Externe referierte Aufsätze

The Distribution of Crowding Costs in Public Transport: New Evidence from Paris

Whilst congestion in automobile traffic increases trip durations, this is often not the case in rail-based public transport where congestion rather leads to in-vehicle crowding, often neglected in empirical studies. Using original survey data from Paris, this article assesses the distribution of comfort costs of congestion in public transport. Estimating willingness to pay for less crowded trips at ...

Urban House Prices: A Tale of 48 Cities

In this paper, the authors construct a unique data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities across 24 countries. The data collected between January and May 2012 from 33 websites, are drawn from Internet advertisements of dwellings. Using the resulting sample of more than 1,000,000 announcements, the authors compute the quality-adjusted city-specific house prices. Based on ...

Bayesian Procedures as a Numerical Tool for the Estimation of an Intertemporal Discrete Choice Model

Discrete choice models usually require a general specification of unobserved heterogeneity. In this paper, we apply Bayesian procedures as a numerical tool for the estimation of a female labor supply model based on a sample size that is typical for common household panels. We provide two important results for the practitioner: First, for a specification with a multivariate normal distribution for the ...

International Knowledge Spillovers through High-Tech Imports and R&D of Foreign-Owned Firms

The international transmission of knowledge through import spillovers, as a source of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth, has received much attention in the literature. We investigate two additional direct channels through which R&D disseminates: the import of high-technology goods and the internationalization of business R&D. Building on an extensive data-set, covering both developing and industrial ...

Financing Patterns of R&D in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and the Perception of Innovation Barriers in Germany

We analyze the role public support plays in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) R&D financing as well as these firms’ assessments of financing conditions in the context of other framework conditions for innovation. Using the sample of 2,708 German SMEs that participated in public R&D promotion programs during 2005–10, we identify four unique types of R&D financing. Firms are generally positive ...

Small Might Be Beautiful, but Bigger Performs Better: Scale Economies in "Green" Refurbishments of Apartment Housing

The energy efficiency of the residential housing stock plays a key role in strategies to mitigate climate change and global warming. In this context, it is frequently argued that private investment and the quality of thermal upgrades are too low in the light of the challenges faced and the potential energy cost savings. While many authors address the potential barriers for investors to increase energy ...

Confidence Bands for Impulse Responses: Bonferroni vs. Wald

In impulse response analysis estimation uncertainty is typically displayed by constructing bands around estimated impulse response functions. If they are based on the joint asymptotic distribution possibly constructed with bootstrap methods in a frequentist framework, often individual confidence intervals are simply connected to obtain the bands. Such bands are known to be too narrow and have a joint ...

How Natural Disasters Can Affect Environmental Concerns, Risk Aversion, and Even Politics: Evidence from Fukushima and Three European Countries

We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on environmental concerns, well-being, risk aversion, and political preferences in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. In these countries, overall life satisfaction did not significantly decrease, but the disaster significantly increased environmental concerns among Germans. One underlying mechanism likely operated through the perceived risk of a similar ...

Immigrant Occupational Composition and the Earnings of Immigrants and Natives in Germany: Sorting or Devaluation?

In this article, the influence of immigrant occupational composition on the earnings of immigrants and natives in Germany is examined. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and the German Microcensus, several relevant concepts are tested. The notion of quality sorting states that the differences in wages that are associated with the immigrant share within occupations are due only to ...

Cooperation or Competition? A Field Experiment on Non-Monetary Learning Incentives

We assess the effect of two antithetic non-monetary incentive schemes based on grading rules on students’ effort, using experimental data. We randomly assigned students to a tournament scheme that fosters competition between paired up students, a cooperative scheme that promotes information sharing and collaboration between students and a baseline treatment in which students can neither compete nor ...

Statistical Problems and Solutions in Onomastic Research - Exemplified by a Comparison of Given Name Distributions in Germany throughout the 20th Century

Das Sozio-oekonomische Panel (SOEP) bietet die seltene Gelegenheit, Vergabemuster von Vornamen im Zeitraum seit 1900 bis heute mit repräsentativen Umfragedaten zu untersuchen. Die Umfrage umfasst mehr als 50.000 Teilnehmer. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über typische Verteilungen von Vornamen in Deutschland und deren Entwicklungen über die Zeit. Zunächst werden Vorteile, Einschränkungen und Grenzen ...

Unbundling the Incumbent: Evidence from UK Broadband

We consider the impact of a regulatory process forcing an incumbent telecom operator to make its local broadband network available to other companies (local loop unbundling, or LLU). Entrants are then able to upgrade their individual lines and offer Internet services directly to customers. Employing a very detailed data set covering the whole of the United Kingdom, we find that, over the course of ...

Long-term Care Insurance and Carers' Labor Supply: A Structural Model

In Germany, individuals in need of long-term care receive support through benefits of the long-term care insurance. A central goal of the insurance is to support informal care provided by family members. Care recipients can choose between benefits in kind (formal home care services) and benefits in cash. From a budgetary perspective, family care is often considered a cost-saving alternative to formal ...

Big Changes before Big Birthdays? Panel Data Provide No Evidence of End-of-Decade Crises

The Role of Paternal Risk Attitudes in Long-Run Education Outcomes and Intergenerational Mobility

This paper studies the role of paternal risk attitudes in sons’ long-run education outcomes and in the intergenerational transmission of incomes and education. Based on 1984–2012 German Socio-Economic Panel Study data of sons and fathers, I show that fathers’ risk aversion is inversely related to sons’ long-run levels of education. A quasi-experimental setting provides no evidence for reverse causality. ...

Veränderungen in der gruppenspezifischen Nutzung von ganztägigen Schulangeboten: Längsschnittanalysen für den Primarbereich

Seit Beginn des Bundes-Investitionsprogramms „Zukunft Bildung und Betreuung“ (IZBB) im Jahr 2003 hat sich der Anteil der Grundschulkinder, die ganztägig eine Schule besuchen, mehr als vervierfacht. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht der vorliegende Beitrag zum einen, welche demografischen und sozioökonomischen Merkmale Kinder aufweisen, die ganztägige Schulangebote nutzen. Zum anderen wird der Frage ...

Qualifikationsspezifische Übergänge aus befristeter Beschäftigung am Erwerbsanfang - zwischen Screening und Flexibilisierung

In der vorliegenden Studie werden die Folgen befristeter Beschäftigung am Anfang der Erwerbskarriere für unterschiedliche Qualifikationsgruppen in Deutschland zwischen 1984 und 2010 untersucht. Dazu werden auf Basis der 8. Etappe des Nationalen Bildungspanels (NEPS-E8) Übergänge aus befristeten Erstbeschäftigungen mittels ereignisdatenanalytischer Methoden untersucht. Wie sich zeigt, hängen die Chancen ...

Capital-Flow Management Measures: What Are They Good for?

Are capital controls and macroprudential measures related to international exposures successful in achieving their objectives? Assessing their effectiveness is complicated by selection bias; countries which change their capital-flow management measures (CFMs) often share specific characteristics and are responding to changes in variables that the CFMs are intended to influence. This paper addresses ...

Outside Earnings, Absence, and Activity: Evidence from German Parliamentarians

We examine moonlighting by politicians in Germany. In July 2007, the German Supreme Court adjudicated that members of parliament (MPs) have to publish details of their outside earnings. Using panel data models, we investigate how outside earnings are correlated with absence and parliamentary activity. The results do not indicate that outside earnings are correlated with absence rates and speeches; ...

Power System Impacts of Electric Vehicles in Germany: Charging with Coal or Renewables

We analyze the impacts of future scenarios of electric vehicles (EVs) on the German power system, drawing on different assumptions on the charging mode. We find that the impact on the load duration curve strongly differs between charging modes. In a fully user-driven mode, charging largely occurs during daytime and in the evening, when power demand is already high. User-driven charging may thus have ...