Externe referierte Aufsätze

On the Emissions–Inequality and Emissions–Welfare Trade-Offs in Energy Taxation: Evidence on the German Car Fuels Tax

By using estimates from a Demographically-Scaled Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (DQUAIDS), we investigate how the German car fuels tax changes the private households’ CO2 emissions, living standards, and post-tax income distribution. Our results show that the tax implies a trade-off between the aim to reduce emissions and vertical equity, which refers to the idea that people with a greater ability ...

The Joint Distribution of Net Worth and Pension Wealth in Germany

The research on wealth inequality has generally focused on real and financial assets, while giving little attention to pension wealth: the present value of future pension entitlements from public and company pension schemes. This is surprising given the important role pension plans play in guaranteeing material security and well‐being for a majority of the population, and suggests that they should ...

Distributional Effects of Subsidizing Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Germany

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the income distribution, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme is almost distributionally neutral in terms of standard inequality measures. Two effects offset ...

Inequality-Minimization with a Given Public Budget

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, it can be solved by an interior-point algorithm. If it is quasiconvex, the bisection method can be used. Using artificial and real-world data, we implement ...

Labor Supply Effects of Long-Term Care Reform in Germany

Many informal caregivers are of working age, facing the double burden of providing care and working. Negative labor supply effects can severely reduce the comparative cost advantage of informal over formal care arrangements. When designing long‐term care (LTC) policies, it is crucial to understand the effects not only on health outcomes but also on labor supply behavior of informal caregivers. We evaluate ...

The Valley of Death, the Technology Pork Barrel, and Public Support for Large Demonstration Projects

Moving non-incremental innovations from the pilot scale to full commercial scale raises questions about the need and implementation of public support. Heuristics from the literature put policy makers in a dilemma between addressing a market failure and acknowledging a government failure: incentives for private investments in large scale demonstrations are weak (the valley of death) but the track record ...

Capturing Affective Well-Being in Daily Life with the Day Reconstruction Method: A Refined View on Positive and Negative Affect

In the last years, there has been a shift from traditional measurements of affective well-being to approaches such as the day reconstruction method (DRM). While the traditional approaches often assess trait level differences in well-being, the DRM allows examining affective dynamics in everyday contexts. The latter may ultimately explain why some people feel more happy than others (e.g., because they ...

The Impact of Complex Family Structure on Child Well‐Being: Evidence from Siblings

Evidence from the United Kingdom Millennium Cohort on children at ages 3 and 5 with older siblings addresses the questions of whether those living with both biological parents and only full siblings have better emotional and behavior outcomes than other children, and whether nonfull siblings affect children's outcomes independently of parents' partnership status. Adjusting for measured family circumstances ...

Estimation of Structural Impulse Responses: Short-Run versus Long-Run Identifying Restrictions

There is evidence that estimates of long-run impulse responses of structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models based on long-run identifying restrictions may not be very accurate. This finding suggests that using short-run identifying restrictions may be preferable. We compare structural VAR impulse response estimates based on long-run and short-run identifying restrictions and find that long-run ...

The Dynamic Impact of Macroeconomic News on Long-Term Inflation Expectations

Well-anchored inflation expectations should not react to macroeconomic news. This paper analyzes the dynamics of inflation expectations in a proxy SVAR model, where macro news shocks are identified by their correlation with surprises from macroeconomic news announcements. Our results confirm that macro news shocks have no impact on U.S. long-term inflation expectations in the long run. In the short ...

Social Causation Versus Health Selection in the Life Course: Does Their Relative Importance Differ by Dimension of SES?

A person’s socioeconomic status (SES) can affect health (social causation) and health can affect SES (health selection). The findings for each of these pathways may depend on how SES is measured. We study (1) whether social causation or health selection is more important for overall health inequalities, (2) whether this differs between stages of the life course, and (3) between measures of SES. Using ...

How Does Education Improve Cognitive Skills? Instructional Time versus Timing of Instruction

This paper investigates two mechanisms through which education may affect cognitive skills in adolescence, exploiting a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment to identify causal effects: between 2001 and 2007, years at academic-track high school were reduced by one, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. First, I exploit the variation over time and ...

China's Emissions Trading Takes Steps Towards Big Ambitions

China recently announced its national emissions trading scheme, advancing market-based approaches to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Its evolution over coming years will determine whether it becomes an effective part of China’s portfolio of climate policies.

A Review of Technology and Policy Deep Decarbonization Pathway Options for Making Energy-Intensive Industry Production Consistent with the Paris Agreement

Pathways between Socioeconomic Status and Health: Does Health Selection or Social Causation Dominate in Europe?

Health differences which correspond to socioeconomic status (SES) can be attributed to three causal mechanisms: SES affects health (social causation), health affects SES (health selection), and common background factors influence both SES and health (indirect selection). Using retrospective survey data from 10 European countries (SHARELIFE, n = 20,227) and structural equation models in a cross-lagged ...

Pricing Carbon Consumption: Synthesizing an Emerging Trend

Nearly every carbon price regulates the production of carbon emissions, typically at midstream points of compliance such as power plants, consistent with typical advice from the literature. Since the early 2010s however, policymakers in Australia, California, China, Japan and Korea have implemented carbon prices that regulate the consumption of carbon emissions, where points of compliance are further ...

Testing Supply-Side Climate Policies for the Global Steam Coal Market—Can They Curb Coal Consumption?

The achieved international consensus on the 1.5–2 °C target entails that most of current fossil fuel reserves must remain unburned. A major contribution has to come from coal as both the most abundant and the most emission-intensive fuel. Currently, a majority of climate policies aiming at reducing coal consumption are directed towards the demand side. In the absence of a global carbon-pricing regime, ...

Coal Taxes as Supply-Side Climate Policy: a Rationale for Major Exporters?

The shift away from coal is at the heart of the global low-carbon transition. Can governments of coal-producing countries help facilitate this transition and benefit from it? This paper analyses the case for coal taxes as supply-side climate policy implemented by large coal exporting countries. Coal taxes can reduce global carbon dioxide emissions and benefit coal-rich countries through improved terms-of-trade ...

The Impact of Policy Measures on Future Power Generation Portfolio and Infrastructure: a Combined Electricity and CCTS Investment and Dispatch Model (ELCO)

This paper presents a general electricity-CO2 modeling framework that is able to simulate interactions of the energy-only market with different forms of national policy measures. We set up a two sector model where players can invest into various types of generation technologies including renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture, transport, and storage (CCTS). For a detailed representation of CCTS ...

A Spatial Electricity Market Model for the Power System: the Kazakhstan Case Study

Kazakhstan envisions a transition towards a green economy in the next decades, which poses an immense challenge as the country's economy and energy system depends heavily on hydrocarbon resources. Here, it lacks inclusive and transparent tools assessing technical, economic, and environmental implications resulting from changes in its electricity system. We present such a tool: our comprehensive techno-economic ...