External refereed essays

Bekanntheit und Nutzung von digitalen Gesundheitsangeboten in Deutschland: eine bevölkerungsrepräsentative Querschnittsuntersuchung

Ziel der Studie Angesichts aktueller gesundheitspolitischer Bestrebungen zur eHealth-Implementierung stellt sich die Frage, welche Bevölkerungsgruppen Online-Gesundheitsangebote in Anspruch nehmen, um diese gezielter auf Nutzerbedürfnisse abstimmen zu können. Die Studie untersucht, ob Unterschiede in der Nutzung von Gesundheitsinformationen und psychologischer Online-Beratung auf Basis soziodemografischer ...

The Impact of Carbon Disclosure Mandates on Emissions and Financial Operating Performance

We examine the impact of a disclosure mandate for greenhouse gas emissions on firms’ subsequent emission levels and financial operating performance. For UK-incorporated listed firms a carbon disclosure mandate was adopted in 2013. Our difference-in-differences design shows that firms affected by the mandate reduced their emissions by about 8% relative to a control group of European firms. At the same ...

SOEP-RV: Linking German Socio-Economic Panel Data to Pension Records

The aim of the project SOEP-RV is to link data from participants in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey to their individual Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Insurance) records. For all SOEP respondents who give explicit consent to record linkage, SOEP-RV creates a linked dataset that combines the comprehensive multi-topic SOEP data with detailed cross-sectional and longitudinal ...

Inspections and Compliance: Enforcement of the Minimum-Wage Law

This paper is the first to empirically study the relationship between spatial distributions oflabor market inspections and noncompliance with Germany’s minimum-wage law. Combiningnovel administrative data with large-scale longitudinal survey data, we documentthat the inspection probability is higher in regions with higher noncompliance. This impliesrisk-based allocation of the inspection efforts and, ...

COVID-19 Associated Contact Restrictions in Germany: Marked Decline in Children’s Outpatient Visits for Infectious Diseases without Increasing Visits for Mental Health Disorders

Children have a low risk for severe COVID-19 infections, but indirect consequences of the pandemic may affect their health. We evaluated nationwide data on children’s outpatient visits before and during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Data from the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians for all children with statutory health insurance and at least one physician’s ...

Fertility as a Driver of Maternal Employment

Based on findings from high-income countries, typically economists hypothesize that having more children unambiguously decreases the time mothers spend in the labor market. Few studies on lower-income countries, in which low household wealth, informal child care, and informal employment opportunities prevail, find mixed results. Using Mexican census data, I do not find evidence for negative employment ...

Rentenanpassungen stabilisieren – ein Vorschlag

Bundesbeteiligung an den Kosten der Unterkunft - ein "pragmatischer" Transfer

Die Beteiligung des Bundes an den Kosten der Unterbringung und Heizung (KdU) erfolgt seit der Einführung des SGB II 2005 mit dem Ziel, die Kommunen finanziell zu entlasten. Seitdem wurde die Bundesbeteiligung in Höhe, Struktur, Berechnung und Zweck beständig verändert. Der Beitrag zeigt, wie sich dieser Transfer im Zeitablauf entwickelt hat, aus welchen Komponenten er heute besteht und welche Kritikpunkte ...

Globalisierung von Forschung und Entwicklung der weltweit forschungsstärksten Unternehmen

Mit Patentdaten der weltweit forschungsstärksten Unternehmen lassen sich Informationen über die regionale und technologische Verteilung ihrer Forschungsaktivitäten generieren. Daraus ergeben sich Anhaltspunkte zu den Motiven der Internationalisierung. Unternehmen betreiben Forschung und Entwicklung im Ausland überwiegend in technologischen Feldern, wo sie bereits stark sind und der ausländische Standort ...

Leisure Activities as a Driver of Personality Development? A Random-Intercept Cross-lagged Panel Model across 13 Years in Adulthood

Repeated experiences and activities drive personality development. Leisure activities are among the daily routines that may elicit personality change. Yet despite the important role they play in daily life, little is known about their prospective effects on personality traits and vice versa. The objective of this study was to examine the extent to which within-person changes in leisure activities lead ...

Discounting Behavior in Problem Gambling

Problem gamblers discount delayed rewards more rapidly than do non-gambling controls. Understanding this impulsivity is important for developing treatment options. In this article, we seek to make two contributions: First, we ask which of the currently debated economic models of intertemporal choice (exponential versus hyperbolic versus quasi-hyperbolic) provides the best description of gamblers’ discounting ...

Long-run Expectations of Households

The rational expectations assumption, e.g. in life-cycle models and portfolio-choice models, prescribes that all actions are in line with a well-structured and unbiased system of expectations. In reality, justification and identification of expectations are nontrivial, and we lack empirical evidence especially for the long run. This paper starts to fill this gap and elicits short-run and long-run expectations ...

Urban Green Is More than the Absence of City: Structural and Functional Neural Basis of Urbanicity and Green Space in the Neighbourhood of Older Adults

The relationship between urbanization, the brain, and human mental health is subject to intensive debate in the current scientific literature. Particularly, since mood and anxiety disorders as well as schizophrenia are known to be more frequent in urban compared to rural regions.Here, we investigated the association between cerebral signatures, mental health and land use indicators (Urban Fabric and ...

Extending the Kitagawa–Oaxaca–Blinder Decomposition Approach to Panel Data

The Kitagawa–Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition approach has been widely used to attribute group-level differences in an outcome to differences in endowment, coefficients, and their interactions. The method has been implemented for Stata in the popular oaxaca command for cross-sectional analyses. In recent decades, however, research questions have been more often focused on the decomposition of group-based ...

Lights along the Frontier: Convergence of Economic Activity in the Proximity of the Polish-German Border, 1992–2012

This paper studies regional economic development on the municipality-level in Poland and Germany along the Oder–Neisse border. We use high-quality satellite night-time light intensity data as an innovative and comparable measure to proxy for overall economic activity on both sides of the border consistently over a long period of time (1992–2012). We use descriptive heat maps as well as regression analysis ...

Cohort Profile: Follow-up of a Berlin Aging Study II (Base-II) Subsample as Part of the GendAge Study

Purpose The study ‘Sex- and gender-sensitive prevention of cardiovascular and metabolic disease in older adults in Germany’, the GendAge study, focuses on major risk factors for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and on the development of major outcomes from intermediate phenotypes in the context of sex and gender differences. It is based on a follow-up examination of a subsample (older group) of ...

Corruption and Cheating: Evidence from Rural Thailand

This study tests the prediction that perceived corruption reduces ethical behavior. Integrating a standard “cheating” experiment into a broad household survey in rural Thailand, we find tentative support for this prediction: respondents who perceive corruption in state affairs are more likely to cheat and, thus, to fortify the negative consequences of corruption. Interestingly, there is a small group ...

Optimal Supply Chains and Power Sector Benefits of Green Hydrogen

Green hydrogen can help to decarbonize parts of the transportation sector, but its power sectorinteractions are not well understood so far. It may contribute to integrating variable renewable energysources if production is sufficiently flexible in time. Using an open-source co-optimization model of thepower sector and four options for supplying hydrogen at German filling stations, we find a trade-offbetween ...

Who Are the Essential and Frontline Workers?

Housing Rent Dynamics and Rent Regulation in St. Petersburg (1880–1917)

This article studies housing rents in St. Petersburg from 1880 to 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. Digitizing over 5000 rental advertisements, we construct a state-of-the-art index – the first pre-war and pre-Soviet market data index for any Russian city. In 1915, a rent control and tenant protection policy was introduced in response to soaring prices following the outbreak ...