Externe referierte Aufsätze

Preferences for Childcare Policies: Theory and Evidence

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from rich to poor, the rich should favour mixed over pure public provision, but if public provision redistributes ...

Financial Student Aid and Enrollment in Higher Education: New Evidence from Germany

Means-tested student aid might affect enrollment in higher education. To derive the potential influence of student aid, we use a tax-benefit microsimulation model. The effect is a non-linear function of parental income, with variation as a result of bracket creeping and various reforms. Therefore, the effect of student aid on enrollment can be separated from the effects of income and other family characteristics. ...

"An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth": Political Violence and Counter-Insurgency in Egypt

The authors analyse newly collected time-series data measuring the dimensions of violent political conflict in Egypt. Attention is focused on the interaction between politically motivated attacks by Islamists and the counter-insurgency measures used by the Egyptian government. Both insurgency and counter-insurgency are multidimensional. Insurgencyincludes attacks on tourists, on Egyptian civilians ...

The Private Equity Premium Puzzle Revisited: New Evidence on the Role of Heterogeneous Risk Attitudes

The empirical finding that entrepreneurs invest a large share of their wealth in their own firms, despite comparably low returns and high risk, has become known as the private equity premium puzzle. This paper provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that lower risk-aversion of entrepreneurs, and thus not necessarily credit constraints, may explain this puzzle. The analysis is based on a representative ...

Modeling Strategic Electricity Storage: The Case of Pumped Hydro Storage in Germany

We study the strategic utilization of storage in imperfect electricity markets. We apply a game-theoretic Cournot model to the German power market and analyze different counterfactual and realistic cases of pumped hydro storage. Our main finding is that both storage utilization and storage-related welfare effects depend on storage ownership and the operator's involvement in conventional generation. ...

Determinants of the Export Behaviour of German Business Services Companies

This paper presents results about the determinants of export behaviour of services firms. Using a unique panel of enterprises for the years 2003 to 2005, the impact of size, productivity, human capital, experience on the national market, etc. on export behaviour are analysed. In addition, the researchers control for unobserved time-invariant characteristics by using a pooled fractional probit estimator. ...

Akzeptanz von Grundschulempfehlungen und Auswirkungen auf den weiteren Bildungsverlauf

Der Übergang von der Grundschule in die mehrgliedrige Sekundarstufe ist in Deutschland entscheidend für den weiteren Bildungsverlauf, da spätere Wechsel der Schulform zwar möglich sind, aber nur relativ selten stattfinden. In diesem Papier betrachten wir den Einfluss der Akzeptanz der Schullaufbahnempfehlungen am Ende der Grundschulzeit auf den Bildungsverlauf bis zum Alter von 17 Jahren. Die Datengrundlage ...

Do We Follow Others When We Should? A Simple Test of Rational Expectations

The paper presents a meta dataset covering 13 experiments on social learning games. It is found that in situations where it is empirically optimal to follow others and contradict one's own information, the players err in the majority of cases, forgoing substantial parts of earnings. The average player contradicts her own signal only if the empirical odds ratio of the own signal being wrong, conditional ...

The Impact of Governance Structure on Firm Performance: An Application to the German Water Distribution Sector

This paper investigates the impact of governance structure on firm performance (i.e., retail prices) using a database of 765 German water suppliers. Controlling for scale economies as well as technical and structural characteristics, we find that private sector participation is accompanied with higher retail prices. Furthermore, Eastern states on average feature higher prices mirroring significant ...

An Overview of Biofuel Policies across the World

In the last decade biofuel production has been driven by governmental policies. This article reviews the national strategy plans of the world's leading producers. Particular attention is dedicated to blending targets, support schemes and feedstock use. Individual country profiles are grouped by continent and include North America (Canada and the US), South America (Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia), ...

Does the Nominal Exchange Rate Regime Affect the Real Interest Parity Condition?

The real interest parity (RIP) condition combines two cornerstones in international finance, uncovered interest parity (UIP) and ex ante purchasing power parity (PPP). The extent of deviation from RIP is therefore an indicator of the lack of product and financial market integration. This paper investigates whether the nominal exchange rate regime has an impact on RIP. The analysis is based on 15 annual ...

Aid Delivery through Non-governmental Organisations: Does the Aid Channel Matter for the Targeting of Swedish Aid?

This paper analyses whether aid channelled through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is less affected by selfish donor motivations and better targeted to needy recipient countries than aid distributed by state agencies. We employ Tobit (and Probit) models and make use of an exceptionally detailed database that allows an assessment of the allocation of Swedish aid channelled through NGOs in comparison ...

Access Pricing and Network Expansion in Natural Gas Markets

Wir diskutieren alternative Ansätze zur Bekämpfung lokaler Marktmacht in Erdgasmärkten mit einem besonderen Fokus auf den Ausbau bestehender Pipelinekapazitäten. Cremer und Laffont (Eur. Econ. Rev. 46:928-935, 2002) haben gezeigt, dass Preisdiskriminierungbeim Netzzugang korrigierend bei Marktversagen wirken und auch zur Erhöhung der Produktionsmenge (also Transportvolumina) führen kann. Im Gegensatz ...

The Effect of Direct Democracy on Income Redistribution: Evidence for Switzerland

In political economics, the impact of institutions on income redistribution is mainly studied by comparing different forms of representative democracy. In this article, we analyze the influence of direct democratic institutions on redistribution first focusing on welfare and nonwelfare spending using yearly panel data for Swiss cantons. Then, we estimate a model, which explains the determinants of ...

On the Sensitivity of Firms' Investment to Cash Flow and Uncertainty

We investigate the analytical and empirical linkages between cash flow, uncertainty, and firms' capital investment behavior. Our empirical approach constructs measures of own- and market-specific uncertainty from firms' daily stock returns and S&P 500 index returns along with a CAPM-based risk measure. Our results indicate that even in the presence of important firm-specific variables, uncertainty ...

Determinanten kindlicher Geduld: Ergebnisse einer Experimentalstudie im Haushaltskontext

Patience as a basis for life success is not just a question of biology and heredity: Rather, the early interaction between parent and child and socialization in early childhood appear to be the "cradle of action" in the area of time preferences as well. In this study, we use an experimental dataset collected in the framework of the longitudinal German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study to investigate ...

The Research Data Center (RDC) of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Eastern Germany on the Brink of Closing the Productivity Gap? Firm Level Evidence from Manufacturing

After 20 years of transition, productivity in Eastern Germany is still considerably below the Western level. We study the development of the East-West productivity gap at the firm level and link it to firms' product policy. Redesigning their product range was a major challenge for Eastern enterprises as they sought their place in the international division of labour. Based on data from manufacturing ...

The Problem of Money Illusion in Economics

Money illusion in economic theory has been an assumption rejected by academic economists for quite some time. However, with the gradual diffusion of behavioural economics based on experimental research this has changed. Now, it has become a respected fact to accept money illusion as a stylized fact of human behaviour. However, it still needs a better understanding why monetary phenomena especially ...

"Marginal Employment" and the Demand for Heterogeneous Labour-Elasticity Estimates from a Multi-Factor Labour Demand Model for Germany

We develop a structural multi-factor labour demand model which distinguishes between eight labour categories including marginal employment, i.e. low-paying jobs with only a few working hours and partially exempted from employee's social security contributions. Using a new panel data set for Germany, the model is estimated both for the number of workers and total working hours. For unskilled and skilled ...