Search

Explaining the Hump in Life Cycle Consumption Profiles

This paper documents life cycle (or age) profiles of (log) household income, durable and non-durable consumption for Dutch households after explicitly controlling for time (or business cycle) effects and birth cohort effects. We find that both measures of consumption as well as income is clearly hump shaped over the life cycle. Hence, real consumption per household seems to track income over the life ...

Zur Entwicklung der Sparquoten der privaten Haushalte: eine Auswertung von Haushaltsdaten des SOEP

According to the National Accounts the German savings rate has increased continuously since 2001 after it fell continuously from 1991. This increase was rather unexpected and hence it is interesting to analyse whether the savings rate of the total population has increased or whether the increase in the aggregated savings rate has been due to the fact that the savings behaviour of certain socio-economic ...

One Last Puff? Public Smoking Bans and Smoking Behavior

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's federal states. We exploit this variation to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on individuals' smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic ...

Behavioural Economics, Consumer Policy, and Consumer Law

Data Network Effects: The Example of Internet Search

Abstract:   The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is lacking. In this paper, we show that data as an input into machine learning tasks displays features that favor the hypothesis that data is a source of market power. We study the search result quality for search keywords on...

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

We study the literature on school financial education programs for children and youth via aquantitative meta-analysis of 37 (quasi-) experiments. We find that financial education treatmenthas, on average, a significant and sizeable impact on financial knowledge (+0.25 SD), similar toeducational interventions in other domains. Additionally, we document small but still significanteffects on financial ...

Active Learning Fosters Financial Behavior: Experimental Evidence

We conduct a randomized field experiment to study the effects of two financial education interventions offered to small-scale retailers in Western Uganda. The treatments contrast “active learning” with “traditional lecturing” within standardized lesson-plans. We find that active learning has a positive and economically meaningful impact on savings and investment outcomes, in contrast to insignificant ...

Partitioned Pricing and Consumer Welfare

Abstract:   In online commerce, obfuscation strategies by sellers are hypothesized to mislead consumers to their detriment and to the profit of sellers. One such obfuscation strategy is partitioned pricing in which the price is split into a base price and add-on fees. While empirical evidence suggests that partitioned pricing impacts consumer decisions through salience effects, its consumer...

Income Redistribution, Consumer Credit, and Keeping up with the Riches

In this study, we set up a DSGE model with upward looking consumption comparison and show that consumption externalities are an important driver of consumer credit dynamics. Our model economy is populated by two different household types. Investors, who hold the economy’s capital stock, own the firms and supply credit, and workers, who supply labor and demand credit to finance consumption. Furthermore, ...

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 ...