement consistency over time, and 3) using a meaningful model for selecting elements ...

Measuring Total Carbon Pricing

While countries increasingly commit to pricing greenhouse gases directly through carbon taxes or emissions trading systems, indirect forms of carbon pricing-such as fuel excise taxes and fuel subsidy reforms-remain important factors affecting the mitigation incentives in an economy. Taken together, how can policy makers think about the overall price signal for carbon emissions and the incentive it ...

Fremde Welt: Nur eine Minderheit teilt Deutschlands „Werte“

Das neue Bürgergeldgesetz – kein Systemwechsel, aber Stärkung von individuellem Schutz sowie verbesserte Chancen nachhaltiger Erwerbsintegration