External refereed essays

The Transition to Grandparenthood: No Consistent Evidence for Change in the Big Five Personality Traits and Life Satisfaction

Intergenerational relations have received close attention in the context of population aging and increased childcare provision by grandparents. However, few studies have investigated the psychological consequences of becoming a grandparent. In a preregistered test of grandparenthood as a developmental task in middle and older adulthood, we used representative panel data from the Netherlands (N = 563) ...

Too Good to Be True? Time-inconsistent Renewable Energy Policies

The transition to low-carbon economies requires massive investments into renewable energies, which are commonly supported through regulatory frameworks. Yet, governments can have incentives – and the ability – to deviate from previously announced support policies once those investments have been made, which can deter investments. We analyze a renewable energy dynamic regulation game and derive under ...

A Lasting Crisis Affects R&D Decisions of Smaller Firms: The Greek Experience

We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the ...

Knappes Gas – Optionen zur Verringerung der Deckungslücke in Deutschland

In this article, we provide the results of a simple quantitative analysis of the potential remedies to reduce the supply gap in Germany that arises if Russia stops delivering natural gas. We take into account the supply potential of other suppliers, and combine this with an analysis of the additional supply potential by stopping electricity generation from natural gas. Moreover, we investigate the ...

Accounting for Spatiality of Renewables and Storage in Transmission Planning

The current governance process to plan the German energy system omits two options to substitute grid expansion: First, placing renewables closer to demand instead of where site conditions are best. Second, utilizing storage instead of additional transmission infrastructure to prevent grid congestion. In the paper, we apply a comprehensive capacity expansion model based on the AnyMOD modeling framework ...

The Gender Division of Unpaid Care Work throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany

The COVID-19 pandemic and related closures of day care centres and schools significantly increased the amount of care work done by parents. There has been much speculation over whether the pandemic increased or decreased gender equality in parental care work. Based on representative data for Germany from spring 2020 and winter 2021 we present an empirical analysis that shows that although gender inequality ...

Wie verzögert erfolgen Erhaltungsmaßnahmen auf deutschen Autobahnen? - Eine Analyse für den Zeitraum von 1997 bis 2015

What Goes around Comes around: How Large Are Spillbacks from US Monetary Policy?

Spillovers from US monetary policy entail spillbacks to the domestic economy. Applying counterfactual analyses in a Bayesian proxy structural vector-autoregressive model we find that spillbacks account for a non-trivial share of the slowdown in domestic real activity following a contractionary US monetary policy shock. Spillbacks materialise as a monetary policy tightening depresses foreign sales and ...

Dominant-Currency Pricing and the Global Output Spillovers from US Dollar Appreciation

We test for the empirical relevance of partial and asymmetric dominant-currency pricing (DCP), the hypothesis that large but not necessarily identical shares of economies’ export and import prices are sticky in US dollar. We first set up a structural three-country New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model which nests DCP, producer-currency pricing and local-currency pricing. Under ...

The Effects of an Increase in the Retirement Age on Health: Evidence from Administrative Data

This study analyzes the causal effect of an increase in the retirement age on official health diagnoses. We exploit a sizable cohort-specific pension reform for women using a Difference-in-Differences approach. The analysis is based on official records covering all individuals insured by the public health system in Germany and including all certified diagnoses by practitioners. This enables us to gain ...

Kleine Welt: Wenn Deutschland nur mit Demokratien handelt

Mehr Selbstdisziplin macht Politikberatung besser

Competition, Formal Governance and Trust in Alliances: An Experimental Study

We study the role of alliance governance in the behavior of partners in alliances with different degrees of competition. Using data from a lab experiment on 1,009 alliances and 31,662 partners' choices, we explore whether and how alliances succeed in different competitive scenarios, contingent on the use of formal governance mechanisms (termination clauses) and the number of partners in the alliance. ...

Earnings Inequality and Working Hours Mismatch

Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we document a significant rise in monthly earnings in- equality between 1993 and 2018. The main contributors are inter-temporal increases in working hours inequality and increases in the covariance between working hours and hourly wages, while changes in the distribution of hourly wages play a minor role. Applying a novel double decomposition technique ...

Centre-Based Care and Parenting Activities

We examine the relationship between parenting activities and centre-based care using time diary and survey data for mothers in Germany. While mothers using centre-based care spend significantly less time in the presence of their child, we find that differences in the time spent on specific activities such as reading, talking, and playing with the child are relatively small or zero. The pattern of results ...

Urban Land Use Fragmentation and Human Well-Being

We study how land use fragmentation affects the life satisfaction of city dwellers. To this end, we calculate fragmentation metrics based on exact geographical coordinates of land use from the European Urban Atlas and of households from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Using ordinary least squares and fixed effects specifications, we find little effect on life satisfaction when aggregating over land ...

Perspectives on Resilience: Trait Resilience, Correlates of Resilience in Daily Life, and Longer‐Term Change in Affective Distress

Resilience describes successful adaptation in the face of adversity, commonly inferred from trajectories of well‐being following major life events. Alternatively, resilience was conceptualised as a psychological trait, facilitating adaptation through stable individual characteristics. Both perspectives may relate to individual differences in how stress is regulated in daily life. In the present ...

Impact of the COVID‑19 Pandemic on Depression, Anxiety, Loneliness, and Satisfaction in the German General Population: a Longitudinal Analysis

Purpose Cross-sectional studies found high levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, and loneliness during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reported increases were lower in longitudinal population-based findings. Studies including positive outcomes are rare. This study analyzed changes in mental health symptoms, loneliness, and satisfaction. Methods Respondents of the German Socio-Economic ...

Die EZB-Geldpolitik in der Zwickmühle

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