Externe referierte Aufsätze

Seeking Pleasure and Seeking Pain: Differences in Prohedonic and Contra-Hedonic Motivation from Adolescence to Old Age

Using a mobile-phone-based experience-sampling technology in a sample of 378 individuals ranging from 14 to 86 years of age, we investigated age differences in how people want to influence their feelings in their daily lives. Contra-hedonic motivations of wanting either to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect were most prevalent in adolescence, whereas prohedonic motivations ...

Regional Convergence in the Enlarged European Union

There are only a few studies which examine regional convergence in the enlarged European Union. None of these approaches uses a conditional convergence model, which considers different initial conditions of regions. We refer to the Mankiw et al. (1992) model to examine convergence including the New Member States. Note that most researchers use equal values of depreciation rate and rate of technological ...

Authentic Happiness Theory Supported by Impact of Religion on Life Satisfaction: A Longitudinal Analysis with Data for Germany

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, this paper assesses the relationship between life satisfaction and religious practice. It is shown that individuals who become more religious over time record long term gains in life satisfaction, while those who become less religious record long term losses. This result holds net of the effects of personality traits, and also in fixed effects ...

What Drives Housing Prices Down? Evidence from an International Panel

In this study, we suggest an explanation for the low growth rates of real housing prices in Canada and Germany in comparison to other OECD countries over the period 1975-2005. We show that the long-run development of housing markets is determined by real disposable percapita income, the real long-term interest rate, population growth, and urbanization. The differential development of real housing prices ...

Risk Attitudes and Reservation Wages of Unemployed Workers: Evidence from Panel Data

This paper studies risk attitudes of unemployed job seekers and their relationship to self-reported reservation wages. We find that risk aversion is prevalent, and that reservation wages decrease slightly over time. Furthermore, risk aversion and reservation wages are negatively correlated.

The Chernobyl Disaster, Concern about the Environment, and Life Satisfaction

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster on satisfaction with life and on concern about the environment. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and identifying the exogenous event through the exact date of occurance, I find that concern about the environment sharply increased immediately after the incident. However, there is no effect ...

A History of Conditionality: Lessons for International Cooperation on Climate Policy

This article surveys the experience of conditionality provisions applied by the World Bank, the IMF, bilateral donors, and the European Union's accession process. Ownership is essential for effective cooperation and requires domestic climate policies to be country-driven and decision-making to be equitable. Bilateral cooperation allows for a direct exchange of expertise and long-term relationships. ...

Policy Targets: Lessons for Effective Implementation of Climate Actions

Policy targets are used to improve the implementation of domestic and international actions, in a national context and in international frameworks. But how can domestic and international experience be useful for climate policy? Case studies point to the value of defining policy targets more broadly than final outcomes, which in the case of climate policy are CO2 emission reductions. There is a need ...

Understanding the Roles and Interactions of International Cooperation on Domestic Climate Policies: Editorial

Introduction: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change defines the principle of common but differentiated responsibility (Art. 4.1 of UNFCCC). It is the common responsibility of all countries to pursue mitigation actions so as to achieve climate stabilization. The differentiated nature of historic responsibility, capabilities and economic situation creates a responsibility for developed ...

Employer Size, Wages and Unobserved Skills: Evidence from Moonlighters in the UK

In this paper we examine the labour quality explanation of the employer size-wage gap: larger firms pay higher wages because they employ more skilled workers. Most previous studies control for unobserved skills of workers by applying the fixed-effects estimator to longitudinal data, thus assuming time-invariant unobserved individual heterogeneity. We release this assumption by using a sample of moonlighters; ...

Sports Rules as Common Pool Resources: A Better Way to Respond to Doping

Dynamics of Health and Labor Market Risks

While there is little doubt that the probability of poor health increases with age, and that less healthy people face a more difficult situation on the labor market, the precise relationship between facing the risks of health deterioration and labor market instability is not well understood. Using 12 years of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel we study the nature of the relationship between ...

The Impact of Household Capital Income on Income Inequality: A Factor Decomposition Analysis for the UK, Germany and the USA

This paper analyses the contribution of capital income to income inequality in a cross-national comparison. Using micro-data from the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) for three prominent panel studies, namely the BHPS for the UK, the SOEP for West Germany, and the PSID for the USA, we use the factor decomposition method described by Shorrocks (Econometrica 50:193-211, 1982). The factor decomposition ...

GEE Estimation of the Covariance Structure of a Bivariate Panel Data Model with an Application to Wage Dynamics and the Incidence of Profit-Sharing in West Germany

We propose a generalized estimating equations (GEE) approach to the estimation of the mean and covariance structure of bivariate time series processes of panel data. The one-step approach allows for mixed continuous and discrete dependent variables. A Monte Carlo Study is presented to compare our particular GEE estimator with more standard GEE-estimators. In the empirical illustration, we apply our ...

Revisiting Friendship Networks

We extend the model of friendship networks developed by Brueckner (2006) in two ways. First, we extend the level of indirect benefits by incorporating benefits from up to three links and explore its implication for the socially optimal and individual effort levels. Next, we generalize the magnetic agent problem by allowing for more than 3 players by restricting ourselves to regular networks that include ...

Explaining the Hump in Life Cycle Consumption Profiles

This paper documents life cycle (or age) profiles of (log) household income, durable and non-durable consumption for Dutch households after explicitly controlling for time (or business cycle) effects and birth cohort effects. We find that both measures of consumption as well as income is clearly hump shaped over the life cycle. Hence, real consumption per household seems to track income over the life ...

Hysteresis in the Development of Unemployment: The EU and US Experience

We examine hysteresis in EU and US unemployment by panel unit root tests. First generation tests indicate that unemployment is stationary. Second generation tests show mixed results. Idiosyncratic components are stationary in the US. A unit root in the US common component depends on the starting point of the sample. While the common component is nonstationary over the whole period, it is mean-reverting ...

Variable Selection and Oversampling in the Use of Smooth Support Vector Machines for Predicting the Default Risk of Companies

In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis is vital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable to the bank's objectives regarding the relation of false acceptances (Type I error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitability of smooth support vector machines (SSVM), and investigate how important factors such as the selection of appropriate ...

Voting on Redistribution with Tax Evasion

This paper analyzes voting on a linear income tax whose proceeds are redistributed lump sum to the taxpayers. Individuals can evade taxes, which leads to penalties if evasion is detected. Since preferences satisfy neither single peakedness nor single crossing, a voting equilibrium may not exist. When an equilibrium does exist, there are several possible outcomes. There may be 'conventional' equilibria ...

Zur Entwicklung der Vermögensungleichheit in Deutschland

For a long time, the social policy discussion in Germany has been heavily dominated by income inequality and poverty risk rates, while at the same time the analysis of personal wealth distribution was underdeveloped, last but not least due to a severe lack of appropriate data. Using representative micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this paper analyzes individual level information ...