External refereed essays

Consumption and Social Life in Cities: Evidence from Germany

This paper examines social agglomeration externalities. Using survey data from the German Socioeconomic Panel, it examines the link between city size and different measures of consumption, social interaction and social capital. There is strong evidence of agglomeration effects in consumption, while positive effects of city size on social interaction and social capital variables seem to some extent ...

Dynamik von Einkommen und Armut in Ost- und West-Deutschland

The Relationship between Technology, Innovation, and Firm Performance: Empirical Evidence from E-Business in Europe

This article analyzes the relationship between the usage of Internet-based technologies, different types of innovation, and performance at the firm level. Data for the empirical investigation originates from a sample of 7302 European enterprises. The empirical results show that Internet-based technologies were an important enabler of innovation in the year 2003. It was found that all studied types ...

Publications: German Economic Research Institutes on Track

About a decade ago the German Science Council requested a strengthening of academic research at the German economic research institutes to improve the academic foundation of policy advice - the traditional task of the institutes. Based on publications in SSCI journals, research output has since then improved remarkably in scope and quality and has involved an ever rising number of scholars within the ...

O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Effects of Having a Sibling on Geographic Mobility and Labour Market Outcomes

This paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact in affecting children's mobility characteristics. Our main result is that the mobility of young adults crucially depends on the presence of a sibling. Siblings compete in location and employment decisions to direct parental care decisions towards their preferred outcome. Only children are not exposed ...

Subjective Income and Employment Expectations and Preferences for Redistribution

Using probabilistic expectations data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we establish a link between self-reported expectations of occupational mobility and preferences for redistribution. Our results provide new evidence on the validity of the "prospect of upward mobility" hypothesis. (

Isometrische Greifkraft und sozialgerontologische Forschung: Ergebnisse und Analysepotentiale des SHARE und SOEP

Dieser Aufsatz zeigt, dass die Messung der Handgreifkraft ein auch in sozialwissenschaftlichen Bevölkerungsumfragen einfach zu ermittelndes, nicht-invasives und verlässliches objektives Gesundheitsmaß ist. Die Greifkraftmessung stellt nicht nur eine sinnvolle Ergänzung zu selbst berichteten Indikatoren des Gesundheitszustandes dar, sondern besitzt darüber hinaus hinsichtlich einer Vielzahl insbesondere ...

Is Entrepreneurial Success Predictable? An Ex-Ante Analysis of the Character-Based Approach

This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which focuses on the personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction of entrepreneurial success. A unique data set is used consisting of 414 persons whose personal characteristics were analyzed by different methods, namely an one-day assessment center (AC) and a standardized questionnaire, before ...

Downsizing in the German Chemical Manufacturing Industry during the 1990s

The German chemical manufacturing industry experienced major downsizing between 1992 and 2004, with the average size of firms shrinking by nearly half during this period. This study uses modern frontier efficiency analysis to investigate the determinants of this downsizing. Based on reliable census data, the results of this analysis suggest that firms were not primarily concerned with improving technical ...

The Impact of Income Taxation on the Ratio between Reservation and Market Wages and the Incentives for Labour Supply

This article extends previous research about the determinants of reservation wages by analysing the effect of progressive income taxation on the ratio between reservation and net market wages. Based on micro data for Germany Socio-Economic-Panel (SOEP) we show that joint income taxation in Germany which discriminates by marital status, has a strong and highly significant impact on the reservation/market ...

Risk Attitudes of Nascent Entrepreneurs

The influence of risk aversion on the decision to become self-employed is a much discussed topic in the entrepreneurial literature. Conventional wisdom asserts that being an entrepreneur means making risky decisions; hence more risk-averse individuals are less likely to become entrepreneurs. In contrast to previous research, we are able to examine empirically whether the decision of starting a business ...

Income Taxes and Entrepreneurial Choice: Empirical Evidence from Germany

Does tax policy affect entrepreneurial choice? We use two tax reforms in Germany as "natural experiments". These reforms reduced the marginal income tax rate for entrepreneurs with income above a certain threshold, with the exception of freelance professionals. The two conditions for belonging to the treatment group allow us to apply a "difference-in-difference-in-difference" identification strategy ...

Evaluating the German Mini-Job Reform Using a Natural Experiment

Increasing work incentives for people with low income is a common topic in the policy debate across European countries. The 'Mini-Job' reform in Germany had a similar motivation. We carry out an ex-post evaluation to identify the short-run effects of this reform. Our identification strategy uses an exogenous variation in the interview months in the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which allows us ...

Turning Unemployment into Self-Employment: Effectiveness of Two Start-up Programmes

Turning unemployment into self-employment has become a major focus of German active labour market policy (ALMP) in recent years. If effective, this would not only reduce Germany's persistently high unemployment rate, but also increase its notoriously low self-employment rate. Empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such programmes is scarce. We evaluate the effectiveness of two start-up programmes ...

Introducing Family Tax Splitting in Germany: How Would It Affect the Income Distribution, Work Incentives and Household Welfare?

We analyze the effects of three different proposals to introduce a family tax-splitting system in Germany. The empirical analysis is based on a behavioral microsimulation model, which integrates an empirical household labor-supply model into a detailed tax-benefit model. Our results show that, under each reform, the lion's share of the reduction in taxes would accrue to families in the upper part of ...

The Parental Leave Benefit Reform in Germany: Costs and Labour Market Outcomes of Moving towards the Nordic Model

Germany is known to have one of the lowest fertility rates among Western European countries and also relatively low employment rates of mothers with young children. Although these trends have been observed during the last decades, the German public has only recently begun discussing these issues. In order to reverse these trends, the German government recently passed a reform of the parental leave ...

A Drive up the Capital Coast? Contributions to Post-reform Growth across Chinese Provinces

We use nonparametric production-frontier methods to decompose the growth of labor productivity of Chinese provinces in the post-reform period. These techniques, combined with kernel density estimates, allow us to decompose the shift in the distribution of labor productivity without the need for many assumptions common in the empirical growth literature. We find that (1) the distribution of output per ...

Banking Competition, Good or Bad? The Case of Promoting Micro and Small Enterprise Finance in Kazakhstan

Competition is claimed to be beneficial in development projects promoting micro and small enterprise finance although there are still doubts as to whether these loans can be developed into a profitable business. Our research sheds new light on the question of how many MSE banking units should optimally be created and supported in a certain region. We employ a unique data set from the European Bank ...

Does Corporate Governance Determine Dividend Payouts in Poland?

This study examines the relation between corporate governance practices measured by the Transparency Disclosure Index (TDI) and dividend payouts in Poland. Our empirical approach lies in constructing measures of the quality of the corporate governance in 110 non-financial companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange between 1998 and 2004.We find evidence that an increase in the TDI or its sub-indices ...

Effects of Foreign Presence in a Transition Economy

We investigate the effects of regional and industrywide foreign presence and foreign direct investment (FDI) on the export volumes of Ukrainian manufacturing firms using unpublished panel data from 1996-2000. Foreign presence through FDI may have negative competition effects on domestic firms' performance; at the same time, domestic firms' productivity may be increased by technology transfer or training ...