External refereed essays

Primenenie cenovoj diskriminacii na pervicnom rynke kvartir v rossii

The paper explores practical issues of using price discrimination in the markets of new apartments.First, we discuss various strategies of price discrimination which may be applied byconstruction companies to increase revenue (i. e. discrimination by observable characteristics orby self-selection). Then we suggest an approach for empirical estimation of possibility of pricediscrimination in this market, ...

Bridging the Industrial Energy Efficiency Gap: Assessing the Evidence from the Italian White Certificate Scheme

The Italian white certificate scheme is the main national policy instrument to incentivise energy efficiency of the industrial sector, with savings from white certificates amounting to 2% of Italy's 2012 primary energy consumption. The mechanism sets binding energy-saving targets on electricity and gas distributors with at least 50,000 clients and includes a voluntary opt-in model for participation ...

The Effectiveness of a Strategic Reserve in the Presence of a High Portfolio Share of Renewable Energy Sources

To ensure sufficient investment in electricity generation capacity, mechanisms such as strategic reserves are being considered or already implemented. We analyze the effectiveness of a strategic reserve in the presence of a growing portfolio share of renewable energy sources (RES) with EMLab-Generation, an agent-based electricity market model. A strategic reserve can stabilize investment, but within ...

The PIAAC Longitudinal Study in Germany: Rationale and Design

In Germany, the respondents who had participated in the 2012 survey of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) were re-approached for the panel study PIAAC-L. PIAAC-L aims at investigating the longitudinal effects of skill outcomes over the life course and the development of the key skills assessed in PIAAC. Moreover, additional and alternative background information ...

The Long Arm of Childhood Circumstances on Health in Old Age: Evidence from SHARELIFE

Socioeconomic status (SES) and health during childhood have been consistently observed to be associated with health in old age in many studies. However, the exact mechanisms behind these two associations have not yet been fully understood. The key challenge is to understand how childhood SES and health are associated. Furthermore, data on childhood factors and life course mediators are sometimes unavailable, ...

Euro Area Government Bonds: Fragmentation and Contagion during the Sovereign Debt Crisis

The paper analyzes the integration of euro area sovereign bond markets during the European sovereign debt crisis. It tests for contagion (i.e., an intensification in the transmission of shocks across countries), fragmentation (a reduction in spillovers) and flight-to-quality patterns, exploiting the heteroskedasticity of intraday changes in bond yields for identification. The paper finds that euro ...

Cognitive Skills, Non-cognitive Skills, and Family Background: Evidence from Sibling Correlations

This paper estimates sibling correlations in cognitive and non-cognitive skills to evaluate the importance of family background for skill formation. Based on a large representative German dataset including IQ test scores and measures of non-cognitive skills, a restricted maximum likelihood model indicates a strong relationship between family background and skill formation. Sibling correlations in non-cognitive ...

Energy Taxes, Reforms and Income Inequality: An Empirical Cross-Country Analysis

Environmentally-motivated taxes on energy products can effectively induce households and firms to take into account the environmental externalities of energy transformation and use. The levy of such taxes is, however, often hampered by public concerns over possible distributional effects. This paper analyses the macroeconomic relationship between taxes on energy products and income inequality. It also ...

Civil Liberties vs. Security: Why Citizens Accept or Reject Digital Security Measures

Fundamental changes to security policy in European democracies raise the question of the acceptance of new security measures. This paper aims to explain why new measures are accepted (or not). It combines three core elements that are typically analysed separately in the literature: individual attitudes (especially trust), social context and cost/benefit balancing. Comparing Germany and the UK, the ...

Short-Run Fuel Price Responses: At the Pump and on the Road

We provide evidence that motorists respond to short-run fluctuations in fuel prices at the gas pump and not on the road. Employing variants of censored panel regression to control for censoring of the dependent variable, we find that the fuel price has a negative impact on the quantity of fuel purchased, but no consistently significant impact on the subsequent distance driven until the next refill. ...

Intangible Investments and International Business Cycles

Intangible capital is an increasingly important factor of production in advanced economies. Governments in Europe and elsewhere promote investment in intangible assets. However, the potential role of intangibles for business cycles and the international transmission of shocks is not well understood. In this paper, we investigate the international business cycle effects of intangible capital. To this ...

Personal Income Tax Progressivity and Output Volatility: Evidence from OECD Countries

This paper investigates empirically the effect of personal income tax progressivity on output volatility using macro data from a sample of OECD countries over the period 1982–2009. Our measure of progressivity is based on the difference between the marginal and the average personal income tax rate for the average production worker. We find supportive empirical evidence for the hypothesis that higher ...

Locus of Control and Mothers' Return to Employment

The Economics of the EU ETS Market Stability Reserve: Introduction

Longitudinal Wealth Data and Multiple Imputation: An Evaluation Study

Statistical analysis in surveys is generally facing missing data. In longitudinal studies for some missing values there might be past or future data points available. The question arises how to successfully transform this advantage into improvedimputation strategies. In a simulation study the authors compare six combinations of cross-sectional and longitudinal imputation strategies for German wealth ...

Think National, Forecast Local: A Case Study of 71 German Urban Housing Markets

In this article, we examine whether the local indicators are able to predict the city-level housing prices and rents better than national indicators. For this purpose, we assess the forecasting ability of 126 indicators and 21 types of forecast combinations using a sample of 71 large German cities. There are several predictors that are especially useful, namely price-to-rent ratios, national-level ...

Offset Credits in the EU ETS: A Quantile Estimation of Firm-Level Transaction Costs

International carbon offset certificates were cheaper than European Union Allowances, although they were substitutes within the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). Thus, firms had a strong incentive to use offset certificates. However, a considerable number of firms did not exhaust their offset quota and, by doing so, seemingly forwent profits. While most literature on emissions trading evaluates ...

Empirics on the Long-Run Effects of Building Energy Codes in the Housing Market

We study the effectiveness of building energy codes, taking a long-run perspective. The focus is on regulation’s impact on energy demand in both high- and low-quality residences, in other words, the diffusion and the entry of “green” buildings in the housing market. We develop a measure for regulation intensity and apply this to a panel-error-correction regression model for energy requirements of a ...

Genetic Variants Linked to Education Predict Longevity

Educational attainment is associated with many health outcomes, including longevity. It is also known to be substantially heritable. Here, we used data from three large genetic epidemiology cohort studies (Generation Scotland, n = ∼17,000; UK Biobank, n = ∼115,000; and the Estonian Biobank, n = ∼6,000) to test whether education-linked genetic variants can predict lifespan length. We did so by using ...

The Informed Consent to Record Linkage in Panel Studies: Optimal Starting Wave, Consent Refusals, and Subsequent Panel Attrition

Social scientists increasingly link survey data with administrative records. However, data protection legislation often requires respondents’ informed consent prior to record linkage. This has confronted research with nontrivial refusal rates in combination with selectivity of the consent decision. In longitudinal surveys, linkage requests may also increase attrition rates in subsequent waves, as many ...