External refereed essays

Zensus der Zukunft? Erdbeobachtung zur räumlichen Abschätzung der Bevölkerungsverteilung

Expected Future Earnings, Taxation, and University Enrollment: A Microeconometric Model with Uncertainty

Taxation changes the expectations of prospective university students about their future level and uncertainty of after-tax income. To estimate the impact of taxes on university enrollment, we estimate a structural microeconometric model, in which a high-school graduate decides to enter university studies if expected lifetime utility from this choice is greater than that anticipated from starting to ...

Terror and Human Insecurity: Editoral Introduction

We identify research gaps and recent contributions in the economics of terror. We focus on the human drivers of insecurity as a key topic. Insecurity shapes growth, perceptions of individuals, and policy responses. The economics of security policies remains large under-researched.

Violent Conflict and Behavior: A Field Experiment in Burundi

We use a series of field experiments in rural Burundi to examine the impact of exposure to conflict on social, risk, and time preferences. We find that conflict affects behavior: individuals exposed to violence display more altruistic behavior towards their neighbors, are more risk-seeking, and have higher discount rates. Large adverse shocks can thus alter savings and investments decisions, and potentially ...

Energy Consumption and Economic Growth: New Insights into the Cointegration Relationship

This paper examines the long-run relationship between energy consumption and real GDP, including energy prices, for 25 OECD countries from 1981 to 2007. The distinction between common factors and idiosyncratic components using principal component analysis allows to distinguish between developments on an international and a national level as drivers of the long-run relationship. Indeed, cointegration ...

Gender and Remittances: Evidence from Germany

This study focuses on gender-specific determinants of remittances in Germany. The conceptual approach considers gender roles and naturalization to be crucial in the immigrant's decision to remit. For the empirical investigation, the authors use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study for the years 2001-6. The findings show, first, that individual income differences in the country of ...

SOEP 2010: The 9th International Socio-Economic Panel User Conference: Editorial

Individual Risk Attitudes and the Composition of Financial Portfolios: Evidence from German Household Portfolios

This paper explores the relationship between the self-declared risk aversion of private investors and their propensity to hold incomplete portfolios of financial assets. The analysis is based on household survey data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) that provides a reliable measure of individual attitudes toward financial risk. Our findings suggest that more risk averse households tend to ...

Assessment of Bottom-up Sectoral and Regional Mitigation Potentials

The greenhouse gas mitigation potential of different economic sectors in three world regions are estimated using a bottom-up approach. These estimates provide updates of the numbers reported in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4). This study is part of a larger project aimed at comparing greenhouse gas mitigation potentials from bottom-up and top-down ...

EU Banks Rating Assignments: Is There Heterogeneity between New and Old Member Countries?

We model EU countries' bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. Our aim is to assess whether "old" and "new" EU countries are rated differently and to determine whether "new" ones areassigned lower ratings, ceteris paribus, than "old" ones. We find that country-specific factors (in the form of heterogeneous intercepts) are a crucial determinant of ratings. ...

Stock Market Integration between Three CEECs, Russia, and the UK

This paper estimates a trivariate VAR-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean model to examine linkages between the stock markets of three Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), specifically the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and both the UK and Russia. The adopted framework allows to analyze interdependence by estimating volatility spillovers, and also contagion by testing for possible shifts in the transmission ...

Global Integration of Central and Eastern European Financial Markets: The Role of Economic Sentiments

This paper examines the importance of different economic sentiments for the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) during the transition process. We first analyze the importance of economic confidence with respect to the CEECs' financial markets. Since the integration of formerly strongly-regulated markets into global markets can also lead to an increase in the dependence of the CEECs' economies ...

Long-Run Cost Functions for Electricity Transmission

Electricity transmission has become the pivotal industry segment for electricity restructuring. Yet, little is known about the shape of transmission cost functions. Reasons for this can be a lack of consensus about the definition of transmission output and the complexitity of the relationship between optimal grid expansion and output expansion. Knowledge of transmission cost functions could help firms ...

The Effect of Student Aid on the Duration of Study

In this paper I evaluate the effect of student aid on the success of academic studies. I focus on two dimensions, the duration of study and the probability of actually graduating with a degree. To determine the impact of financial student aid, I estimate a discrete-time duration model allowing for competing risks to account for different exit states (graduation and dropout) using individual level panel ...

Modeling Storage and Demand Management in Power Distribution Grids

Storage devices and demand control may constitute beneficial tools to optimize electricity generation with a large share of intermittent resources through inter-temporal substitution of load. This paper quantifies the related cost reductions in a simulation model of a simplified stylized medium-voltage grid (10 kV) under uncertain demand and wind output. Benders Decomposition Method is applied to create ...

Do Ethnic Minorities "Stretch" Their Time? UK Household Evidence on Multitasking

This paper investigates the effect of ethnicity on time spent on secondary household production, work and leisure activities employing the 2000 UK Time Use Survey. We find that, unconditionally, white females manage to "stretch" their time the most by almost four additional hours per day and non-white men "stretch" their time the least. The three secondary activities most often combined with other ...

Germany's Next Top Manager: Does Personality Explain the Gender Career Gap?

Many studies have focused on the influence of human capital and other 'objective' factors on career achievement. In our study, we go a step further by also looking at the impact of self-reported personality traits on differences in career chances. For the first time - to our knowledge - we compare managers and other white-collar employees in Germany's private sector and find evidence that personality ...

Entrepreneurship: The Role of Extreme Events

We use aggregate country data as well as individual surveys to uncover, for the first time, the effect of extreme events such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks on entrepreneurial activity. We find that natural disasters and terrorist attacks influence individual perceptions of the rewards to entrepreneurship and, more surprisingly, extreme events affect entrepreneurship rates positively in ...

Long-Term Antecedents and Outcomes of Perceived Control

Perceived control plays an important role in shaping development throughout adulthood and old age. Using data from the adult lifespan sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, covering 25 years of measurement), we explored long-term antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of perceived control and examined if associations differ with age. Targeting correlates and antecedents ...

Strict Nash Networks and Partner Heterogeneity

This paper extends the two-way flow model of network formation initiated by Bala and Goyal (Econometrica 68(5):1181-1230, 2000) by allowing for partner heterogeneity.In our model if a player i forms a link with player j, then she pays a cost of c j and gets benefits of V j . Our main result consists of the characterization of strict Nash networks. We find that the introduction of partner heterogeneity ...