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Public Transport Reliability and Season Ticket Ownership: The Case of the Deutschlandticket

This paper provides a systematic analysis of peoples’ decision to purchase the Deutschlandticket, identifying primary customer groups and the role of public transport irregularities such as delays and cancellations. It builds on a panel dataset covering survey answers from almost 3000 participants between March and December 2023 and applies a series of binary logit models. The results confirm that ...

Targeting Viewers’ Heterogeneous Ad Aversion: Evidence from a Two-Sided Market

This paper studies the role of viewers’ heterogeneous ad aversion on media content demand and advertisers’ willingness to pay. High-frequency individual-level data on broadcast media content allows us to track viewers’ minute-by-minute choices within the set of available alternatives. We first illustrate the potential selection biases that arise when using aggregated market-level data to estimate...

Quantifying the Fiscal Channel of Monetary Policy

In macroeconomic models featuring borrowing-constrained agents, the effects of monetary policy depend on the fiscal reaction to interest rate changes. This paper presents new evidence on the dynamic causal effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks on fiscal instruments and estimates a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model with fiscal feedback rules to match the empirical results. I find that U.S. fiscal ...

Non-monetary factors influence heating energy consumption much more than price increases do in the short term

Non-monetary Factors Were an Important Driver of Residential Energy Savings during the Energy Crisis

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered an energy crisis in Germany, with consumer energy prices skyrocketing over the course of the year. Due to concerns about gas shortages, various programs aimed at reducing consumption were set up and the German Federal Government and numerous organizations appealed to consumers to save as much energy as possible. This Weekly Report investigates how much ...

Contracting Matters: Hedging Producers and Consumers With a Renewable Energy Pool

Renewable energy installations are rapidly gaining market share due to falling technology costs and supportive policies. Meanwhile, the energy price crisis in 2022 shifted the energy policy debate toward the question of how consumers can better benefit from the low and stable generation costs of renewable electricity. Long-term contracts for renewable energy to link producers and consumers are an option ...

Steering of Consumer Behavior by Conversational Artificial Intelligence

Conversational AI models are becoming increasingly popular and are about to replace traditional search engines for information retrieval and product discovery. This raises concerns about monetization strategies and the potential for subtle consumer manipulation. Companies may have financial incentives to steer users toward search results or products in a conversation in ways that are unnoticeable...

Agents, Landlords and Tenants: Price Regulation in a Thick Two-sided Market

This paper examines the impacts of new policies aimed at reducing the cost of renting by regulating the actions of intermediaries in the rental market. We highlight how information frictions between buyers and intermediaries can give rise to rents in the thick two-sided market. The distribution of these rents between intermediaries and sellers, as well as the impact of price regulation, depends on...

Quantifying Bargaining Power in Supply Chains: Essential for Merger Control

Merger control plays a central role in competition policy. When assessing proposed mergers, Competition Authorities should consider its impact on all relevant markets. Large mergers between manufacturers typically impact competition, thus requiring the approval of Competition Authorities. Divestitures are often a condition of merger approval. This report investigates the effectiveness of implementing ...

Earn More Tomorrow: Overconfidence, Income Expectations, and Consumer Indebtedness

This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt taking. We show suggestive evidence for a link between overconfidence and borrowing behavior in a representative survey of German households (German Socio-Economic Panel–Innovation Sample [GSOEP-IS]). This motivates a laboratory experiment to study causality behind these effects. In two experiments, ...