External refereed essays

The Impact of Home Production on Economic Inequality in Germany

Using representative income and time-use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from home production and analyze their impact on economic inequality. As an alternative to existing measures, we propose a predicted wage approach that relaxes some of the strong assumptions underlying both the standard opportunity cost approach and the housekeeper ...

The Justice of Earnings in Dual-Earner Households

Over recent decades, the rise in female labor market participation and the increase in "atypical" employment arrangements have brought about a steady decline in traditional "male breadwinner" households and an increasing number of dual-earner households. Against this backdrop, the present paper investigates how different household contexts' ranging from traditional "male breadwinner" households to ...

Die abnehmende Bedeutung des Elternhauses: intergenerationale Übertragung von Parteibindungen in Deutschland 1984 bis 2010

Household Survey Panels: How Much Do Following Rules Affect Sample Size?

In household panels, typically all household members are surveyed. Because household composition changes over time, so-called following rules are implemented to decide whether to continue surveying household members who leave the household (e.g. former spouses/partners, grown children) in subsequent waves. Following rules have been largely ignored in the literature leaving panel designers unaware of ...

Nash Networks with Imperfect Reliability and Heterogeneous Players

This paper combines the imperfect reliability model of Bala and Goyal [2000b] with the heterogeneous player model of Galeotti et al. [2006]. We compare existence, characterization and efficiency results in the resulting framework with the results in other frameworks allowing for imperfect reliability or heterogeneity. Specifically, we compare our work with the framework of Haller and Sarangi [2005] ...

Decision-Making Strategies and Performance among Seniors

Using paper and pencil experiments administered in senior centers, we examine decision-making performance in multi-attribute decision problems. We differentiate the effects of declining cognitive performance and changing cognitive process on decision-making performance of seniors as they age. We find a significant decline in performance with age due to reduced reliance on common heuristics and increased ...

The Economics of Fast Charging Infrastructure for Electric Vehicles

By 2011 little is known about the economic rationale of public fast chargers for electric vehicles (EV). This paper aims at providing an insight into the business case of this technology in a case study for Germany. The estimated Return on Investment (ROI) of a public fast charging station constitutes the main contribution. Potential users and organization structures are investigated as well as different ...

Searching for the Entrepreneurial Personality: New Evidence and Avenues for Further Research ; Editorial

The Russian-Ukrainian Earnings Divide

Ethnic differences are often considered to be powerful sources of diverse economic behaviour. In this article, we investigate to what extent ethnicity affects Ukrainian labour market outcomes. Using microdata from the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey and the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of earnings, we find a persistent and increasing labour market divide between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians ...

Individual Wellbeing in a Dynamic Perspective

We explore the determinants of individual wellbeing as measured by self-reported levels of satisfaction with income and life. Making use of the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide empirical evidence for wellbeing depending on absolute and relative income levels in a dynamic framework where status and signal effects play a role. This finding holds after controlling for other factors in a multivariate ...

The Intergenerational Transmission of Health in Early Childhood: Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study

Children's physical health problems have clear and lasting impacts on a variety of later life outcomes, as a growing body of research has shown. Furthermore, problems such as obesity, motor impairment, and chronic diseases entail high social costs, particularly when childhood health problems carry over into adulthood. This study examines intergenerational relationships between parent and child health ...

Pollution Exposure and Child Health: Evidence for Infants and Toddlers in Germany

This paper examines the impact of outdoor pollution and parental smoking on children's health from birth until the age of three years in Germany. We use representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), combined with five air pollution levels. These data were provided by the Federal Environment Agency and cover theyears 2002-2007. Our work makes two important contributions. First, we ...

How Important Is Cultural Background for the Level of Intergenerational Mobility?

Based on brother correlations in permanent earnings for different groups of second generation immigrants, the findings in this paper indicate that cultural background is not a major determinant of the level of intergenerational economic mobility.

The Evolution of Adult Height across Spanish Regions, 1950-1980: A New Source of Data

We present new evidence concerning the evolution of adult height across Spanish regions for the 1950-1980 male and female birth cohorts, using the augmented sample of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for Spain. This augmented sample, available only for the year 2000, contains self-reported height data representative at the Autonomous Community level. The average heights of these two sets ...

Sovereign Bond Yield Spreads: A Time-Varying Coefficient Approach

We study the determinants of sovereign bond yield spreads across 10 EMU countries between Q1/1999 and Q1/2010. We apply a semiparametric time-varying coefficient model to identify, to what extent an observed change in the yield spread is due to a shift in macroeconomic fundamentals or due to altering risk pricing. We find that at the beginning of EMU, the government debt level and the general investors' ...

Forecasting Private Consumption by Consumer Surveys

Survey-based indicators are widely seen as leading indicators for economic activity. As such, consumer confidence might be informative for the future path of private consumption. Although the indicators receive high attention in the media, their forecasting power often appears to be very limited. This paper takes a fresh look at the data that serve as a basis for the consumer confidence indicator (CCI) ...

The Long Run Relationship between Private Consumption and Wealth: Common and Idiosyncratic Effects

We investigate the long run relationship between private consumption, disposable income and wealth approximated by equity and house price indices for a panel of 15 industrialized countries. Consumption, income and wealth are cointegrated in their common components. The impact of house prices exceeds the effect arising from equity wealth. The long run vector is broadly in line with the life cycle permanent ...

The Contextual Effects of Social Capital on Health: A Cross-National Instrumental Variable Analysis

Past research on the associations between area-level/contextual social capital and health has produced conflicting evidence. However, interpreting this rapidly growing literature is difficult because estimates using conventional regression are prone to major sources of bias including residual confounding and reverse causation. Instrumental variable (IV) analysis can reduce such bias. Using data on ...

A Comparison of Response Rates in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing and the Health and Retirement Study

Survey response rates are an important measure of the quality of a survey; this is true for both longitudinal and cross-sectional surveys. However, the concept of a response rate in the context of a panel survey is more complex than is the case for a cross-sectional survey. There are typically many different response rates that can be calculated for a panel survey, each of which may be relevant for ...

The Influence of Collusion on Price Changes: New Evidence from Major Cartel Cases

In this article, we compare the distribution of price changes between collusive and non-collusive periods for 11 major cartels. Based on the theoretical and empirical results from previous research, we discuss the four moments with respect to price changes (mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis). However, none of the above descriptive statistics can be considered as a robust test allowing a differentiation ...