External refereed essays

The Effect of Lone Motherhood on the Smoking Behavior of Young Adults

We provide evidence that living with an unmarried mother during childhood raises smoking propensities for young adults in Germany.

Network Formation under Mutual Consent and Costly Communication

We consider two different approaches to describe the formation of social networks under mutual consent and costly communication. First, we consider a network-based approach; in particular Jackson-Wolinsky's concept of pairwise stability. Next, we discuss a non-cooperative game-theoretic approach, through a refinement of the Nash equilibria of Myerson's consent game. This refinement, denoted as monadic ...

Where People Live and Die Makes a Difference: Individual and Geographic Disparities in Well-Being Progression at the End of Life

Life-span psychological research has long been interested in the contextual embeddedness of individual development. To examine whether and how regional variables relate to between-person disparities in the progression of late-life well-being, we applied three-level growth curve models to 24-year longitudinal data from deceased participants of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (N = 3,427; age at ...

Examining the Gender Wealth Gap

Economic research on the determinants of gender differences in economic outcomes particularly in income and consumption is well established. Extending these investigations to other outcomes such as wealth up till now has been limited due to lack of individual-level data. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we find a significant "raw" gender wealth gap of 50,000€ for married partners. Decomposition ...

Inclusion of Latent Variables in Mixed Logit Models: Modelling and Forecasting

Travel demand models typically use mainly objective modal attributes as explanatory variables. Nevertheless, it has been well known for many years that attitudes and perceptions also influence users' behaviour. The use of hybrid discrete choice models constitutes a good alternative to incorporate the effect of subjective factors. We estimated hybrid models in a short-survey panel context for data among ...

Technological Innovation Systems for Microgeneration in the UK and Germany: A Functional Analysis

This paper examines the deployment of microgeneration in Germany and the UK from a technological innovation systems (TIS) perspective. Based on the TIS functions approach, we condense supportive and obstructive factors and discuss the differences in the respective national setting for small-scale renewable and combined heat and power (CHP) technologies. The findings underline the relevance of legitimation ...

Distributional Effects of Imputed Rents in Five European Countries

Most empirical distributional studies of well-being in developed countries rely on distributions of disposable income. From a theoretical point of view this practice is contentious since a household's command over resources is determined not only by its spending power over commodities it can buy in the market but also on resources available to the household members through non-market mechanisms such ...

M3 Money Demand and Excess Liquidity in the Euro Area

Recent empirical studies have found evidence of unstable long run money demand functions if recent data are used. If the link between money balances and the macroeconomy is fragile, the rationale of monetary aggregates in the ECB strategy has to be doubted. In contrast we present a "stable" long run money demand relationship for M3 for the period 1983-2006. To obtain the result, the short run homogeneity ...

Overcoming Data Limitations in Nonparametric Benchmarking: Applying PCA-DEA to Natural Gas Transmission

We empirically demonstrate a practical approach of efficiency evaluation with limited data availability in some regulated industries. We apply PCA-DEA for radial efficiency measurement to U.S. natural gas transmission companies in 2007. PCA-DEA reduces dimensions of the optimization problem while maintaining most of the variation in the original data. Our results suggest that the methodology reduces ...

Merchant Electricity Transmission Expansion: A European Case Study

We apply a merchant transmission model to the trilateral market coupling (TLC) arrangement among the Netherlands, Belgium and France as an example, and note that it could further be applied to other market splitting or coupling of Europe's different national power markets. In this merchant framework the system operator allocates financial transmission rights (FTRs) to investors in transmission expansion ...

Incentives for Transmission Investment in the PJM Electricity Market: FTRs or Regulation (or Both?)

This paper presents an application of a mechanism that provides incentives to promote transmission network expansion in the area of the US electric system known as PJM. The applied mechanism combines the merchant and regulatory approaches to attract investment into transmission grids. It is based on rebalancing a two-part tariff in the framework of a wholesale electricity market with locational pricing. ...

Liquidity and the Dynamic Pattern of Asset Price Adjustment: A Global View

Global liquidity expansion has been very dynamic since 2001. Contrary to conventional wisdom, high money growth rates have not coincided with a concurrent rise in goods prices. At the same time, however, asset prices have increased sharply, significantly outpacing the subdued development in consumer prices. We investigate the interactions between money and goods and asset prices at the global level. ...

Toward a Combined Merchant-Regulatory Mechanism for Electricity Transmission Expansion

Electricity transmission pricing and transmission grid expansion have received increasing attention in recent years. There are two disparate approaches to transmission investment: one employs the theory based on long-run financial rights (LTFTR) to transmission (merchant approach), while the other is based on the incentive-regulation hypothesis (regulatory approach). In this paper we consider the elements ...

Pricing Natural Gas in Mexico: An Application of the Little-Mirrlees Rule: The Case of Quasi-Rents

In 1997, the Comision Reguladora de Energia of Mexico implemented a netback rule for linking the Mexican natural gas price to the Texas price. At that time, the Texas price reflected a reasonably competitive market. There have been dramatic increases in the demand for gas, and there are various bottlenecks in the supply of gas. As a result, the price of gas in Texas now reflects the quasi-rents created ...

Lumpy Investment in Regulated Natural Gas Pipelines: An Application of the Theory of the Second Best

We address investment in regulated natural gas pipelines when investment is lumpy and the demand for gas is stochastic. This is a problem that can be solved in theory as a dynamic program, but a practical solution depends on functions and parameters that are either subjective or cannot be estimated. We then reformulate the problem from the standpoint of consumers that face incomplete markets. It is ...

Comparing the Early Research Performance of PhD Graduates in Labor Economics in Europe and the USA

This paper analyzes the early research performance of PhD graduates in labor economics, addressing the following questions: Are there major productivity differences between graduates from American and European institutions? If so, how relevant is the quality of the training received (i.e. ranking of institution and supervisor) and the research environment inthe subsequent job placement institution? ...

Copayments for Ambulatory Care in Germany: A Natural Experiment Using a Difference-in-Difference Approach

In response to increasing health expenditures and a high number of physician visits, the German government introduced a copayment for ambulatory care in 2004 for individuals with statutory health insurance (SHI). Because persons with private insurance were exempt from the copayments, this health-care reform can be regarded as a natural experiment. We used a difference-in-difference approach to examine ...

Do Regional Price Levels Converge?

We investigate price level convergence on the base of regional data for 439 German districts.. - First and second generation tests are applied to the overall consumer price index as well as to the index without housing prices. They indicate a lack of regional price convergence. The. - second generation tests reveal that the source of the unit root is likely common for all regions. One rationale of ...

Will the Stress Tests for Banks Improve the Stability of Financial Markets?

Your House, Your Car, Your Education: The Socioeconomic Situation of the Neighborhood and Its Impact on Life Satisfaction in Germany

This study deals with the impact of socioeconomic conditions and social integration into a local neighborhood on individual life satisfaction in Germany. While the majority of ecological studies to date are based on very broad neighborhood concepts, using large research units for defining neighborhood the present study contains micro-geographic information on a representative sample of private households ...