External refereed essays

Routes to the Top

Who makes it to the top? We use the leading socio-economic survey in Germany, supplemented by extensive data on the rich, to answer this question. We identify the key predictors for belonging to the top 1 percent of income, wealth, and both distributions jointly. Although we consider many, only a few traits matter: Entrepreneurship and self-employment in conjunction with a sizable inheritance of company ...

Impact of Social Isolation on Mental Health Changes by Socio-Economic Status: A Moderated Mediation Analysis among Non-migrant, Migrant, and Refugee Subpopulations in Germany, 2016–2020

Background: Populations experiencing precarity face heightened mental health inequities, especially during crises. In this regard, it is established that socio-economic status (SES) and social isolation are critical factors influencing mental health outcomes, which interact syndemically. Understanding their interrelated mechanisms is crucial for developing effective public health strategies to support ...

Health System Resilience in the Context of Forced Migration: A Qualitative Framework Analysis of Germany’s Crisis Responses in 2015 and 2020

BackgroundHealth system resilience, the ability of a health system to maintain its functions under stress, has received increasing attention in recent years. Shortcomings in health system resilience are often most visible in the most vulnerable settings, including the care for asylum seekers and refugees. We therefore examined how the German health system responded to challenges and uncertainties during ...

Dealing with Censored Earnings in Register Data

Earnings are often top-coded (right-censored) in administrative registers. The censoring threshold in the case of Germany is the limit value for social security contributions, leading to a substantial fraction of censoring: For example, about 12%of male workers inWest Germany are affected, rising to above 30% for highly educated prime-aged workers. This missing right tail of the earnings distribution ...

On Strategic Behavior in Electricity Markets during the 2022 Energy Crisis: An Ex-post Analysis for the German Power Sector

During the 2022 energy crisis, electricity prices across Europe have risen to unprecedented heights. In a case study for Germany, this work investigates to which extent price spikes can be attributed to changes in upstream commodity prices, and to which degree strategic behavior by generators may have contributed to the situation. Electricity markets are more prone to the effects of such behavior if ...

Birth Cohort Size Variation and the Estimation of Class Size Effects

We show that in school systems with grade retention or redshirting birth cohort size is negatively related to the grade-level share of students who are too old for their grade. This compositional effect gives rise to an upward bias in estimates of class size effects based on commonly used research designs exploiting within-school variation in birth cohort size. Using data for all primary schools in ...

Primary Healthcare Models for Refugees Involving Nurses: A Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis

Introduction Primary healthcare (PHC) is key to addressing the health and social needs of refugees. Nurses are often part of multidisciplinary teams in PHC, but little is known about their roles and responsibilities in refugee healthcare. We aimed to synthesise the existing knowledge about models of care (MoC) for refugees in primary care settings which involve nursing professionals.Methods Systematic ...

Avoiding Unintentionally Correlated Shocks in Proxy Vector Autoregressive Analysis

Noting that the shocks in vector autoregressive models can be correlated if a number of shocks is identified individually by multiple proxy variables, we propose a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach for estimation that enforces uncorrelated shocks. We point out that if each proxy identifies exactly one shock and is uncorrelated with all other shocks, uncorrelatedness of the shocks provides ...

How Spousal Bereavement Shapes Life Satisfaction: Stability and Change Across Historical Time

Ensuring Low-Emission Electricity Purchasing Requires a Broader Systems Perspective

Introducing electricity purchase conditions in renewable fuel regulations and carbon accounting is a controversial issue in the US and Europe. We argue that their impact must be assessed considering demand flexibility, local grid conditions, and overlapping policy instruments such as emissions trading schemes and renewable portfolio standards. The introduction of more stringent requirements has a significant ...

Sovereign vs. Corporate Debt and Default: More Similar than You Think

Theory suggests that corporate and sovereign bonds are fundamentally different, also because sovereign debt has no bankruptcy mechanism and is hard to enforce. We show empirically that the two assets are more similar than you think, at least when it comes to high-yield bonds over the past 20 years. We use rich new data to compare high-yield US corporate (“junk”) bonds to high-yield emerging market ...

Taxonomy Disclosure in the EU: A Useful Framework, Despite Current Challenges

The EU Taxonomy is a classification system for sustainable economic activities and a framework for various regulatory initiatives. Its primary objectives are to enhance transparency, to reduce greenwashing and ultimately to redirect capital toward more sustainable activities. However, since its introduction, market participants have raised concerns about whether the benefits justify the costs. This ...

Optimal Discounts in Green Public Procurement

We provide an auction-theoretical analysis of Green Public Procurement (GPP) as a preferential program aimed at stimulating investment in green technologies. We find that GPP incentivizes more competitive firms to invest. We also show that GPP can be an optimal mechanism for a procurer who cares about minimizing the purchasing price while triggering green investment.

The Beyondpareto Command for Optimal Extreme-Value Index Estimation

In this article, we introduce the command beyondpareto, which estimates the extreme-value index for distributions that are Pareto-like, that is, whose upper tails are regularly varying and eventually become Pareto. The estimation is based on rank-size regressions, and the threshold value for the upper-order statistics included in the final regression is determined optimally by minimizing the asymptotic ...

Geopolitischer Umbruch verschärft Krise – Strukturreformen noch dringlicher

The Keys to the House - How Wealth Transfers Stratify Homeownership Opportunities

This study investigates how actual and anticipated intergenerational wealth transfers – i.e., inter vivos gifts and inheritances – contribute to inequalities in the transition to homeownership by parental social class. Utilizing discrete-time survival analysis on data from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (N = 13,018), we find that individuals whose parents were manual workers or service workers ...

Nonadditivity of Subjective Expectations over Different Time Intervals

We examine the additivity of expectations over different time intervals. For example, when asked about 10-year stock price growth, survey respondents report an expected change that is not equal to, but closer to zero than, the sum of their expectations over two shorter time intervals that cover the same 10 years. Such subadditivity, which we also find in expectations for other economic variables, is ...

Contracting Matters: Hedging Producers and Consumers with a Renewable Energy Pool

Renewable energy installations are rapidly gaining market share due to falling technology costs and supportive policies. Meanwhile, the energy price crisis in 2022 shifted the energy policy debate toward the question of how consumers can better benefit from the low and stable generation costs of renewable electricity. Long-term contracts for renewable energy to link producers and consumers are an option ...

The Reliability of Replications: A Study in Computational Reproductions

This study investigates researcher variability in computational reproduction, an activity for which it is least expected. Eighty-five independent teams attempted numerical replication of results from an original study of policy preferences and immigration. Reproduction teams were randomly grouped into a ‘transparent group’ receiving original study and code or ‘opaque group’ receiving only a method ...

Fieldwork Monitoring in Practice: Insights from 17 Large-scale Social Science Surveys in Germany

This study provides a synopsis of the current fieldwork monitoring practices of large-scale surveys in Germany. Based on the results of a standardized questionnaire, the study summarizes fieldwork monitoring indicators used and fieldwork measures carried out by 17 large-scale social sciences surveys in Germany. Our descriptive results reveal that a common set of fieldwork indicators and measures exist ...