External refereed essays

Mortality in Midlife for Subgroups in Germany

Case and Deaton, 2015 document that, since 1998, midlife mortality rates are increasing for white non-Hispanics in the US. This trend is driven by deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related diseases, termed as deaths of despair, and by the subgroup of low-educated individuals. In contrast, average mortality for middle-aged men and women continued to decrease in several other high-income ...

Does the EU ETS Cause Carbon Leakage in European Manufacturing?

Carbon leakage is of interest in both academic and policy debates about the effectiveness of unilateral climate policy, especially in Europe, where the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) affects many traded sectors. We review how the literature identifies leakage and the pollution haven effect. We then evaluate whether EU ETS emission costs caused carbon leakage in European manufacturing, using trade ...

Assessing Fiscal-Policy Sustainability: On the Different States of the Debt-to-GDP Process

This paper assesses fiscal-policy sustainability. A sufficient condition for this is that public debt is on a stationary trajectory. This is tested by means of a very general Markov-switching augmented Dickey-Fuller (MS-ADF) model, which expands and improves simpler existing models of this type, and produces more reliable results than conventional state-invariant unit-root tests. Long data series (in ...

On the Importance of Testing Structural Identification Schemes and the Potential Consequences of Incorrectly Identified Models

Identification schemes are of essential importance in structural analysis. This paper focuseson testing a commonly used long-run structural parameter identification scheme claiming to identifyfundamental and non-fundamental shocks to stock prices. Five related widely used structural modelson assessing stock price determinants are considered. All models are either specified in vector errorcorrection ...

Monetary Policy and Defaults in the United States

This paper uses a structural VAR model to study the effect of monetary policy on the delinquency rate of business loans and consumer credit. The VAR is identified using, jointly, several external instruments that reflect different approaches from the literature. Delinquency rates, defined as the rate of loans with overdue repayments relative to total loans, are found to decrease in response to an exogenous ...

Terminal Change Across Facets of Affective Experience and Domain Satisfaction: Commonalities, Differences, and Bittersweet Emotions at the End of Life

General well-being is known to deteriorate sharply at the end of life. However, it is an open question howrates of terminal change differ across affective and evaluative facets of well-being and if individualdifference correlates operate in facet-specific ways. We examined how discrete affective states (happy,angry, fearful, sad) and satisfaction with key life domains (health, leisure, family) change ...

The Integration of International Financial Markets: An Attempt to Quantify Contagion in an Input-Output-Type Analysis

The increasing integration of international financial markets means that credit defaults in one country have to be covered by creditors in other countries. If the principle of creditor liability were applied systematically, the financial losses incurred by the financial institution that provided the credit and is thus directly affected by the default would be ‘passed on’ through its domestic and foreign ...

The More Concentrated, the Better Represented? The Geographical Concentration of Immigrants and Their Descriptive Representation in the German Mixed-Member System

Does the geographical concentration of ethnic minorities influence their descriptive representation in closed-list systems? Counterintuitive to the idea that single-member district electoral rules are necessary for minorities’ geographical representation, we argue that, in closed-list systems, parties are incentivised to allocate promising list positions to those minority candidates who are based in ...

Calculating Joint Confidence Bands for Impulse Response Functions Using Highest Density Regions

This paper proposes a new nonparametric method of constructing joint confidence bands for impulse response functions of vector autoregressive models. The estimation uncertainty is captured by means of bootstrapping, and the highest density region (HDR) approach is used to construct the bands. A Monte Carlo comparison of the HDR bands with existing alternatives shows that the former are competitive ...

Getting the Within Estimator of Cross-Level Interactions in Multilevel Models with Pooled Cross-Sections: Why Country Dummies (Sometimes) Do Not Do the Job

Multilevel models with persons nested in countries are increasingly popular in cross-country research. Recently, social scientists have started to analyze data with a three-level structure: persons at level 1, nested in year-specific country samples at level 2, nested in countries at level 3. By using a country fixed-effects estimator, or an alternative equivalent specification in a random-effects ...

Social Image Concerns and Welfare Take-Up

Using a laboratory experiment, we present first evidence that social image concerns causally reduce the take-up of an individually beneficial transfer. Our design manipulates the informativeness of the take-up decision by varying whether transfer eligibility is based on ability or luck, and how the transfer is financed. We find that subjects avoid the inference both of being low-skilled (ability stigma) ...

YouTube, Google, Facebook: 21st Century Online Video Research and Research Ethics

Since the early 2000s, the proliferation of cameras in devices such as mobile phones, closed-circuit television (CCTV), or body cameras has led to a sharp increase in video recordings of human interaction and behavior. Through websites that employ user-generated content (e.g., YouTube) and live streaming sites (e.g., GeoCam), access to such videos virtually is at the fingertips of social science researchers. ...

Anchored Calibration: From Qualitative Data to Fuzzy Sets

Combining qualitative data and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) holds great analytic potential because it allows for detailed insights into social processes as well as systematic cross-case comparisons. But despite many applications, continuous methodological development, and some critique of measurement practices, a key procedure in using qualitative data for QCA has hardly been discussed: how ...

Gegenwart versus Zukunft - zur unsicheren Empirie der sozialen Diskontierungsrate

Das Sozio-Oekonomische Panel als Datenbasis für die Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie: Potentiale, Limitationen und Analysemethoden längsschnittlicher Surveydaten

Der Beitrag zeigt die Analysepotentiale der repräsentativen Mikrodaten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) für die Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie (A/O-Psychologie) auf. Dabei werden allgemeine Charakteristika von Stichprobe und Erhebung des SOEP vorgestellt, sowie Konstrukte mit besonderer Relevanz für die Psychologie eingeführt. Zudem diskutieren wir Analysemethoden für Paneldaten, mit denen ...

Coping with the Consequences of a Housing Crisis during the Great War: The Case of Right-Bank Ukraine in 1914-1918

Crimea and Punishment: The Impact of Sanctions on Russian Economy and Economies of the Euro Area

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started in March 2014 led Western countries and Russia to impose economic sanctions on each other, including the euro zone members. The paper investigates the impact of the sanctions on the real side of the economies of Russia and the euro area. The effects of sanctions are analyzed with a structural vector autoregression. To pin down the effect we are interested ...

Who Cares about Social Image?

This paper experimentally investigates how concerns for social approval relate to intrinsic motivations to purchase ethically. Participants state their willingness-to-pay for both a fair trade and a conventional chocolate bar in private or publicly. A standard model of social image predicts that all participants increase their fair trade premium when facing an audience. We find that the premium is ...

The Local Economic Impact of Wind Power Deployment

This study focuses on the local economic impacts of wind power deployment.Wind power deployment is not necessarily driven by locally accruing economic payoffs only, but potentially also by other factors, such as emphasis on environmentally friendly energy production and its associated benefits. Thus, the local economic impacts of wind power deployment are ambiguous.We empirically test the existence ...

The Role of Time Preferences in Educational Decision Making

We analyze the implication of time-inconsistent preferences in educational decision making and corresponding policies using a structural dynamic choice model. We make two important research contributions. First, we estimate our model using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (soep) and provide quantitative evidence for time-inconsistent behavior in educational decision making. Second, we evaluate ...