External refereed essays

Energiewende für die Modernisierung des Industriestandorts Deutschland nutzen

Die Industrie ist ein Eckpfeiler des wirtschaftlichen Erfolgs Deutschlands. Ihre Investitionstätigkeit ist im internationalen Vergleich zurzeit allerdings schwach. Befürchtet wird, dass die Kosten der Energiewende die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und damit die Attraktivität des Produktionsstandorts Deutschland einschränken. Die Antwort der Politik auf diesen vermeintlichen Zielkonflikt sind umfangreiche Ausnahmeregelungen, ...

How Far Reaches the Power of Personality? Personality Predictors of Terminal Decline in Well-Being

Personality is a powerful predictor of central life outcomes, including subjective well-being. Yet, we still know little about how personality manifests in the very last years of life when well-being typically falls rapidly. Here, we investigate whether the Big Five personality traits buffer (or magnify) terminal decline in well-being beyond and in interaction with functioning in key physical and social ...

David and Goliath in the Poll Booth: Group Size, Political Power and Voter Turnout

This article analyses how the presence of a dominant group of voters within the electorate affects voter turnout. Theoretically, we argue that its absolute size affects turnout via increased free-riding incentives and reduced social pressure to vote within a larger dominant group. Its relative size compared to other groups within the electorate influences turnout through instrumental and expressive ...

Age Differences in Intertemporal Choice: U-Shaped Associations in a Probability Sample of German Households

To describe adult age differences in intertemporal choice, we analyzed data from 1,491 participants who completed an incentivized monetary intertemporal discounting choice task involving different conditions (e.g., time delay of 12 months vs. 1 month). Respondents completed a number of other survey measures including behavioral measures of cognitive ability and self-reports concerning health, financial ...

The Economic Cost of Subway Congestion: Estimates from Paris

Related to the increased encouragement of public transport (PT) by policy-makers, over-crowding in PT has become a major issue worldwide. Whilst the impact of in-vehicle crowding on individuals' travel costs has been considered, we focus on aggregate welfare losses. We apply a Pigouvian framework to the case of subways and compute the economic cost of congestion (ECC). We combine data of the 14 metro ...

North American Natural Gas and Energy Markets in Transition: Insights from Global Models

This modeling comparison exercise looks at the global consequences of increased shale gas production in the U.S. and increased gas demand from Asia. We find that differences in models' theoretical construct and assumptions can lead to divergences in their predictions about the consequences of U.S. shale gas boom. In general, models find that U.S. High Shale Gas scenario leads to increased U.S. production, ...

The Dominance of Introspective Measures and What This Implies: The Example of Environmental Attitude

The behavioral sciences, including most of psychology, seek to explain and predict behavior with the help of theories and models that involve concepts (e.g., attitudes) that are subsequently translated into measures. Currently, some subdisciplines such as social psychology focus almost exclusively on measures that demand reflection or even introspection when administered to persons. We argue that such ...

Moving Home in the Early Years: What Happens to Children in the Uk?

Children’s early years are a time when many families move home. Does residential mobility affect children’s wellbeing at age five in terms of cognitive and behavioural development? The question arises as moving home is sometimes portrayed as a stressful life event adversely affecting child development, particularly if frequent. Other studies suggest a more mixed role for home moves, which may reflect ...

Replication Studies in Economics - How Many and Which Papers Are Chosen for Replication, and Why?

We investigate how often replication studies are published in empirical economics and what types of journal articles are replicated. We find that between 1974 and 2014 0.1% of publications in the top 50 economics journals were replication studies. We consider the results of published formal replication studies (whether they are negating or reinforcing) and their extent: Narrow replication studies are ...

On the Economics of Electrical Storage for Variable Renewable Energy Sources

The use of renewable energy sources is a major strategy to mitigate climate change. Yet Sinn (2017) argues that excessive electrical storage requirements limit the further expansion of variable wind and solar energy. We question, and alter, strong implicit assumptions of Sinn’s approach and find that storage needs are considerably lower, up to two orders of magnitude. First, we move away from corner ...

Big Banks and Macroeconomic Outcomes: Theory and Cross‐Country Evidence of Granularity

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? We develop a theory of granularity for the banking sector by modeling heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using data for a large set of countries, we show that the banking sector is indeed “granular,” as the right tail of the bank size distribution follows a power law. We demonstrate empirically that the presence of big banks, ...

Does Financial Literacy Improve Financial Inclusion? Cross Country Evidence

While financial inclusion is typically addressed by improving the financial infrastructure, we show that a higher degree of financial literacy also has a clear beneficial effect. We study this effect at the cross-country level, which allows us to consider institutional variation. Regarding “access to finance”, financial infrastructure and financial literacy are mainly substitutes. However, regarding ...

‘Universal’ Early Education: Who Benefits? Patterns in Take‐up of the Entitlement to Free Early Education among Three‐Year‐Olds in England

For over a decade, all three‐year‐olds in England have been entitled to a free part‐time early education place. One aim of this policy is to close developmental gaps between higher‐income and low‐income children. However, the success of the initiative depends on children accessing the places. Using the National Pupil Database, we examine all autumn‐born four‐year‐olds attending in January 2011, and ...

The End of Cheap Labor: Are Foreign Investors Leaving China?

China's government has been promoting the shift toward a consumption-based economy in the past few years to arrive at a path of sustainable and socially inclusive growth. In this context, the explicit goal to significantly raise the percentage ofwages in the national household income was an integral part of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–15). These changes in economic strategy are likely to affect the ...

The Balance Sheet Effects of Oil Market Shocks: An Industry Level Analysis

The paper estimates the dynamic impact of structural oil market shocks on the balance sheet of US firms, using industry level data covering manufacturing, trade and mining sectors. For manufacturing firms, findings indicate that an unexpected disruption in oil supply that raises oil prices by 1% lowers firm profits by 1.3% on impact. On the other hand, profits rise by 0.39% in response to the same ...

The State Dependent Impact of Bank Exposure on Sovereign Risk

The theoretical literature remains inconclusive on whether changes in bank exposure to the domestic sovereign have an adverse effect on the sovereign risk position through a diabolic loop in the sovereign-bank nexus, or reduce perceived default risk by acting as a disciplinary device for the sovereign. In this paper we empirically analyze the impact of exogenous changes in bank exposure on the risk ...

Corporate Debt and Investment: A Firm-Level Analysis for Stressed Euro Area Countries

This paper investigates the link between corporate debt and investment for a group of five peripheral euro area countries. Using firm-level data from 2005 to 2014, we postulate a non-linear corporate leverage-investment relationship and derivethresholds beyond which leverage has a negative and significant impact on investment. The investment sensitivity of debt increased after 2008 when financial distress ...

Ohne Plan: Wirtschaftsentwicklung und Wirtschaftspolitik in Ungarn

School Entry, Afternoon Care, and Mothers’ Labour Supply

The availability of childcare is a crucial factor for mothers’ labour force participation. While most of the literature examines childcare for preschool children, we specifically focus on primary school-aged children, estimating the effect of formal afternoon care on maternal labour supply. To do so, we use a novel matching technique, entropy balancing, and draw on the rich and longitudinal data of ...

The Association between CVD-Related Biomarkers and Mortality in the Health and Retirement Survey

Background: It has become increasingly common in multiple purpose general population surveys to integrate different kinds of biomarker in the data collection process.Objective: In this article we test the predictive power of five different functional forms of CVD-related biomarkers for all-cause and CVD mortality in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS).Methods: We use five different functional forms ...