External refereed essays

Lessons from Germany's Hard Coal Mining Phase-Out: Policies and Transition from 1950 to 2018

German hard coal production ended in 2018, following the termination of subsidies. This paper looks at 60 years of continuous decline of an industry that employed more than 600,000 people, through a case study comparing Germany’s two largest hard coal mining areas (Ruhr area and Saarland). Although predominantly economic drivers underlay the transitions, both provide valuable lessons for upcoming coal ...

Do Benefits from Dynamic Tariffing Rise? Welfare Effects of Real-Time Retail Pricing Under Carbon Taxation and Variable Renewable Electricity Supply

We analyze the gross welfare gains from real-time retail pricing in electricity markets where carbon taxation induces investment in variable renewable technologies. Applying a stylized numerical electricity market model, we find a U-shaped association between carbon taxation and gross welfare gains. The benefits of introducing real-time pricing can accordingly be relatively low at relatively high carbon ...

Financial Education in Schools: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies

We study the literature on school financial education programs for children and youth via a quantitative meta-analysis of 37 (quasi-) experiments. We find that financial education treatments have, on average, sizeable impacts on financial knowledge (+0.33 SD), similar to educational interventions in other domains. Additionally, we document smaller effects on financial behaviors among students (+0.07 ...

Communication on the Science-Policy Interface: An Overview of Conceptual Models

This article focuses on scholarly discourse on the science-policy interface, and in particular on questions regarding how this discourse can be understood in the course of history and which lessons we can learn. We aim to structure the discourse, show kinships of different concepts, and contextualize these concepts. For the twentieth century we identify three major phases that describe interactions ...

Being Unengaged at Work but Still Dedicating Time and Energy: A Longitudinal Study

Overcommitted individuals cannot withdraw from work obligations. We examine whether work goal engagement attenuates the negative effects of overcommitment on work and health outcomes. For overcommitted professionals it should matter whether they dedicate time and energy to work goals they feel bound to or to goals they do not feel attached to (unengaged overcommitment). In a longitudinal study of 752 ...

The Challenges of Spatial and Temporal Aggregation: Modelling Issues, Applications, and Policy Implications: Editorial

The Effect of a Ban on Gender‐Based Pricing on Risk Selection in the German Health Insurance Market

Starting from December 2012, insurers in the European Union were prohibited from charging gender‐discriminatory prices. We examine the effect of this unisex mandate on risk segmentation in the German health insurance market. Although gender used to be a pricing factor in Germany's private health insurance (PHI) sector, it was never used as a pricing factor in the social health insurance (SHI) sector. ...

Does Subsidized Care for Toddlers Increase Maternal Labor Supply?

Expanding public or publicly subsidized childcare has been a top social policy priority in many industrialized countries. It is supposed to increase fertility, promote children’s development and enhance mothers’ labor market attachment. In this paper, we analyze the causal effect of one of the largest expansions of subsidized childcare for children up to three years among industrialized countries on ...

Teams Promise but Do Not Deliver

Individuals and two-person teams play a hidden-action trust game with pre-play communication. We replicate previous results for individuals that non-binding promises increase cooperation rates, but this does not extend to teams. While teams promise to cooperate at the same rate as individuals, they consistently renege on those promises. Additional treatments begin to explore the basis for team behavior. ...

Decentralization and Public Procurement Performace: New Evidence from Italy

We exploit a new dataset based on European Union (EU) procurement award notices to investigate the relationship between the degree of centralization of public procurement and its performance. We focus on the case of Italy, where all levels of government, along with a number of other public institutions, are involved in procurement and are subject to the same EU regulation. We find that (a) municipalities ...

Early Education and Care Quality: Does It Matter for Maternal Working Hours?

This study investigates whether mothers whose children enter early childhood education and care (ECEC) centers of higher quality are more likely to work longer hours. The empirical analysis links the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Study with the K2iD-SOEP extension study, which collected ECEC quality information from childcare centers across Germany. Based on a sample of 556 mothers of 628 children with ...

The Effect of Restructuring Electricity Distribution Systems on Firms' Persistent and Transient Efficiency

We evaluate the efficiency of electricity distribution operators (DSOs) as providers of local public infrastructure. In particular, we consider two types of efficiency, i.e., short-term (transient) and long-term (persistent). We apply the recently developed four-component stochastic frontier model, which allows identifying determinants of the two types of efficiency, after controlling for firm heterogeneity ...

Looking for the Missing Rich: Tracing the Top Tail of the Wealth Distribution

We analyse the top tail of the wealth distribution in France, Germany, and Spain using the first and second waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be under-represented in household surveys, we integrate big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto distribution, and impute the missing rich. In addition to the Forbes list, we rely on national rich ...

Family Separation and Refugee Mental Health: a Network Perspective

How do the structure and relational features of family networks affect refugees’ mental health after migration, particularly when refugees are geographically separated from their family? Using the first wave of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees, which is representative of the population of refugees who arrived in Germany between 2013 and 2016, this study finds that the size of the nuclear family ...

Zehn Jahre nach dem großen Knall: wie ist es um die Stabilität der internationalen Immobilienmärkte bestellt?

Zehn Jahre nach der weltweiten Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise, die ihren Ursprung auf dem US-amerikanischen Immobilienmarkt hatte, steigen angesichts weltweit zunehmender Preise für Wohneigentum die Sorgen vor neuen Immobilienpreisblasen. Dieser Beitrag zeigt auf Basis von OECD-Daten für 20 Länder, dass die Sorge nicht unberechtigt ist: In acht Ländern deutet die Immobilienpreisentwicklung auf ein spekulatives ...

Analyzing Scenarios for the Integration of Renewable Energy Sources in the Mexican Energy System: An Application of the Global Energy System Model (GENeSYS-MOD)

This paper uses numerical techno-economic modelling to analyse the effect of current national renewable targets and climate goals on the cost and structural composition of the Mexican energy system. For this, we construct a scenario base analysis to compare current policies with two alternative states of the world—one without climate policies and one attaining full decarbonization. Furthermore, an ...

Emissions Trading in Regulated Electricity Markets

The Effects of Pricing Waste Generation: A Synthetic Control Approach

To internalize pollution externalities into household waste generation, Unit Pricing Systems (UPS) have been adopted worldwide. This paper evaluates the causal effects of a UPS on the disposal of municipal solid waste in Trento, Italy. Using a unique panel dataset of monthly waste generation in Italian municipalities, we employ the synthetic control method, which allows us to account for possible time-varying ...

Deutschland: ein Land der Mieter? Die Rolle von Erwartungen über zukünftige Immobilienpreisentwicklungen

Mehr als die Hälfte aller Haushalte in Deutschland wohnen zur Miete – ein im internationalen Vergleich sehr hoher Wert. Bisherige Studien haben vor allen Dingen den regulatorischen Rahmen des Immobilienmarkts hervorgehoben, der Mietwohnungen in Deutschland systematisch begünstigt. Allerdings gibt es keine Studien, die diese Erklärungen empirisch eindeutig untermauern können: einige Arbeiten betonen ...

Notes about Comparing Long-Term Care Expenditures across Countries: Comment on "Financing Long-Term Care: Lessons from Japan"

The comparison of long-term care (LTC) expenditures is a difficult task. National LTC systems differ widely in terms of eligibility criteria, level of benefits, institutional variety and regional heterogeneity. In this commentary I will first give some general remarks on cross country comparisons. Then I discuss the role of the informal sector which is the most important pillar of all LTC systems. ...