External refereed essays

Über die Ursachen und das mögliche Ende der niedrigen Zinsen in Deutschland

Gestaltende Technologiepolitik als Kern moderner Industriepolitik

Job Displacement, Family Dynamics and Spousal Labor Supply

We study the effectiveness of intrahousehold insurance among married couples when the husband loses his job due to a mass layoff or plant closure. Empirical results based on Austrian administrative data show that husbands suffer persistent employment and earnings losses, while wives' labor supply increases moderately due to extensive margin responses. Wives' earnings gains recover only a tiny fraction ...

Grundrentenplan der großen Koalition: Welche Risiken soll die gesetzliche Rentenversicherung versichern?

Unabhängig davon, ob der Grundrenten-Beschluss der Koalitionsparteien tatsächlich umgesetzt wird, ist er von Interesse, da die Diskussion über die noch offene Finanzierung der geplanten Grundrente auf die grundsätzliche Frage verweist, welche Risiken die Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung eigentlich versichert. Es gibt Argumente dafür, dass die konventionelle Sichtweise auf die versicherten Risiken abgelöst ...

The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Working Hours

The present paper analyzes how the statutory minimum wage introduced on January 1, 2015, has affected working hours in Germany up to 2016. The data used come from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which provides not only contractual working hours but also actual hours worked. Using a difference-in-differences estimation approach, we find a significant and robust reduction in contractual working hours ...

Identifying Robust Correlates of Risk Preference: A Systematic Approach Using Specification Curve Analysis

People’s risk preferences are thought to be central to many consequential real-life decisions, making it important to identify robust correlates of this construct. Various psychological theories have put forth a series of candidate correlates, yet the strength and robustness of their associations remain unclear because of disparate operationalizations of risk preference and analytic limitations in ...

Take Your Time to Grow: A Field Experiment on the Hiring of Youths

We investigate the effect of spells of no formal employment of young Germans on their chances of entering the labor market through an apprenticeship. We also study whether the potential negative effects of such spells can be mitigated by publicly provided training measures. In a field experiment, the fictitious applications of three young women were sent to firms advertising apprenticeships for the ...

The Impact of ECB Policy on Structural Reforms

We estimate the impact of monetary policy on structural reform adoption in the euro area. We identify exogenous ECB policy changes through an event study that extracts the unexpected variation in euro area interest rates on policy announcement days. We find that surprise monetary expansions increase the number of reforms significantly and that the effect is stronger for countries with weaker macroeconomic ...

Tax Evasion in New Disguise? Examining Tax Havens' International Bank Deposits

Recent efforts to reduce international tax evasion focus on information exchange with tax havens. Using bilateral bank data for 1397 countrypairs in a balanced quarterly panel from 2003:I to 2017:IV, we first show that information-on-request treaties with tax havens reduce bank deposits in tax havens by 27.5%. Second, also deposits from tax havens in high tax countries decline after such treaties are ...

The Effect of Unemployment on the Smoking Behavior of Couples

Although unemployment likely entails various externalities, research examining its spillover effects on spouses is scarce. This is the first paper to estimate effects of unemployment on the smoking behavior of both spouses. Using German Socio‐Economic Panel data, we combine matching and difference‐in‐differences estimation, employing the post‐double‐selection method for control variable selection via ...

Comparing Self-Reported and Partnership-Inferred Sexual Orientation in Household Surveys

Research comparing heterosexuals with bisexuals and homosexuals in economics and the social sciences typically relies on two strategies to identify sexual orientation in existing survey data of general populations. Probing respondents to self-report their sexual orientation is generally considered the preferred option. Since self-reports are unavailable in most large multidisciplinary surveys, often ...

Modeling the Low-Carbon Transition of the European Energy System - a Quantitative Assessment of the Stranded Assets Problem

In this paper, multiple pathways for the European energy system until 2050 are computed, focusing on one of the major challenges of the low-carbon transition: the issue of unused capacities and stranded assets. Three different scenarios are analyzed, utilizing the Global Energy System Model (GENeSYS-MOD) for calculations. A major feature is the introduction of limited foresight and imperfect planning ...

Same, but Different? Testing Monetary Policy Shock Measures

In this study, we determine the reliability and exogeneity of four popular monetary policy shock measures, namely the narrative series of Romer and Romer (2004), the high-frequency series of Barakchian and Crowe (2013), the high-frequency series of Gertler and Karadi (2015), and the hybrid series of Miranda-Agrippino and Ricco (2018b). To this end, we employ the Proxy-SVAR model and different empirical ...

No Evidence for a Protective Effect of Education on Mental Health

This paper analyzes whether education has a protective effect on mental health. To estimate causal effects, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) technique that exploits a reform extending compulsory schooling by one year implemented between 1949 and 1969 in West Germany. We complement analyses on the Mental Component Summary (MCS) score as a generic measure of overall mental health with an MCS-based ...

Monetary Policy, Bank Bailouts, and the Sovereign-Bank Risk Nexus in the Euro Area

The article analyses the empirical relationship between bank credit risk and sovereign credit risk in the euro area, using a system of simultaneous equations identified through heteroskedasticity. We first confirm a two-way causality between both risks, which amplifies initial credit risk shocks. We also document significant credit risk spillovers between sovereigns and banks in the periphery and the ...

Tied and Troubled: Revisiting Tied Migration and Subsequent Employment

ObjectiveThis article looks at couples' migration decision making processes and their gender‐specific employment consequences after migration to Germany.BackgroundInternational migration has evolved into a common experience for couples around the globe. Previous research has focused on the internal migration of couples and families. This article is the first to consider couples' international migration ...

Decarbonizing China’s Energy System – Modeling the Transformation of the Electricity, Transportation, Heat, and Industrial Sectors

Growing prosperity among its population and an inherent increasing demand for energy complicate China’s target of combating climate change, while maintaining its economic growth. This paper, therefore, describes three potential decarbonization pathways to analyze different effects for the electricity, transport, heating, and industrial sectors until 2050. Using an enhanced version of the multi-sectoral, ...

An Investment in the Future: Institutional Aspects of Credential Recognition of Refugees in Germany

Adding to the rich literature on the economic integration of refugees, this article extends the scope towards the role of institutions by focusing on the transfer of human capital by means of credential recognition. The 2012 Federal Act of Recognition in Germany is a new institution that provides the possibility to study the transfer of human capital in depth. I argue that analysing the decision for ...

Surveying Persons in Same-Sex Relationships in a Probabilistic Way: An Example from the Netherlands

In the last decade, the call for improved estimates of lesbians, gay men and bisexual (LGB) populations has grown steadily. This is related to the increasing visibility of same-sex unions and the rapidly evolving changes in the legal and normative institutional frameworks regarding same-sex relationships in Western countries. The aim of this article is to present the sampling strategy and discuss the ...

A Novel Sampling Strategy for Surveying High Net-Worth Individuals: A Pretest Using the Socio-Economic Panel

High‐wealth individuals are typically underrepresented or completely missing in population surveys. The lack of comprehensive national registers on high‐wealth individuals in many countries challenged previous attempts to remedy this under‐representation. In a novel research design, we draw on public data on the shareholding structures of companies as a sampling frame. Our design builds on the empirical ...