External refereed essays

Accounting for Pension Wealth, the Missing Rich and Under-coverage: A Comprehensive Wealth Distribution for Germany

This study constructs a comprehensive wealth distribution for Germany to inform debate in Germany and internationally on the distribution of wealth including pension entitlements. We estimate the net present value of pension wealth in Germany in 2012 and 2017 using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data. When including pension wealth, German households’ wealth-income ratio increases from 570% to 850% in ...

Why Investing in New Nuclear Plants Is Bad for the Climate: Commentary

Socioeconomic Differences in SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Vaccination in Germany: A Seroepidemiological Study After One Year of COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign

Objective: To evaluate the socioeconomic patterns of SARS-CoV-2 antigen contacts through infection, vaccination or both (“hybrid immunity”) after 1 year of vaccination campaign.Methods: Data were derived from the German seroepidemiological Corona Monitoring Nationwide study (RKI-SOEP-2; n = 10,448; November 2021–February 2022). Combining serological and self-report data, we estimated adjusted prevalence ...

Reformen bei Elterngeld und Ehegattensplitting könnten gleichstellungspolitische Impulse setzen

A Collective Blueprint, Not a Crystal Ball: Overcoming Political Stalemates: The German Stakeholder Commission on Phasing out Coal

The future of coal remains contested in many countries, hindering necessary energy transitions. Collaborative governance approaches, such as stakeholder commissions, have been proposed as potential solution to resolve such societal conflicts. In Germany, a stakeholder commission process managed to overcome the existing stalemate situation, leading to the adoption of a coal phase-out by 2038. Celebrated ...

Does Your Smartphone “Know” Your Social Life? A Methodological Comparison of Day Reconstruction, Experience Sampling, and Mobile Sensing

Mobile sensing is a promising method that allows researchers to directly observe human social behavior in daily life using people's mobile phones. To date, limited knowledge exists on how well mobile sensing can assess the quantity and quality of social interactions. We therefore examined the agreement among experience sampling, day reconstruction, and mobile sensing in the assessment of multiple aspects ...

Causal Misperceptions of the Part-time Pay Gap

In this paper, we analyze if an increase in the working life leads to more human capital investment via on-the-job training. We obtain RDD-estimates from a sharp date-of-birth cut-off, generated by a pension reform that increased the Early Retirement Age (ERA) by three years for many women in Germany. In our preferred specification, we find that this reform causally increased on-the-job training by ...

Atomwende? Ja, bitte! Warum die Abkehr von der Atomenergie und eine gute Entsorgungspolitik die Energiewende in Deutschland befördern werden

Die Atomenergie bleibt gesellschaftlich umkämpft. Zum einen wird sie wieder als Zukunftstechnologie gehandelt, mit der vermeintlich klimafreundlich und ressourcenschonend Strom erzeugt werden kann. Zum anderen ist die Endlagerung von Atomabfällen noch nicht geregelt. Das Konzept der ,,atompolitischen Wende“ bringt ‐ analog zur Energiewende ‐ dieses Ringen auf den Punkt. Die Beendigung der kommerziellen ...

Selection, Socialization, and Risk Preferences in the Finance Industry: Longitudinal Evidence for German Finance Professionals

The financial sector plays a crucial role in society. Consequently, prior research has examined the preferences of professionals working in finance. However, these studies have tended to be cross-sectional and have neglected the dynamic roles played by (self-)selection and socialization. This paper uses longitudinal data from Germany to examine how individuals’ financial risk preferences affect their ...

Uncertainties in Estimating Production Costs of Future Nuclear Technologies: A Model-based Analysis of Small Modular Reactors

Predicting future costs of technologies not yet developed is a complex exercise that includes many uncertain parameters and functional forms. In that context, small modular reactor (SMR) concepts that are in a rather early development stage claim to have cost advantages through learning effects, standardized design, modularization, co-siting economies, and other factors, such as better time-to-market ...

Bidirectional Coupling of the Long-term Integrated Assessment Model REgional Model of INvestments and Development (REMIND) v3.0.0 with the Hourly Power Sector Model Dispatch and Investment Evaluation Tool with Endogenous Renewables (DIETER) v1.0.2

Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are a central tool for the quantitative analysis of climate change mitigation strategies. However, due to their global, cross-sectoral and centennial scope, IAMs cannot explicitly represent the temporal and spatial details required to properly analyze the key role of variable renewable energy (VRE) in decarbonizing the power sector and enabling emission reductions ...

New Coal Mines in the Australian Galilee Basin Are Not Economically Viable and Are Prone to Become Stranded Assets

To limit the effects of climate change, we must significantly curtail the trading and use of coal as an energy source. Although the rise of renewable energy sources has already led to a reduction in the demand for and use of coal, new export-oriented coal mine projects are still being approved, and they often receive strong political support. However, whether these projects are economically viable ...

Competition and Moral Behavior: A Meta-Analysis of Forty-Five Crowd-Sourced Experimental Designs

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental ...

Risk Preference and Entrepreneurial Investment at the Top of the Wealth Distribution

This study quantifies the distributional effects of the minimum wage introduced in Germany in 2015. Using detailed Socio-Economic Panel survey data, we assess changes in the hourly wages, working hours, and monthly wages of employees who were entitled to be paid the minimum wage. We employ a difference-in-differences analysis, exploiting regional variation in the “bite” of the minimum wage. At the ...

Hours Risk and Wage Risk: Repercussions over the Life Cycle

We decompose earnings risk into contributions from hours and wage shocks. To distinguish between hours shocks, modeled as innovations to the marginal disutility of work, and labor supply reactions to wage shocks, we formulate a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply. For estimation, we use data on married American men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Permanent wage shocks explain ...

The Impact of the Tax Reduction on Fuel Prices in Germany: A Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Approach

We analyse the impact of the temporary tax reduction on diesel and gasoline prices from June to the end of August 2022 in Germany. By implementing a synthetic difference-in-differences approach with different baskets of European countries, we find a significant reduction in prices by 33.8–34.4 cents per litre for gasoline and 12.2–14.6 cents per litre for diesel. These results are robust to variations ...

Spatial Patterns of Recent Ukrainian Refugees in Germany: Administrative Dispersal and Existing Ethnic Networks

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, many people have fled the war and left their home country. By the end of January 2023, more than one million Ukrainian refugees had been registered in Germany alone. In contrast to refugees from other countries of origin in Germany, Ukrainian citizens can choose their place of residence if they have either found private accommodation ...

Ukrainian Refugees in Germany: Evidence From a Large Representative Survey

This study describes the first wave of the IAB-BiB/FReDA-BAMF-SOEP Survey on Ukrainian Refugees in Germany, a unique panel dataset based on over 11,000 interviews conducted between August and October 2022. The aim of the IAB-BiB/FReDA-BAMF-SOEP Survey is to provide a data-infrastructure for theory-driven and evidence-based research on various aspects of integration among Ukrainian refugees in Germany, ...

Intangible Capital and Productivity Divergence

Understanding the causes of the slowdown in aggregate productivity growth is key to maintaining the competitiveness of advanced economies and ensuring long-term economic prosperity. This paper provides evidence that investment in intangible capital, despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the aggregate level as it amplifies ...

Changes in Risk Attitudes Vary across Domains throughout the Life Course

Risk attitudes are important predictors of various economic decisions and socioeconomic outcomes. Although studies show that peoples’ general willingness to take risks decreases with age, there are few reports on the age dependence of domain-specific risk attitudes. Drawing on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this study employs a proxy variable approach to disentangle age from periodic and cohort effects, ...