External refereed essays

Forecasting the Fragility of the Banking and Insurance Sectors

Linkages between banks and insurance companies are important when forecasting the fragility of the banking and insurance sectors. We propose a novel empirical framework that allows us to estimate unobserved linkages in panel data sets that contain observed regressors. We find that taking unobserved common factors into account reduces the root mean square forecasts error of firm specific forecasts by ...

Transitions to Employment and Marriage among Young Men in Egypt

We examine in this paper the transition from school to work and the transition to marriage among young men with at least a secondary education in Egypt, with particular attention to how the first transition affects the second. In examining the transition from school to work, we analyze the determinants of the duration of transition to first employment after school completion, as well as the type and ...

Der Gender Pay Gap in Führungspositionen: warum die Humankapitaltheorie zu kurz greift

Quality Distortions in Vertical Relations

This paper examines how delivery tariffs and private quality standards are determined in vertical relations that are subject to asymmetric information. We consider an infinitely repeated game where an upstream firm sells a product to a downstream firm. In each period, the firms negotiate a delivery contract comprising the quality of the good as well as a non-linear tariff. Assuming asymmetric information ...

Economic Gains from Educational Transfers in Kind in Germany

The aim of this paper is to estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from publicly provided education and to analyze their impact on the income distribution and on economic inequality in Germany. Using representative micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and taking into consideration regional and education-specific variation, the overall result is an expected leveling effect ...

Analysing Convergence in Europe Using the Non-linear Single Factor Model

We investigate convergence in European price level, unit labour cost, income and productivity data over the period of 1960-2006 using the non-linear time-varying coefficients factor model proposed by Philips and Sul (2007 Econometrica 75:1771-1855). This approach is extremely flexible in order to model a large number of transition paths to convergence. We find regional clusters in consumer price level ...

Infrastructure, Regulation, Investment and Security of Supply: A Case Study of the Restructured US Natural Gas Market

In this paper, we discuss the relationship between infrastructure regulation and investment in light of the emerging "security of supply" debate. We approach the subjectby surveying the literature of the past two decades, especially examining the interactions among restructuring, regulation, and investment. The empirical section of this paper relies on case studies of the relationship between the regulatory ...

Maternal Life Satisfaction and Child Outcomes: Are They Related?

This paper investigates the association between maternal life satisfaction and the developmental functioning of 2-3-year-old children as well as the socio-emotional behavior of 5-6-year-old children. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which allows us to control for a rich set of child and parental characteristics and to use the mother's life satisfaction before the birth ...

Detecting Illegal Activities: The Case of Cartels

This paper considers enhancements of a comparatively new method to detect cartels, the System of Cartel Markers (SCM), introduced by Blanckenburg and Geist (Int Adv Econ Res 15(4):421-436, 2009). The aim of SCM is to find illegal collusion on legal markets with observable market data. It uses expected behavior patterns such aslow level of capacity utilization, slackness of price adjustments to exogenous ...

Circular and Repeat Migration: Counts of Exits and Years away from the Host Country

The importance of repeat and circular migration starts receiving rising recognition. The paper studies this behavior by analyzing the number of exits and the total number of years away from the host country using count data models and panel data from the German guestworker experience. Beyond the myth, more than 60% of migrants in the sample from the guestworker countries living in Germany are indeed ...

Culture, Contiguity and Conflict: On the Measurement of Ethnolinguistic Effects in Spatial Spillovers

Research on ethnolinguistic heterogeneity has so far mostly focused on domestic measures, while little attention has been paid to ethnolinguistic relations between nations. In this paper, I propose a way of measuring ethnolinguistic affinity between nations. This index measures the degree of similarity two randomly drawn individuals from two different populations are expected to display. I show that ...

Do Tuition Fees Affect the Mobility of University Applicants? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Several German states recently introduced tuition fees for university education. We investigate whether these tuition fees influence the mobility of university applicants. Based on administrative data of applicants for medical schools in Germany, we estimate the effect of tuition fees on the probability of applying for a university in the home state. We find a small but significant reaction: The probability ...

Can Child Care Policy Encourage Employment and Fertility? Evidence from a Structural Model

We develop a structural model of female employment and fertility which accounts for intertemporal feedback effects between these two outcomes. To identify the effect of financial incentives on employment and fertility we exploit variation in the tax and transfer system, which differs by employment state and number of children. Specifically, we simulate in detail the effects of the tax and transfer ...

Preferences for Childcare Policies: Theory and Evidence

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from rich to poor, the rich should favour mixed over pure public provision, but if public provision redistributes ...

Financial Student Aid and Enrollment in Higher Education: New Evidence from Germany

Means-tested student aid might affect enrollment in higher education. To derive the potential influence of student aid, we use a tax-benefit microsimulation model. The effect is a non-linear function of parental income, with variation as a result of bracket creeping and various reforms. Therefore, the effect of student aid on enrollment can be separated from the effects of income and other family characteristics. ...

"An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth": Political Violence and Counter-Insurgency in Egypt

The authors analyse newly collected time-series data measuring the dimensions of violent political conflict in Egypt. Attention is focused on the interaction between politically motivated attacks by Islamists and the counter-insurgency measures used by the Egyptian government. Both insurgency and counter-insurgency are multidimensional. Insurgencyincludes attacks on tourists, on Egyptian civilians ...

The Private Equity Premium Puzzle Revisited: New Evidence on the Role of Heterogeneous Risk Attitudes

The empirical finding that entrepreneurs invest a large share of their wealth in their own firms, despite comparably low returns and high risk, has become known as the private equity premium puzzle. This paper provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that lower risk-aversion of entrepreneurs, and thus not necessarily credit constraints, may explain this puzzle. The analysis is based on a representative ...

Modeling Strategic Electricity Storage: The Case of Pumped Hydro Storage in Germany

We study the strategic utilization of storage in imperfect electricity markets. We apply a game-theoretic Cournot model to the German power market and analyze different counterfactual and realistic cases of pumped hydro storage. Our main finding is that both storage utilization and storage-related welfare effects depend on storage ownership and the operator's involvement in conventional generation. ...

Determinants of the Export Behaviour of German Business Services Companies

This paper presents results about the determinants of export behaviour of services firms. Using a unique panel of enterprises for the years 2003 to 2005, the impact of size, productivity, human capital, experience on the national market, etc. on export behaviour are analysed. In addition, the researchers control for unobserved time-invariant characteristics by using a pooled fractional probit estimator. ...

Akzeptanz von Grundschulempfehlungen und Auswirkungen auf den weiteren Bildungsverlauf

Der Übergang von der Grundschule in die mehrgliedrige Sekundarstufe ist in Deutschland entscheidend für den weiteren Bildungsverlauf, da spätere Wechsel der Schulform zwar möglich sind, aber nur relativ selten stattfinden. In diesem Papier betrachten wir den Einfluss der Akzeptanz der Schullaufbahnempfehlungen am Ende der Grundschulzeit auf den Bildungsverlauf bis zum Alter von 17 Jahren. Die Datengrundlage ...