External refereed essays

Are Couples with Young Children More Likely to Split up When the Mother Is the Main or an Equal Earner?

This study examines how a mother being the main or an equal earner impacts the relationship stability of heterosexual couple parents, using the UK's Millennium Cohort Survey. Various theories alternatively predict that such couples experience a higher or lower risk of divorce than male-breadwinner couples. Alternatively the characteristics of these couples may predispose them to relatively higher or ...

Validating Abbreviated Measures of Effort-Reward Imbalance at Work in European Cohort Studies: The IPD-Work Consortium

Cohort Profile: The Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II)

Partnership Longevity and Personality Congruence in Couples

Evidence of assortative mating according to personality was reported in a previous SOEP-based study (Rammstedt & Schupp, 2008). Based on population representative data of almost 7000 couples, high levels of congruence between spouses were found, which increased with marriage duration. Almost 5000 of these couples were tracked over a five-year period with personality assessed at the beginning and end ...

Current Account Imbalances in the Euro Area: Does Catching up Explain the Development?

In the debate on global imbalances, the euro area countries received inreasing attention since the outbreak of the financial crisis. While the current account is on balance for the entire area, divergences between individual member states have increased since the introduction of the common currency and are part of the excessive imbalances procedure. This paper explores the determinants of the imbalances ...

Need for Conclusive Evidence that Positive and Negative Reciprocity Are Unrelated

Comparing Three Models for Introduction of Competition into Railways

In this paper we report the use of the open source Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM, www.eclipse.org/stem) to compare three basic models for seasonal influenza transmission. The models are designed to test for possible differences between the seasonal transmission of influenza A and B. Model 1 assumes that the seasonality and magnitude of transmission do not vary between influenza A and ...

Family Location and Caregiving Patterns from an International Perspective

We conduct a cross-national econometric analysis of intra-family location and caregiving patterns. Using European data, we first assess, from an international perspective, the relationship between family structure and the geographic proximity between adult children and their parents. We then examine whether differences in family structure are related to the amount of informal care adult children provide ...

L'entrée sur le marché du travail des descendants d'immigrés: une analyse comparée France-Allemagne

The Global Dimension of Inflation: Evidence from Factor-Augmented Phillips Curve

We examine the global dimension of inflation in 24 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007 in a Phillips curve framework. We decompose output gaps and changes in unit labour costs into common (or global) and idiosyncratic components using a factor analysis and introduce these components separately in the regression. We find that the common component of changes in unit labour costs has a notable impact ...

Armut und Resilienz: über die Bedingungen von gymnasialem Schulerfolg bei Jugendlichen mit Armutserfahrung

The following study investigates the conditions under which adolescents in Germany between the ages of 16 and 19 who experienced poverty at some point during childhood complete sec-ondary school. Based on considerations from resilience and socialization theory, we test the relevance of social and personal factors for success in secondary school. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study ...

Assessing the Strength and Effectiveness of Renewable Electricity Feed-in Tariffs in European Union Countries

In the last two decades, feed-in tariffs (FIT) have emerged as one of the most popular policies for supporting renewable electricity (RES-E) generation. A few studies have assessed the effectiveness of RES-E policies, but most ignore policy design features and market characteristics (e.g. electricity price and production cost) that influence policy strength. We employ 1992-2008 panel data to conduct ...

The Dynamics of Repaet Migration: A Markov Chain Analysis

This article studies repeat or circular migration between the host and home countries using panel data for Germany, distinguishing between factors generating single moves, circular migration, and absorption. Migrants are more likely to leave early after their first arrival in Germany, and when they have social and familial bonds in the home country, but less likely when they have a job in Germany and ...

The Good Governance Indicators of the Millenium Challenge Account: How Many Dimensions Are Really Being Measured?

This paper assesses the validity of the perception-based governance indicators used by the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) for aid allocation decisions. By conducting Explanatory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of data from 1996 to 2009, we find that although the MCA purports to measure seven distinct dimensions of governance, only two discrete underlying dimensions, the perceived "participatory ...

Who Gives Aid to Whom and When? Aid Accelerations, Shocks and Policies

We address the pitfalls of averaging by exploiting the longitudinal variation in aid to identify sudden and sharp increases in aid flows. Focusing on specific events, we testif aid accelerations correspond to policies and shocks in the recipient country. We find that positive regime changes and wars are significant predictors of aid accelerations. The results also suggest the presence of aid spill-overs, ...

Survey of Photovoltaic Industry and Policy in Germany and China

Photovoltaic (PV) technologies have demonstrated significant price reductions, but large-scale global application of PV requires further technology improvements and cost reductions along the value chain. We survey policies in Germany and China and the industrial actors they can encourage to pursue innovation, including deployment support, investment support for manufacturing plants and R&D support ...

Is There a Bubble in the Chinese Housing Market?

For many analysts, the Chinese economy is being spurred on by a bubble in the housing market, probably driven by the fiscal stimulus package and massive credit expansion, with potentially adverse effects on the real economy. The house price development is investigated by panel cointegration techniques. Evidence is based on a data-set for 35 major cities. Cointegration is detected between real house ...

A Further Examination of the Export-Led Growth Hypothesis

This article challenges the common view that exports generally contribute more to GDP growth than a pure change in export volume, as the export-led growth hypothesis predicts. Applying panel cointegration techniques to a production function with non-export GDP as the dependent variable, we find for a sample of 45 developing countries that: (i) exports have a positive short-run effect on non-export ...

Jobless Now, Sick Later? Investigating the Long-Term Consequences of Involuntary Job Loss on Health

In the light of the current economic crises which in many countries lead to business closures and mass lay-offs, the consequences of job loss are important on various dimensions. They have to be investigated not only in consideration of a few years, but with a long-term perspective as well, because early life course events may prove important for later life outcomes. This paper uses data from SHARELIFE ...

Targeted Pricing and Customer Data Sharing among Rivals

It is increasingly observable that competitors in different industries share customer data, which can be used for targeted pricing. We propose a modified Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity to analyze the incentives for such sharing and its ensuing welfare effects. We show that these incentives depend on the type of customer data and on consumer heterogeneity in the strength ...