External refereed essays

Drivers of Structural Change in Cross-Border Banking since the Global Financial Crisis

The paper analyzes the effects of changes to regulatory policy and to monetary policy on cross-border bank lending since the global financial crisis. Cross-border bank lending has decreased, and the home bias in the credit portfolio of banks has risen sharply, especially among banks in the euro area. Our results suggest that expansionary monetary policy in the source countries – as measured by the ...

Integrating Intermittent Renewable Wind Generation: A Stochastic Multi-Market Electricity Model for the European Electricity Market

In northern Europe, wind energy has become a dominate renewable energy source, due to natural conditions and national support schemes. However, the uncertainty about wind generation affects existing network infrastructure and power production planning of generators, which cannot be fully diminished by wind forecasts. In this paper we develop a stochastic electricity market model to analyze the impact ...

Why Did Self-Employment Increase so Strongly in Germany?

Effort and Performance: What Distinguishes Interacting and Noninteracting Groups from Individuals?

We study how group membership affects behavior both when group members can and cannot interact with each other. Our goal is to isolate the contrasting forces that spring from group membership: a free-riding incentive leading to reduced effort and a sense of social responsibility that increases effort. In an environment with varying task difficulty and individual decision making as the benchmark, we ...

A Note on Networks of Collaboration in Multi-market Oligopolies

In this note, we extend the Goyal and Joshi’s model of collaboration networks in oligopoly to multi-market situations. We examine the incentive of firms to form links and the architectures of the resulting equilibrium networks in this setting. We then present some results on efficient networks.

Signature Requirements and Citizen Initiatives: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Germany

Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of direct democratic instruments such as citizen initiatives. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiative petitions. Based on municipal-level data for Germany, we make use of changes in signature requirements that occur at specific population thresholds to build an identification ...

Can't Get It out of My Head: Age Differences in Affective Responsiveness Vary with Preoccupation and Elapsed Time after Daily Hassles

To better understand age differences in negative affective responses to daily hassles, the current study investigated how responses may depend on how much time has elapsed after the hassle and how much one still thinks about the hassle. In an experience-sampling approach with mobile phones, 397 participants aged 12 to 88 years reported their momentary activating (e.g., angry) and deactivating (e.g., ...

Does State Antitrust Enforcement Drive Establishment Exit?

While studies have examined motivations for businesses to exit and relocate in response to tax and regulatory policies at the state level, no previous work has considered whether U.S. state antitrust enforcement may have similar effects. The results of this article suggest that state-level antitrust (even when coordinated with the federal government) plays a fairly minor role in the exit decision of ...

Local Day Care Quality and Maternal Employment: Evidence from East and West Germany

By investigating how locally available early childhood education and care quality relates to maternal employment choices, this study extends the literature, which mostly has focused on the importance of day care availability or costs. The authors provide differentiated analyses by the youngest child's age and for West and East Germany to examine moderating influences, such as work-care cultures, in ...

A Solution Concept for Network Games: The Role of Multilateral Interactions

We propose an allocation rule that takes into account the importance of both players and their links and characterize it for a fixed network. Our characterization is along the lines of the characterization of the Position value for Network games by van den Nouweland and Slikker (2012). The allocation rule so defined admits multilateral interactions among the players through their links which distinguishes ...

On the Representation of Demand-Side Management in Power System Models

DSM (demand-side management) merits increased attention by power system modelers. Numerical models should incorporate DSM constraints in a complete and consistent way. Otherwise, flawed DSM patterns and distorted conclusions on the system benefits of demand-side management are inevitable. Building on a model formulation put forward by Göransson et al. (2014), it is first suggested to include an additional ...

Career Prospects and Effort Incentives: Evidence from Professional Soccer

it is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face different external career opportunities depending on their nationality. We test whether the career prospect of being ...

Intergenerational Downward Mobility in Educational Attainment and Occupational Careers in West Germany in the Twentieth Century

What happens in the occupational careers of men if the intergenerational continuity in status reproduction is disrupted by the failure to reproduce the parental level of educational attainment? We frame this failure as a risk for intergenerational status maintenance and ask whether such a risk induces extra effort by way of compensation. By studying eight birth cohorts born between 1919 and 1971 characterized ...

A New Look at Intergenerational Mobility in Germany: Compared to the U.S.

Motivated by contradictory evidence on intergenerational mobility in Germany, I present a cross-country comparison of Germany and the U.S., reassessing the question of whether intergenerational mobility is higher in Germany than in the U.S. I can reproduce the standard result from the literature, which states that the German intergenerational elasticity estimates are lower than those for the U.S. However, ...

The Value of a Statistical Life in a Road Safety Context: A Review of the Current Literature

This paper summarizes the state-of-the-art for assessing the value of a statistical life (VSL) as a component of the costs of road accidents. It focuses on the most popular approaches for assessing the VSL, with respect to its theoretical foundations, current state-of-research and empirical evidence. Our paper also provides a first (to our knowledge) compendium of results for the VSL based on Stated ...

The Scapegoat Theory of Exchange Rates: The First Tests

The scapegoat theory of exchange rates (2 and 5) suggests that market participants may attach excessive weight to individual economic fundamentals, which are picked as “scapegoats” to rationalize observed currency fluctuations at times when exchange rates are driven by unobservable shocks. Using novel survey data that directly measure foreign exchange scapegoats for 12 exchange rates, we find empirical ...

The Transmission of Oil and Food Prices to Consumer Prices: Evidence for the MENA Countries

This paper investigates the effects of global oil and food price shocks to consumer prices in Middle East-North African (MENA) countries using threshold cointegration methods. Oil and food price shocks increase domestic prices in the long run, whereby the impact of food prices dominates. While global prices are weakly exogenous, consumer prices respond to deviations from the equilibrium relationship. ...

Reducing Binge Drinking? The Effect of a Ban on Late-Night-Off-Premise Alcohol Sales on Alcohol-Related Hospital Stays in Germany

Excessive alcohol consumption among young people is a major public health concern. On March 1, 2010, the German state of Baden-Württemberg banned the sale of alcoholic beverages between 10 pm and 5 am at off-premise outlets (e.g., gas stations, kiosks, supermarkets). We use rich monthly administrative data from a 70% random sample of all hospitalizations during the years 2007–2011 in Germany in order ...

Banking Market Structure and Macroeconomic Stability: Are Low-Income Countries Special?

Does the structure of banking markets affect macroeconomic volatility and, if yes, is this link different in low-income countries? In this paper, we explore the channels through which the structure of banking markets affects macroeconomic volatility. Our research has three main findings. First, we study whether idiosyncratic volatility at the bank level can impact aggregate volatility. We find weak ...

New Spain: France Transmission Line: A Cost-Benefit Analysis

Die Kosten der geplanten unterirdisch verlegten Hochspannungs-Gleichstrom-Übertragungsleitung (HGÜ) zwischen Spanien und Frankreich übersteigen die Investitionskosten einer vergleichbaren Wechselstrom-Freileitung. Die Frage stellt sich, ob die Mehrkosten mit ausreichendem Zusatznutzen für die Gesellschaft, wie zum Beispiel erhöhter Versorgungssicherheit, zu rechtfertigen sind. Aus diesem Grund wurden ...