External refereed essays

Acceptance of Criteria for Health and Driver Scoring in the General Public in Germany

Numerous health insurers offer bonus programmes that score customers’ health behaviour, and car insurers offer telematics tariffs that score driving behaviour. In many countries, however, only a minority of customers participate in these programmes. In a population-representative survey of private households in Germany (N = 2,215), we study the acceptance of the criteria (features) on which the scoring ...

Impact of Mexico's Energy Reform on Consumer Welfare

We study the impact of Mexico's energy reform on the welfare of electricity, liquified petroleum gas, and gasoline consumers between 2010 and 2018. We utilize micro-level data to estimate income and price elasticities. Comparative statics are used to determine subsidy and price influences on consumer surplus. A counterfactual is used to simulate the industry's behavior under non-reform parameters. ...

Equilibrium Effects of Tax Exemptions for Low Pay

Across the world, tax exemptions for jobs with low earnings intend to incite non-participating workers to rejoin the labor market. However, such tax exemptions may also have negative equilibrium effects. The German minijob tax exemption offers a convenient case to identify equilibrium effects as it applies to some but not to other low-wage jobs. We build and estimate a structural job search model with ...

Extracting Agency and Communion from the Big Five: A Four-Way Competition

Agency and communion are the two fundamental content dimensions in psychology. The two dimensions figure prominently in many psychological realms (personality, social, self, motivational, cross-cultural, etc.). In contemporary research, however, personality is most commonly measured within the Big Five framework. We developed novel agency and communion scales based on the items from the most popular ...

Changing Fortunes and Attitudes: What Determines the Political Trust In Modern Russia?

Research background: We are guided by concepts linking political trust with the perceived rank of people in the wealth hierarchy, their confidence in other people, and the means they use to learn about events at home and abroad.Purpose of the article: The aim of the article is to assess and analyse at the micro level the impact of subjective welfare, interpersonal trust and the intensity of usage of ...

Familien im Fokus der Bundestagswahl: Ein Bekenntnis zur Systemrelevanz von Familien

Nachdem die Familie am Anfang der Pandemie kaum eine Bedeutung hatte, wird inzwischen vielfach über die Belastung der Familien diskutiert. Fakt ist, Familien sind in der Pandemie in mehrfacher Hinsicht stark belastet. Jedoch nicht alle in gleichem Umfang. Das sollte den Parteien im Bundestagswahlkampf 2021 klar sein, wenn es darum geht die Folgen der Pandemie für Familien abzumildern und Versäumtes ...

Subjektive Belastung der Eltern durch die Beschulung ihrer Kinder zu Hause zu Zeiten des Corona-bedingten Lockdowns im Frühjahr 2020

Die Corona-bedingten Schulschließungen sowie die Schließung von Kinderbetreuungseinrichtungen im April und Mai 2020 haben viele Eltern vor eine immense Herausforderung gestellt. Plötzlich mussten Kinder ganztags Zuhause betreut und beschult werden. In diesem Beitrag beschäftigen wir uns mit der Frage nach der subjektiven Belastung, der sich Eltern durch die Beschulung ihrer Kinder Zuhause ausgesetzt ...

Ein Investitionsprogramm zur Krisenbewältigung

Eigenkapitalpuffer im Abschwung wirksam?

er antizyklische Kapitalpuffer und der Kapitalerhaltungspuffer wurden für die Verstetigung der Kreditvergabe sowie eine höhere Resilienz des Finanzsystems geschaffen. Fraglich bleibt, wie gut diese Puffer speziell im Abschwung in der Praxis von den Finanzinstituten genutzt werden. Dem Signalisierungsproblem zufolge könnte eine sinkende Eigenkapitalquote als positives (Fähigkeit zu Neugeschäften) aber ...

Financing Power: Impacts of Energy Policies in Changing Regulatory Environments

Power systems with increasing shares of wind and solar power generation have higher capital costs and lower operational costs than power systems based on fossil fuels. This increases the importance of the financing costs for total system cost. We quantify how renewable energy support policies can affect the financing costs by addressing regulatory risk and facilitating hedging. We use interview data ...

Prosumage of Solar Electricity: Tariff Design, Capacity Investments, and Power Sector Effects

We analyze how tariff design incentivizes households to invest in residential photovoltaic and battery storage systems, and explore selected electricity sector effects. To this end, we develop an open-source electricity sector model that explicitly features prosumage agents and apply it to German 2030 scenarios. Results show that lower feed-in tariffs substantially reduce investments in residential ...

The Nexus between Loan Portfolio Size and Volatility: Does Bank Capital Regulation Matter?

This paper analyzes the effects of bank capital regulation on the link between bank size and volatility. Using bank-level data for 27 advanced economies over the 2000–2014 period, we estimate a power law that relates the volume of a bank’s loan portfolio to the volatility of loan growth. Our analysis reveals, first, that more stringent capital regulation weakens the size-volatility nexus. Hence, in ...

Comparing the Educational Gradients in Three Cardiovascular Disease-Specific Health Measures

Less-educated persons have worse cardiovascular health. We compare the educational gradients in three disease-specific health measures (biomarkers, self-reported doctors’ diagnoses and cause-specific mortality) in order to compare their relevance in different stages of the disease process. We study 14,102 people aged 50–89 from the US Health Retirement Study (HRS) in the period 2006–17. We use six ...

Alternative Recipes for Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Five World Regions

In most cross-national research on Life Satisfaction (LS) an implicit assumption appears to be that the correlates of LS are the same the world over; ‘one size fits all’. Using data from the World Values Survey (1999–2014), we question this assumption by assessing the effects of differing personal values/life priorities on LS in five world regions: the West, Latin America, the Asian-Confucian region, ...

On the Difficulties to Calculate Infrastructure Charges for Heavy Goods Vehicles: A Review of 15 Years’ Experience in Germany

This paper analyses the calculation principles used for determining the level and differentiation ofHGV charges in Germany. It demonstrates that calculating average cost-based charges is far fromstraightforward, even with an agreed methodology, and involves sensitive methodological choices.Based on a review of available studies, the paper argues that estimating marginal costs does notnecessarily involve ...

Testing Identification via Heteroskedasticity in Structural Vector Autoregressive Models

Tests for identification through heteroskedasticity in structural vector autoregressive analysis are developed for models with two volatility states where the time point of volatility change is known. The tests are Wald-type tests for which only the unrestricted model, including the covariance matrices of the two volatility states, has to be estimated. The residuals of the model are assumed to be from ...

25 Years of European Merger Control

We study the determinants of common European merger policy over its first 25 years, from 1990 to 2014. Using a novel dataset at the level of the relevant antitrust markets and containing all relevant merger cases notified to the European Commission, we evaluate how consistently arguments related to structural market parameters – dominance, rising concentration, barriers to entry, and foreclosure – ...

Social Policy or Crowding-out? Tenant Protection in Comparative Long-run Perspective

Private rental markets have become increasingly important since the Global Financial Crisis 2008–2009 and rent controls are back on the political agenda. Yet, they have received less attention from housing scholars than homeownership and public housing. This paper presents new data on the development of private tenancy legislation based on a content-coding of rent control, protection of tenants from ...

Growing Potentials for Migration Research Using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study

This article highlights the potentials for migration research using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), a longitudinal panel dataset of private households in Germany running since 1984. We provide a concise overview of its basic features, describe the survey contents and research potentials, and demonstrate opportunities to link external data sources to the SOEP thereby presenting its diverse ...

Solicited versus Unsolicited Ratings: The Role of Selection

This paper analyzes the extent to which selection explains the observed discrepancy between solicited and unsolicited ratings. I propose a model of selection with truth telling rating agencies and borrowers with the ability to veto the revelation of the rating. The observed difference between the two categories of ratings in different sectors is in line with the prediction of the model. In the sovereign ...