External refereed essays

The Strategic Use of Private Quality Standards in Food Supply Chains

We explore the strategic role of private quality standards in food supply chains. Considering two symmetric retailers that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of producers and endogenizing the suppliers' delivery choice, we show that there exist two asymmetric equilibria in the retailers' quality requirements. Our results reveal that the retailers use private quality standards to improve their ...

Dealing with Incomplete Household Panel Data in Inequality Research

In trying to capture complete within-household heterogeneity, household panel surveys typically try to interview all adult household members. Following from this, such surveys tend to suffer from partial unit nonresponse (PUNR), that is, the nonresponse of at least one member of an otherwise participating household, most likely yielding an underestimation of aggregate household income. Using data from ...

Tragen ältere Menschen ein erhöhtes Armutsrisiko? Eine Dekompositions- und Mobilitätsanalyse relativer Einkommensarmut für das wiedervereinigte Deutschland

The Political Economy of the German Länder Deficits: Weak Governments Meet Strong Finance Ministers

We analyse the deficits of the German Länder (regional states) for the period 1960 to 2005 and test a number of hypotheses derived from the literature on the political economy of public deficits. We find evidence for the weak government hypothesis, that is, coalition governments issue significantly more debt than single party governments - a result that is typically explained by the common pool problem. ...

Der Einfluss von Erhebungsformen auf den Postmaterialismus-Index

Locational and Internal Sources of Firm Competitive Advantage: Applying Porter's Diamond Model at the Firm Level

This paper employs Porter's diamond model to examine the relationships between a firm's locational environment, its innovation capabilities, and competitive advantage assessed in terms of various performance indicators. The study implements a structural equation model estimated with the partial least squares (PLS) approach and reveals that frequent cooperation spurs innovation and performance but that, ...

Transmission Investment in the Peruvian Electricity Market: Theory and Applications

This research presents an application of the mechanism in Hogan et al. (2010) (HRV) to promote electricity transmission network expansion in the Peruvian electricity transmission system known as SEIN (Sistema Eléctrico Interconectado Nacional). The HRV mechanism combines the merchant and regulatory approaches to promote investment into transmission grids. This mechanism gives incentives for efficient ...

Sovereign Risk Premiums in the European Government Bond Market

This paper provides a study of bond yield differentials among EU government bonds on the basis of a unique data set of issue spreads in the US and DM (Euro) bond market between 1993 and 2009. Interest differentials between bonds issued by EU countries and Germany or the USA contain risk premiums which increase with fiscal imbalances and depend negatively on the issuer's relative bond market size. The ...

Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking?

This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over ...

Anyone up for Helping the Fisherman's Wife? More Solidarity with Accidental Misery than with Man-Made Misery

We experimentally examine the willingness to donate depending on whether "misery" has been randomly generated or self-inflicted by too high demands in bilateral negotiations. Wefind that randomness has a positive influence on the total amount of the donation. In the case of self-inflicted "misery", we observe that the subject who may be perceived to have caused the unfavourable situation receives significantly ...

The Role of the Log Transformation in Forecasting Economic Variables

For forecasting and economic analysis many variables are used in logarithms (logs). In time series analysis, this transformation is often considered to stabilize the variance of a series. We investigate under which conditions taking logs is beneficial for forecasting. Forecasts based on the original series are compared to forecasts based on logs. For a range of economic variables, substantial forecasting ...

Labour Market Integration, Occupational Uncertainties, and Fertility Choices in Germany and the UK

The aim of this paper is to investigate how occupational prospects affect first-birth decisions of men and women. Contrasting the continental conservative German welfare state with the liberal market economy of the UK, the focus of analyses rests on how welfare state alignment affects fertility rationales in the context of either promising or bleak occupational prospects. The results based on data ...

Sparmotive von jungen, mittelalten und älteren Erwachsenen: erste Ergebnisse eines neuen Inventars zur Erfassung lebenslaufbezogener Sparmotive

There is some research on personal reasons for saving money in the economic sciences. However, not much is known about the age differences of saving motives. In this vein, the future time perspective (FTP) is known to play a critical role for motivation across the life span. In this study, we introduce a new Saving Motive Inventory (SMI), which also covers saving goals after retirement. Furthermore, ...

Measuring Regional Inequality by Internet Car Price Advertisements: Evidence for Germany

We suggest to use car sale prices from internet advertisements for measuring economic inequality between and within German regions. Our estimates of regional income levels and Gini indices based on advertisements are highly positively correlated with the official figures.

Distributional Effects of the Child Tax Credit in Poland and Its Potential Reforms

Compliance with the Anti-trafficking Protocol

The Anti-trafficking Protocol reflects the interests of the major countries. Due to the high costs of compliance, countries will strategically select those obligations that will satisfy the major countries most efficiently with lower costs of compliance. Among the three main obligations of the Protocol - prevention, protection and prosecution - we predict that ratification leads to the strongest effect ...

Multi-family Households in a Labour Supply Model: A Calibration Method with Application to Poland

Models of cooperative and noncooperative behaviour opened the household "black box" and allowed for individual treatment of partners in couples. However, labour supply literature has so far largely ignored a broader issue - the distinction of single versus multi-family ("complex") households. We propose a method to account for multi-family household structure by borrowing from recent applications of ...

Assets, Shocks, and Poverty Traps in Rural Mozambique

This paper explores welfare dynamics among households in rural Mozambique. Using household panel data, we test whether an asset-based poverty trap exists. Findings indicate that all rural households converge to one stable equilibrium in the medium term, which is close to the poverty line. This may indicate that households in rural Mozambique are collectively trapped in generalized underdevelopment. ...

A Household Study of Self-Regulation in Children: Intergenerational Links and Maternal Antecedents

Delay of gratification (DoG) and delay discounting (DD) are behavioral measures of self-regulation and impulsivity. Whereas DoG refers to the postponement of gratification, DD involves the devaluation of a reward over time. Previous studies have demonstrated associations between paternal self-control, paternal personality traits, parenting styles, maternal intelligence, and children's self-regulation. ...

Naming and War in Modern Germany

This paper analyzes naming behavior in Germany in the context of rapid social change. It begins with an overview of general developments in naming in Germany over the last one hundred years, based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which supplies us with almost 45,000 datasets. The paper focuses on the periods of World War II and the Cold War since we conclude that general developments ...