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SOEPpapers 117 / 2008
This paper explores the relationship between risk attitude and asset diversification in household portfolios. We first examine the impact of manifested risk aversion on the total number of distinct assets held in a portfolio (naive diversification). The second part of the paper focuses on a more sophisticated strategy of diversification and asks whether financial theory is compatible with observed ...
2008| Nataliya Barasinska, Dorothea Schäfer, Andreas Stephan
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Diskussionspapiere 1066 / 2010
Survey-based indicators such as the consumer confidence are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity, especially for the future path of private consumption. Although they receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power appears to be very limited. Therefore, this paper takes a fresh look on the survey data, which serve as a basis for the consumer confidence indicator (CCI) ...
2010| Christian Dreger, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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Externe referierte Aufsätze
The Chinese government is building the largest public credit information database on earth. The Credit Registry Center of the People's Bank of China registers more than 600 million consumers of which 110 million have a credit relationship with a financial institution. The Center is a public utility monopoly which collects information from banks and non-bank institutions - a unique approach developed ...
In:
China Economic Review
19 (2008), 4, S. 537-550
| Nicola Jentzsch
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SOEPpapers 339 / 2010
According to the life-cycle theory of consumption and saving, foreseeable retirement events should not reduce consumption. Whereas some consumption expenditures may fall when goods are self-produced (given higher leisure after retirement), this argument applies especially to housing consumption which can hardly be substituted by home production. We test this hypothesis using micro data for Germany ...
2010| Miriam Beblo, Sven Schreiber
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SOEPpapers 289 / 2010
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 sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on individuals' smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich longitudinal ...
2010| Silke Anger, Michael Kvasnicka, Thomas Siedler
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SOEPpapers 202 / 2009
Adequate housing and affordable warmth are essential human needs, the lack of which may seriously harm people's health. Germany provides an allowance to low-income households, covering the housing as well as the space heating cost, to protect people from the consequences of poor housing conditions and fuel poverty. In order to limit public expenditures, payment recipients are required to choose low-cost ...
2009| Peter Grösche
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Diskussionspapiere 534 / 2005
The ad valorem versus unit taxes debate has traditionally emphasized tax yield. For this criterion, ad valorem taxes outperform unit taxes in terms of welfare for a wide range of imperfect competition settings, including Dixit-Stiglitz monopolistic competition. Yet, in a number of policy fields, such as environmental, health or trade economics, policy makers apply taxes to target the production/consumption ...
2005| Susanne Dröge, Philipp J. H. Schröder
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SOEPpapers 31 / 2007
Within the German welfare system, heating expenditures of recipients are in general fully covered by the government. This paper empirically tests for the hypothesis that households receiving welfare payments turn to over consumption of residential space heating. We use microdata from two different data sources to explore whether conditional heating expenditures of these households significantly differ ...
2007| Katrin Rehdanz, Sven Stöwhase
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SOEPpapers 650 / 2014
We study behavior in an investment experiment conducted with a representative sample of German households (SOEP-IS). Respondents allocate a fixed budget between a safe asset and a risky asset whose returns are tied to the German stock market and earn monetary returns based on their decisions. Experimental investment choices correlate with beliefs about stock market returns and exhibit desirable external ...
2014| Steffen Huck, Tobias Schmidt, Georg Weizsäcker
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SOEPpapers 668 / 2014
In this paper a descriptive overview of the housing situation of immigrants in Germany is combined with a multivariate analysis on potential effects of rental price discrimination for specific groups of immigrants. The driving research question is, whether immigrants systematically pay higher rents for comparable flats. Utilizing data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP) different variables ...
2014| Andreas Hartung