External refereed essays

All Quiet on the Eastern Front? Disruption Scenarios of Russian Natural Gas Supply to Europe

The 2014 Russian–Ukrainian crisis reignited European concerns about natural gas supply security recalling the experiences of 2006 and 2009. However, the European supply situation, regulation and infrastructure have changed, with better diversified import sources, EU member states being better connected and a common regulation on the security of supply has been introduced. Nevertheless, European dependency ...

Measuring Transnationality of Immigrants in Germany: Prevalence and Relationship with Social Inequalities

The scope of immigrants' transnational ties and the relationship to their social position is subject to a controversial debate that suggests a dualistic picture. On the one hand, globalization theorists argue that an elite of highly educated and economically most successful professionals intensively engages in and benefits from transnationality. On the other hand, most scholars in migration and assimilation ...

Turning back to Turkey - or Turning the Back on Germany? Remigration Intentions and Behavior of Turkish Immigrants in Germany between 1984 and 2011

Der Beitrag der Frage nach, wie sich die Remigrationsabsichten und das Remigrationsverhalten türkischstämmigerEinwanderer in Deutschland im Zeitverlauf verändert haben, und wertet dazu alle Erhebungswellen dessozio-çkonomischen Panels (SOEP) ereignisdatenanalytisch aus. Die Befunde zeigen, dass Remigrationsabsichten und-raten türkischstämmiger Einwanderer seit der Jahrtausendwende angestiegen sind, ...

Income and Wealth Inequality after the Financial Crisis: The Case of Germany

The topic of rising income inequality does not only gain in relevance since the two prominent reports by the OECD (Growing unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries, Paris 2008; Divided we stand—Why inequality keeps rising, Paris 2011) but rather since the financial crisis. So far there is only scarce empirical evidence–besides a rather broad literature dealing with the US–about the ...

Mittelstandsorientierte Innovationspolitik befördert den Wissenstransfer

A Global Perspective on the Future of Natural Gas: Resources, Trade, and Climate Constraints

Natural gas plays an important role in the global energy system as an input to power generation, heating, and industry. This article identifies key drivers and uncertainties for natural gas markets in the coming decades. These include the availability of natural gas from conventional and unconventional sources, the role of international trade, and the impact of climate policies. We build on model-based ...

Natural Gas: An Overview of a Lower-Carbon Transformation Fuel

This article provides an overview of the natural gas industry, which we view as a bridge fuel toward a lower-carbon energy system in many countries and regions around the world. Based on a review of the literature, an econometric analysis of natural gas prices and contracts, and the authors’ experience with the natural gas industry, this introductory article to the symposium on the Prospects for Natural ...

Employment in Health and Long-term Care sector in European Countries

Health care is an important sector in all European countries showing a high dynamic in the past. In 2011 about 23 million persons were employed in health and social care, that is to say 10.4% of total employment. The share of health care expenditures in GDP was 10%. The health care workforce increased despite the overall trend of declining employment also during the economic crisis. The high dynamic ...

Long Working Hours and Alcohol Use: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Published Studies and Unpublished Individual Participant Data

Objective To quantify the association between long working hours and alcohol use.Design Systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies and unpublished individual participant data.Data sources A systematic search of PubMed and Embase databases in April 2014 for published studies, supplemented with manual searches. Unpublished individual participant data were obtained from 27 additional studies.Review ...

What Drives Academic Data Sharing?

Despite widespread support from policy makers, funding agencies, and scientific journals, academic researchers rarely make their research data available to others. At the same time, data sharing in research is attributed a vast potential for scientific progress. It allows the reproducibility of study results and the reuse of old data for new research questions. Based on a systematic review of 98 scholarly ...

On the Variability of Hybrid Discrete Choice Models

It is well-known that not all the variables affecting decisions in a discrete choice situation are objective characteristics of the alternatives. Some of them are associated with difficult to measure attributes which may be represented as latent variables. Since this type of variables cannot be directly observed by the analyst, they must be estimated through a special model (typically a MIMIC model), ...

Differences in the Patterns of In-Work Poverty in Germany and the UK

This study analyses differences in individual-level working poverty determinants between Germany and the UK. These differences are linked to institutional patterns at the country level. Here, we observe that the two countries differ especially in bargaining centralisation, employment protection legislation and family policy. At the same time, the levels of decommodification and labour market regulation ...

Secular Changes in Late-Life Cognition and Well-Being: Towards a Long Bright Future with a Short Brisk Ending?

How sociocultural contexts shape individual functioning is of prime interest for psychological inquiry. Secular increases favoring later-born cohorts in fluid intelligence measures are widely documented for young adults. In the current study, we quantified such trends in old age using data from highly comparable participants living in a narrowly defined geographical area and examined whether these ...

Are Incentive Effects on Response Rates and Nonresponse Bias in Large-Scale, Face-to-Face Surveys Generalizable in Germany: Evidence from Ten Experiments

In survey research, a consensus has grown regarding the effectiveness of incentives encouraging survey participation across different survey modes and target populations. Most of this research has been based on surveys from the US, whereas few studies have provided evidence that theseresults can be generalized to other contexts. This paper is the first to present comprehensive information concerning ...

Inequality and the Time Structure of Earnings: Evidence from Germany

This paper studies the relationships between annual and subannual inequality and mobility during the course of the year. We apply an exact decomposition framework as outlined in Wodon and Yitzhaki (Econ Bull 4:1–8, 2003), and in Yitzhaki and Wodon (Research on Economic Inequality 12:179–199, 2004). Earnings records of pension insurants in Germany serve as the database. The long time horizon of our ...

Personality Has Minor Effects on Panel Attrition

In light of the recent interest in using longitudinal panel data to study personality development, it is important to know if personality traits are related to panel attrition. We analyse the effects of personality on panel drop-out separately for an ‘older’ subsample (started in 1984), a relatively ‘young’ subsample (started in 2000), and a ‘new’ subsample (started in 2009) of the German Socio-Economic ...

The Global Crisis and Equity Market Contagion

We analyze the transmission of the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis to 415 country-industry equity portfolios. We use a factor model to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings and residual correlations as indicative ofcontagion. While we find evidence of contagion from the United States and the global financial sector, the effects are small. By contrast, there has been ...

Lifetime Earnings Inequality in Germany

We employ German social security records to investigate intragenerational lifetime earnings inequality and mobility of yearly earnings for 35 cohorts, starting with the birth year 1935. Our main result is a striking secular rise of intragenerational inequality in lifetime earnings: West German men born in the early 1960s are likely to experience about 85% more lifetime inequality than their fathers. ...

China's Dominance Hypothesis and the Emergence of a Tri-polar Global Currency System

This study assesses whether the international monetary system is already tri-polar by testing what we call China's ‘dominance hypothesis’, i.e. whether the renminbi already influences exchange rate and monetary policies strongly in Asia, a direct reference to the old ‘German dominance hypothesis’ which ascribed to the German mark a dominant role in Europe in the 1980s. Using a global factor model of ...

From Distribution Networks to Smart Distribution Systems: Rethinking the Regulation of European Electricity DSOs

Distributed energy resources allow for new business models that have the potential to substantially change today's power system functioning paradigm. In particular, these changes pose challenges for distribution system operators (DSOs) and their regulation alike. This article sheds light on missing aspects in current regulation, recognizing DSOs as regulated monopolies, but also as key players along ...