External refereed essays

Exit Expectations and Debt Crises in Currency Unions

We study a sovereign debt crisis in a small member state of a currency union. If the country exits the currency union, it may redenominate its liabilities and reduce the real value of debt through depreciation and inflation. We analyze formally how the anticipation of this possibility, “exit expectations”, impact the dynamics of the sovereign debt crisis. First, we show that public debt accumulates ...

Poor Glucose Regulation is Associated with Declines in Well-Being among Older Men, but not Women

Glucose regulation is a key aspect of healthy aging and has been linked to brainfunctioning and cognition. Here, we examined the role of glucose regulation for withinpersonlongitudinal trajectories of well-being. We applied growth models to data fromthe Berlin Aging Study II (N = 1,437), using insulin resistance as an index of glucoregulatorycapacity. We found that poor glucose regulation (higher insulin ...

Comparing Administrative and Survey Data: Is Information on Education from Administrative Records of the German Institute for Employment Research Consistent with Survey Self-Reports?

In research on stratification and inequality, administrative data are popular for their wide coverage and assumed high quality. Yet, the quality of the data depends crucially on the aim of data collection. In this paper, we investigate the quality of information on education in administrative data from social security records provided by the German Federal Institute for Employment Research where education ...

Can Happiness Apps Generate Nationally Representative Datasets? - a Case Study Collecting Data on People’s Happiness Using the German Socio-Economic Panel

In the last few years, apps have become an important tool to collect data. Especially in the case of data on people’s happiness, two projects have received substantial attention from both the media and the scientific world: “Track your happiness” from Killingsworth and Gilbert (Science, 330, 932-932, 2010), and “Mappiness,” from MacKerron (2012). Both happiness apps used the experience sampling method ...

Closing Routes to Retirement for Women: How Do They Respond?

We study the employment effects of a large increase in the early retirement age (ERA) of women. Raising the ERA has the potential to extend contribution periods and to reduce the number of pensioners at the same time. However, workers may not be able to work longer or may choose other social support programs as exit routes from employment. Results suggest that the reform increases employment, unemployment ...

Parental Leave Policies and Socio-Economic Gaps in Child Development: Evidence from a Substantial Benefit Reform Using Administrative Data

This paper examines the effects of substantial changes in paid parental leave on child development and socio-economic development gaps. We analyse a German reform that replaced a means-tested with an earnings-related benefit scheme. Higher-income households benefited relatively more from the reform than low-income households. The reform expanded paid leave in the first year, while it removed paid leave ...

The Fayherriot Command for Estimating Small-Area Indicators

We introduce a command, fayherriot, that implements the Fay–Herriot model (Fay and Herriot, 1979, Journal of the American Statistical Association 74: 269–277), which is a small-area estimation technique (Rao and Molina, 2015, Small Area Estimation), in Stata. The Fay–Herriot model improves the precision of area-level direct estimates using area-level covariates. It belongs to the class of linear mixed ...

Industry Conversion Tables for German Firm-Level Data

Drivers of Renewable Technology Adoption in the Household Sector

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we undertake a simultaneous assessment of the importance of factors that are individually found to be significant for the adoption of renewable energy systems by households but are not yet tested jointly. These are sociodemographic and housing characteristics, environmental concern, personality traits, and economic factors; i.e. the expected costs of ...

Analyzing Climate and Energy Policy Integration: The Case of the Mexican Energy Transition

One of the main challenges faced by climate policy makers today is to design and implement policies capable of transferring climate policy goals into sectoral actions towards transformational pathways. Hence, climate policies need to be of cross-cutting character, lead to coherence with sectoral goals and reconcile diverging sectoral interests. Against this background, Mexico has undertaken significant ...

Anticipating Global Energy, Climate and Policy in 2055: Constructing Qualitative and Quantitative Narratives

This study presents a set of novel and multidisciplinary scenarios (‘narratives’) that provide insight into four distinct and diverging yet plausible worlds. They combine qualitative and quantitative elements in order to reflect the interlinked and complex nature of energy and climate. We use the STEMPLE+ framework to include social, technological, economic, military (security), political, environmental, ...

Pathways for Germany’s Low-Carbon Energy Transformation Towards 2050

Like many other countries, Germany has defined goals to reduce its CO2-emissions following the Paris Agreement of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP). The first successes in decarbonizing the electricity sector were already achieved under the German Energiewende. However, further steps in this direction, also concerning the heat and transport sectors, have stalled. This paper describes three possible ...

The Effect of Peer Observation on Consumption Choices: Evidence from a Lab-In-Field Experiment

We investigate the impact of peer observation on consumption decisions using a lab-in-field experiment. Respondents make consumption decisions either alone or under peer observation. We find evidence for peer effects. We are able to study these further by looking into the mechanism and performing detailed heterogeneity analysis. Concerning the mechanisms, we find evidence for an information channel. ...

The Effects of Conflict on Fertility: Evidence from the Genocide in Rwanda

Our study analyzes the fertility effects of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. We study the effects of violence on both the duration time to the first birth in the early post-genocide period and on the total number of post-genocide births per woman up to 15 years following the conflict. We use individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys, estimating survival and count data models. This article ...

Inferring Floor Area Ratio Thresholds for the Delineation of City Centers Based on Cognitive Perception

The morphology of today’s cities is the result of historic urban developments and on-going urban transformation resulting in complex urban spatial structures. While functionally as well as spatially, cities are structured into sub-units such as the city center, business districts, residential areas or industrial and commercial zones, their precise localization in the geographic space is sometimes difficult. ...

Cohort Differences in Adult-Life Trajectories of Internal and External Control Beliefs: A Tale of More and Better Maintained Internal Control and Fewer External Constraints

Lifespan theory posits that socio-historical contexts shape individual development. Inline with this proposition, cohort differences favoring later-born cohorts have beenwidely documented for cognition and health. However, little is known about historicalchange in how key resources of psychosocial functioning such as control beliefsdevelop in old age. We pooled data from three independent samples: ...

Sustainable Finance: Political Challenges of Development and Implementation of Framework Conditions

According to the 2015 Paris Agreement, a long-term goal is the commitment to “making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.” Reconciling climate change objectives and financial flows is an enormous challenge in the 21st century. States in general and Germany in particular have various instruments at their disposal to initiate ...

Macroeconomic Effects of Government Spending: The Great Recession Was (Really) Different

We estimate the effect of government spending shocks on the U.S. economy with a time‐varying parameter vector autoregression. The recent Great Recession period appears to be characterized by uniquely large impulse responses of output to fiscal shocks. Moreover, the particularity of this period is underlined by highly unusual responses of several other variables. The pattern of fiscal shock responses ...

The Structure, Drivers and Policy Implications of the European Carbon Footprint

Policy to reduce the European Union’s (EU) carbon footprint needs to be grounded in an understanding of the structure and drivers of both the domestic and internationally traded components. Here we analyse consumption-based emission accounts (for the main greenhouse gases (GHGs)) for the EU, focusing on understanding sectoral contributions and what changes have been observed over the last two decades, ...

Transporting and Storing High-Level Nuclear Waste in the U.S. Insights from a Mathematical Model

The nuclear industry in the United States of America has accumulated about 70,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste over the past decades; at present, this waste is temporarily stored close to the nuclear power plants. The industry and the Department of Energy are now facing two related challenges: (i) will a permanent geological repository, e.g., Yucca Mountain, become available in the future, ...