External refereed essays

How Free is the Radio Spectrum? Guest Editorial

Peer Influence in Network Markets: An Empirical Investigation

Relationship Banking and SMEs: A Theoretical Analysis

Reliable information on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is rare and costly for financial intermediaries. Therefore relationship banking is often considered as the appropriate lending technique. In this paper we offer a theoretical model to analyze relationship banking and the pricing behavior of banks in a Bertrand competition framework with monitoring costs. We show that the lack of reliable ...

The Spatial Econometrics of Elephant Population Change: A Note

While previous research found no other variable than corruption to have a negative impact on the growth rate of the elephant populations of African countries, we show that one further significant impact is exerted by "neighbourhood effects". Elephants travel long distances, often crossing borders. Using spatial econometric tools, we find that elephant population changes in one country have a positive ...

Innovative Energy Technologies and Climate Policy in Germany

Due to the size and structure of its economy, Germany is one of the largest carbon emitters in the European Union. However, Germany is facing a major renewal and restructuring process in electricity generation. Within the next two decades, up to 50% of current electricity generation capacity may retire because of end-of-plant lifetime and the nuclear phase-out pact of 1998. Substantial opportunities, ...

Competition with Congestible Networks

We analyse competition between two network providers when the quality of each network depends negatively on the number of customers connected to that network. With respect to price competition we provide a sufficient condition for the existence of a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Comparative statics show that as the congestion effect gets stronger quantities will decrease and prices increase, ...

Income Satisfaction and Relative Deprivation: An Empirical Link

This paper explores the relationship between two well-established concepts of measuring individual well-being: the concept of happiness, i.e. self-reported level of satisfaction with income, and relative deprivation, i.e. the gaps between the individual's income and the incomes of all individuals richer than him. Operationalizing both concepts using micro panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, ...

Not for Lack of Trying: American Entrepreneurship in Black and White

Using a sample obtained from a survey conducted in the United States during summer 2002, we study the variables related to observed differences in the rate of entrepreneurial involvement between black and white Americans. We find strong evidence that differences in subjective and often biased perceptions are highly associated with entrepreneurial propensity across these two racial groups. In addition, ...

The Measurement of Social Exclusion

This paper develops an axiomatic approach to the measurement of social exclusion. At the individual level, social exclusion is viewed in terms of deprivation of the person concerned with respect to different functionings in the society. At the aggregate level we treat social exclusion as a function of individual exclusions. The class of subgroup decomposable social exclusion measures using a set of ...

Internationale Mobilität von deutschen Staatsbürgern: Chance für Arbeitslose oder Abwanderung der Leistungsträger?

Estimation of a Two-Equation Panel Model with Mixed Continuous and Ordered Categorical Outcomes and Missing Data

Intergenerational Mobility and Marital Sorting

We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the extent of intergenerational economic mobility in a framework that highlights the role played by assortative mating. We find that assortative mating plays an important role. On average about 40-50% of the covariance between parents' and own permanent family income can be attributed to the person to ...

Home-Market and Factor-Endowment Effects in a Gravity Approach

This paper shows how the home-market effect can be estimated in the generalized gravity equation of Bergstrand, taking into account traditional comparative advantage effects arising from differences in factor endowment. The empirical results suggest the presence of significant home-market effects for differentiated goods in many manufacturing industries which may be capital intensive or labour intensive. ...

Cohort Effects and the Returns to Education in West Germany

Using a Mincer-type wage function, we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for West German workers born between 1925 and 1974. The main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort, experience, and possibly also age and year effects in the returns. For women, we find a large and robust decline in schooling premia: In the private sector, the returns to a ...

Estimation of Multinomial Logit Models with Unobserved Heterogeneity Using Maximum Simulated Likelihood

In this paper, we suggest a Stata routine for multinomial logit models. - with unobserved heterogeneity using maximum simulated likelihood based on. - Halton sequences. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we describe the. - technical implementation of the estimation routine and discuss its properties. Further,. - we compare our estimation routine with the Stata program gllamm, which. - solves ...

Much Ado about Nothing: Conditional Logit vs. Random Coefficient Models for Estimating Labour Supply Elasticities

This study compares several specifications of discrete choice labour supply estimations on basis of the German Socio Economic Panel. The results suggest that despite the restrictive assumptions of the error terms the conditional logit model provides an adequate model choice for the analysis of labour supply functions. Significance tests, which are based on bootstrapped confidence intervals, show that ...

Verhaltensänderung durch Einführung der Praxisgebühr und Ursachenforschung: erste empirische Ergebnisse

Im Zuge des GKV-Modernisierungsgesetzes wird seit dem 1. 1. 2004 eine sog. Praxisgebühr von 10 Euro pro Quartal für ambulante Arzt- und Zahnarztbesuche erhoben. Neben einem Beitrag zur Konsolidierung der Finanzlage der GKV sollte die Praxisgebühr auch eine Verhaltensänderung der Versicherten bewirken. Der Beitrag zeigt auf, dass die Zahl der Arztbesuche im Jahre 2004 im Vergleich zum Jahr 2003 signifikant ...

Versicherungspflicht gegen Elementarschäden: ein Lehrstück für Probleme der volkswirtschaftlichen Politikberatung

Contribution to Productivity or Pork Barrel? The Two Faces of Infrastructure Investment

This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so, we eliminate a potential source of bias in production-function estimates and generate testable hypotheses on the forces that shape infrastructure policy. ...

Social Anomie and Racial Segregation in South Africa

The concept of anomie is one of the classics of sociological theory. Developed by scholars such as Emile Durkheim and Robert K. Merton, the concept refers to the absence of clear social norms and values and to a lack of sense of social regulation. However, whereas Merton focused on features of relative deprivation that cause anomie, Durkheim was primarily interested in the link between rapid social ...