Externe referierte Aufsätze

A Coordinated Strategic Reserve to Safeguard the European Energy Transition

In Germany and beyond, various capacity mechanisms are currently being discussed with a view to improving the security of electricity supply. One of these mechanisms is a strategic reserve that retains generation capacity for use in times of critical supply shortage. We argue that strategic reserves have specific advantages compared to other capacity mechanisms in the context of the European energy ...

Long-Term Effects of an Extensive Cognitive Training on Personality Development

Objective: Previous research found that cognitive training increases the Big Five personality trait openness to experience during and some weeks after the intervention. The present study investigated whether long-term changes happen in openness to experience and other personality traits after an extensive cognitive training of memory and perceptual speed.Method: Intervention group consisted of 204 ...

Shocks, Individual Risk Attitude, and Vulnerability to Poverty among Rural Households in Thailand and Vietnam

We examine whether the experience of shocks influences individual risk attitude. We measure the risk attitude of more than 4,000 households in Thailand and Vietnam via a simple survey item. The experience of adverse shocks, which is typical for poor and vulnerable households, is related to a higher degree of risk aversion, even when controlled for a large set of socio-demographic variables. Therefore, ...

Terminal Decline in Well-Being: The Role of Social Orientation

Well-being development at the end of life is often characterized by steep deteriorations, but individual differences in these terminal declines are substantial and not yet well understood. This study moved beyond typical consideration of health predictors and explored the role of social orientation and engagement. To do so, we used social variables at the behavioral level (self-ratings of social participation) ...

A Research Symbiont

Gesamtwirtschaftlich unbedeutend: Ostmitteleuropa und die EU-Sanktionen gegen Russland

Rules versus Human Beings, and the Mandate of the ECB

The actions by the European Central Bank (ECB) during the global and European crises have triggered a highly controversial debate, in particular in Germany, about the costs and benefits of the chosen policy path. The article reviews, compares, and evaluates the different arguments made in favor and against ECB policies around three key dimensions—the link of the policy path to price stability, financial ...

Occupational Career Attainment of Single Women during Modernization: The Logic of Industrialism Thesis Revisited

Modernization processes are said to have caused major changes in individual social mobility outcomes. Whether the predictions of the logic of industrialism thesis hold for the careers of women is unclear however. This study provides the first systematic account of how regional modernization processes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced the careers of the female working population. ...

R&D Expenditures and Geographical Sales Diversification

This paper empirically examines the role of diversification in export markets on firm-level R&D activities taking account of the potential endogeneity in this relationship. We show that geographical sales diversification across different regions of the world induces UK firms to increase their R&D expenditures, as firms must innovate and develop new products to maintain a competitive edge over their ...

A Two-Stage Efficiency Analysis of Rail Passenger Franchising in Germany

This paper analyses the differences in the efficiency of using subsidies for franchised regional rail services between the federal states in Germany, and provides evidence on the impact of procurement strategies and contractual design on the efficient use of funds. The analysis is based on a 15-year panel data set at the level of the federal states and employs a two-stage efficiency analysis, including ...

Do Stock Prices Reflect Their Fundamentals? New Evidence in the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis

We re-examine the dynamic relations between stock prices and macroeconomic fundamentals for six major industrialized countries in the wake of the recent financial crisis. Our analysis is based on a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model, which relies on a long-run restriction to identify fundamental and non-fundamental shocks to stock prices. This paper is the first in this line of literature ...

On the Empirical Relevance of the Lucas Critique: The Case of Euro Area Money Demand

This paper examines the relevance of the Lucas critique for euro area money demand. Based on the money in the utility function approach, a vector error correction model is specified to investigate the relationship between money and inflation in times of policy shifts. A well defined equation for money demand is obtained. The results indicate that the evolution of M3 is still in line with money demand. ...

Influence in the Face of Impunity

We compare dictator and impunity games. In impunity games, responders can reject offers but to no payoff consequence to proposers. Because proposers act under impunity, we should expect the same behavior across games, but experimentally observed behavior varies. Responders indeed exercise the rejection option. This threat psychologically influences proposers. Some proposers avoid rejection by offering ...

The Greener, the Happier? The Effect of Urban Land Use on Residential Well-Being

We investigate the effect of urban land use on residential well-being in major German cities, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and cross-section data from the European Urban Atlas. We reduce concerns about endogeneity by employing fixed-effects (within) estimators, with individual and city of residence fixed effects, while controlling for a rich set of observables. The results ...

Fiscal Policy Rules, Budget Deficits, and Forecasting Biases

In this paper, we analyze the impact fiscal policy rules have on budget deficits and forecasting biases in official budget outlooks. Persistent budget deficits and over-optimistic budget forecasts have been observed in many countries in the past, especially in the euro area. To prevent such developments from happening in the future, fiscal rules have been revised or implemented with the aim to strengthen ...

Jumps and Stochastic Volatility in Crude Oil Futures Prices Using Conditional Moments of Integrated Volatility

We evaluate alternative models of the volatility of commodity futures prices based on high-frequency intraday data from the crude oil futures markets for the October 2001–December 2012 period. These models are implemented with a simple GMM estimator that matches sample moments of the realized volatility to the corresponding population moments of the integrated volatility. Models incorporating both ...

The Mayor's Advantage: Causal Evidence on Incumbency Effects in German Mayoral Elections

Are We Architects of Our Own Happiness? The Importance of Family Background for Well-Being

This paper analyzes whether individuals have equal opportunity to achieve happiness (or well-being). We estimate sibling correlations and intergenerational correlations in self-reported life satisfaction, satisfaction with household income, job satisfaction, and satisfaction with health. We find high sibling correlations for all measures of well-being. The results suggest that family background explains, ...

Stability and Change in Risk-Taking Propensity across the Adult Life Span

Can risk-taking propensity be thought of as a trait that captures individual differences across domains, measures, and time? Studying stability in risk-taking propensities across the life span can help to answer such questions by uncovering parallel, or divergent, trajectories across domains and measures. We contribute to this effort by using data from respondents aged 18 to 85 in the German Socio-Economic ...

Editorial: From Panel Data to Longitudinal Analytical Designs: A Note on Contemporary Research Based on Data from the Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP)