External refereed essays

Downscaling Nonclimatic Drivers for Surface Water Vulnerabilities in the Elbe River Basin

Aggregated consideration of both climate and socio-economic change in a coarse spatial resolution is a central feature for scenario development in global change research. Downscaling of the supposed aggregated changes is a necessary prerequisite for the assessments of global change at the regional scale. The present paper describes the method and results of an approach to develop and to apply scenarios ...

Gender Differences in Subjective Well-Being in and out of Management Positions

This study used data from the German Socio-economic Panel to examine gender differences in the extent to which self-reported subjective well-being was associated with occupying a high-level managerial position in the labour market,compared with employment in non-leadership, non-high-level managerial positions, unemployment, and non-labour market participation. Our results indicated that a clear hierarchy ...

The Set Point Theory of Well-Being Has Serious Flaws: On the Eve of a Scientific Revolution?

Set-point theory is the main research paradigm in the field of subjective well-being (SWB). It has been extended and refined for 30 years to take in new results. The central plank of the theory is that adult set-points do not change, except temporarily in the face of major life events. There was always some "discordant data", including evidence that some events are so tragic (e.g. the death of one's ...

Individual Risk Attitudes: Measurement, Determinants, and Behavioral Consequences

This paper studies risk attitudes using a large representative survey and a complementary experiment conducted with a representative subject pool in subjects' homes. Using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks -in general -, we find that gender, age, height, and parental background have an economically significant impact on willingness to take risks. The experiment confirms ...

Refunding ETS Proceeds to Spur the Diffusion of Renewable Energies: An Analysis Based on the Dynamic Oligopolistic Electricity Market Model EMELIE

We use a quantitative electricity market model to analyze the welfare effects of refunding a share of the emission trading proceeds to support renewable energy technologies that are subject to experience effects. We compare effects of supporting renewable energies under both perfect and oligopolistic competition with competitive fringe firms and emission trading regimes that achieve 70 and 80% emission ...

How Do Tourists React to Political Violence? An Empirical Analysis of Tourism in Egypt

This paper uses a detailed database of political violence in Egypt to study European and US tourists' attitudes towards a conflict region. We study the heterogeneous impacts of different dimensions of political violence and counter-violence on tourist flows to Egypt in the 1990s. Both US and EU tourists respond negatively to attacks on tourists, but are not influenced by casualties arising in confrontations ...

Security as a Public, Private or Club Good: Some Fundamental Considerations

Security is often defined as the absence of threats. However, security has far more aspects, reaching from security of nation states to health security. Baldwin (1997) formulated seven questions to narrow the (broad) concept of security. Along with Baldwin's questions, this paper analyses 'security' in the context of private, public, and club goods and their changing mixture. On the individual level, ...

The Economics of Terrorism from a Policy-Maker's Perspective

This paper introduces a brief framework on the political decision-making process in the context of terrorism. I relate the trade-offs policy-makers are faced with to the economic terrorism literature. Past years have shown a steady increase in theoretical and empirical contributions. However, the major part of the empirical advances is on the economic effects of terrorism, its origins, and drivers. ...

The Economics of Security: A European Perspective ; Introduction

Entrepreneurship, Windfall Gains and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Germany

We investigate the link between the propensity to become an entrepreneur and the exogenous release from financial constraints in Germany. This is defined in terms of the movement from employment to self-employment on receipt of a financial windfall. A theoretical framework developing Evans and Jovanovic (1989) is set up and tested with panel data from German households. The results show that financial ...

Virtual Assisted Self Interviewing (VASI): An Expansion of Survey Data Collection Methods to Virtual Worlds by Means of VDCI

Changes in communication technology have allowed for the expansion of data collection modes in survey research. The proliferation of the computer has allowed the creation of web and computer assisted auto-interview data collection modes. Virtual worlds are a new application of computer technology that once again expands the data collection modes by VASI (Virtual Assisted Self Interviewing). The Virtual ...

Government Ownership of Banks, Institutions and Economic Growth

We present new cross-country evidence that reveals that during 1995-2007, government ownership of banks has been robustly associated with higher long-run growth rates. We also show that previous results suggesting that government ownership of banks is associated with lower long-run growth rates are not robust to conditioning on more "fundamental" determinants of economic growth.

What Drives Regional Business Cycles? The Role of Common and Spatial Components

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. The results obtained by a panel model with spatial effects indicate that the impact of national business cycles has been rather stable over the past two decades. A tendency for convergence in business cycles often detected in country data is not confirmed at the regional level. The pattern of synchronization across ...

How Helpful Are Spatial Effects in Forecasting the Growth of Chinese Provinces?

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the annual growth rates of the real gross regional product (GRP) for each of the 31 Chinese provinces simultaneously. Beside the usual panel data models, we use panel models that explicitly account for spatial dependence between the GRP growth rates. In addition, the possibility of spatial effects being different for different groups of provinces (Interior ...

The Russian Regional Convergence Process: Where Is It Leading

This paper investigates income convergence among Russian regions between 1998 and 2006. It makes two major contributions to the literature on regional convergence in Russia. First, it identifies spatial regimes using the exploratory spatial data analysis. Second, it examines the impact of spatial effects on the convergence process. Our results show that the overall speed of regional convergence in ...

Combating "Maritime Terrorism" off the Coast of Somalia

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the international naval mission in the Gulf of Aden from 2008 to 2010, both in terms of its counter-piracy and its counter-terrorism objectives. We draw on arguments developed in the literature of terrorism and law and economics, detailed statistical analyses and a large number of in depth interviews. Counter-piracy operations are a qualified success: their ...

Infant Mortality and Adult Stature in Spain

This paper presents new evidence concerning the relationship between environmental conditions in the year of birth (as reflected in the infant mortality rate (IMR) and gross domestic product per capita) and adult health (adult height). We perform an analysis across Spanish regions for cohorts born between 1961 and 1980, a period when the country underwent a socio-economic and political transformation. ...

Natural Hazard Insurance in Europe: Tailored Responses to Climate Change Are Needed

This paper provides an overview of the existing systems of natural hazard insurance in Europe, their structural characteristics and peculiarities. It also discusses the difficulties of adaptation of these systems to climate change and the growing number of natural disasters. Using Germany, Austria and Switzerland as examples, the paper demonstrates that based on the status quo, the Swiss monopoly insurance ...

Introduction to a Special Issue: The Internationalisation of Services - Evidence from Micro Data

Comparability of EU-SILC Survey and Register Data: The Relationship among Employment, Earnings and Poverty

The Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) provide an up-to-date data source for the comparative analysis of income, material deprivation and poverty. At the European Union (EU) level, these data have become a standard source for social reporting. Yet the specific approaches to data collection in EU-SILC vary widely from one country to the next. One of the major differences is that some ...