External refereed essays

An Electricity Market Model with Generation Capacity Expansion under Uncertainty

This article presents an electricity dispatch model with endogenous electricity generation capacity expansion for Germany over the horizon 2010–2035. The target is to quantify how fuel and carbon price risk impacts investment incentives of thermal power plants. We provide a framework for the evaluation of investment decisions under long-term uncertainty which helps integrating numerous scenarios in ...

Die Berechnung des Siegers: Marktwert, Ungleichheit, Diversität und Routine als Einflussfaktoren auf die Leistung professioneller Fußballteams

Vermarktlichung und Globalisierung haben den Profifußball und die Zusammensetzung von Mannschaften fundamental verändert. Vor dem Hintergrund der veränderten Rahmenbedingungen untersucht der Beitrag, in welchem Maße (a) der Marktwert einer Mannschaft, (b) ihre interne Ungleichheit, (c) die kulturelle Diversität eines Teams sowie (d) der Grad der Fluktuation im Team über den sportlichen Erfolg in nationalen ...

Examining the Structure of Spatial Health Effects in Germany Using Hierarchical Bayes Models

This paper uses Hierarchical Bayes Models to model and estimate spatial health effects in Germany. We combine rich individual-level household panel data from the German SOEP with administrative county-level data to estimate spatial county-level health dependencies. As dependent variable we use the generic, continuous, and quasi-objective SF12 health measure. We find strong and highly significant spatial ...

Structural Vector Autoregressions with Markov Switching: Combining Conventional with Statistical Identification of Shocks

In structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) analysis a Markov regime switching (MS) property can be exploited to identify shocks if the reduced form error covariance matrix varies across regimes. Unfortunately, these shocks may not have a meaningful structural economic interpretation. It is discussed how statistical and conventional identifying information can be combined. The discussion is based on ...

Trade and the Environment: The Role of Firm Heterogeneity

In this paper, we derive a new effect of trade liberalization on the quality of the environment. We show that in the presence of heterogeneous firms, the aggregate volume of emissions is influenced by a reallocation effect resulting from an increase in the relative size of more productive firms. The relative importance of this reallocation effect and the scale effect well-known from the literature ...

Central Bank Communication on Financial Stability

Central banks regularly communicate about financial stability issues. This article asks how such communications affect financial markets, based on a unique dataset covering more than 1,000 releases of Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) and speeches by 37 central banks over the past 14 years. The findings suggest that optimistic FSRs lead to significant and potentially long-lasting positive abnormal ...

A Wealth Tax on the Rich to Bring down Public Debt? Revenue and Distributional Effects of a Capital Levy in Germany

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crisis is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the political agenda in Germany. We use survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and estimate the net wealth distribution ...

The Impact of Labour Market Reform Policies on Insiders' and Outsiders' Low-Wage Risk

Taking a cross-national comparative perspective, this study analyses differences in individual determinants of the low-wage risk across institutional settings. It builds on previous research that dealt with the impact of labour market reform measures on the distribution of labour market risks in advanced economies. It is widely held that such reforms have a particularly adverse effect on labour market ...

Responsive Feed-in Tariff Adjustment to Dynamic Technology Development

This paper reviews the adjustments of the feed-in tariffs for new solar photovoltaic (PV) installations in Germany. As PV system prices declined rapidly since 2009, the German government implemented automatic mechanisms to adjust the remuneration level for new installations in response to deployment volumes. This paper develops an analytic model to simulate weekly installations of PV systems of up ...

Business Cycles, Unemployment and Entrepreneurial Entry: Evidence from Germany

We investigate whether people are more willing to become self-employed during boom periods or during recessions and to what extent business cycles and unemployment levels influence entries into entrepreneurship. Our analysis for Germany reveals that there is a positive relationship between unemployment rates and start-up activities. Moreover, new business formation is higher during recessions than ...

Entrepreneurs and Their Impact on Jobs and Economic Growth

Entrepreneurs are a rare species. Even in innovation-driven economies, only 1–2% of the work force starts a business in any given year. Yet entrepreneurs, particularly innovative entrepreneurs, are vital to the competitiveness of the economy. The gains of entrepreneurship are only realized, however, if the business environment is receptive to innovation. In addition, policymakers need to prepare for ...

The Welfare Impact of Parallel Imports: A Structural Approach Applied to the German Market for Oral Anti-Diabetics

We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel dataset containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 649 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of demand, and on the basis of an oligopolistic model of multi-product firms, we then recover the marginal costs ...

The Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship: Not Just a Matter of Personality

Why do entrepreneurship rates differ so markedly by gender? Using data from a large representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent personality traits, human capital, and the employment history influence the start-up decision and can explain the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Applying a decomposition analysis, we observe that the higher risk aversion among women explains a large ...

(De)Centralization and Voter Turnout: Theory and Evidence from German Municipalities

A vast academic literature illustrates that voter turnout is affected by the institutional design of elections (e.g., compulsory voting, electoral system, postal or Sunday voting). In this article, we exploit a simple Downsian theoretical framework to argue that the institutional framework of public good provision—and, in particular, the distribution of political and administrative competences across ...

Market Design and Supply Security in Imperfect Power Markets

Supply security in imperfect power markets is modelled under different market designs. In a uniform price auction for electricity with two firms, strategic behaviour may leave firms offering too few capacities and unable to supply all realized demand. Market design that relies on capacity markets increases available generation capacities for sufficiently high capacity prices and consequently decreases ...

Standardisierte Kurzskalen zur Erfassung psychologischer Merkmale in Umfragen

Psychologische Merkmale gewinnen zunehmend an Bedeutung in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Umfrageforschung. Da psychologische Instrumente vielfach einen individualdiagnostischen Entstehungshinter-grund haben, sind sie meist viel zu umfangreich für einen Einsatz in Umfragen. Für solche Erhebungssituationen sind extrem kurze aber auch für die gesamte Bevölkerungsbreite validierte Verfahren angemessener. ...

Die NUBBEK-Ergebnisse: ihre Relevanz aus bildungs- und familienökonomischer Perspektive ; Diskussion zum Schwerpunktthema

Financial Support for Families with Children and Its Trade-Offs: Balancing Redistribution and Parental Work Incentives

Financial support for families with children implies inherent trade-offs some of which are less obvious than others. In the end these trade-offs determine the effectiveness of policy with respect to the material situation of families and employment of their parents. We analyse several kinds of trade-offs involved using a careful selection of potential changes to the system of financial support for ...

Happiness Is Pleasant, or Is It? Implicit Representations of Affect Valence Are Associated with Contra-hedonic Motivation and Mixed Affect in Daily Life

People typically want to feel good. At times, however, they seek to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect. The prevalence of such contrahedonic motivation has been related to simultaneous experiences of positive and negative (i.e., mixed) affect. We investigated the role that implicit mental representations of affect valence may play in this regard in a study with N = 400 ...

Sales at a Loss: Who Benefits?

Pricing and selling strategies in the retail sector are hotly debated in policy circles. This article analyses the impact of sales below cost on the negotiation outcomes in intermediate goods markets. Assuming that consumers have a sufficiently strong preference for one-stop shopping, we model below-cost pricing as the result of a profit-maximising cross-subsidisation strategy of a multi-product retailer. ...