External refereed essays

Rethinking the Dependent Variable in Voting Behavior: On the Measurement and Analysis of Electoral Utilities

As a dependent variable, party choice did not lend itself to analysis by means of powerful multivariate methods until the coming of discrete-choice models, most notably conditional logit and multinomial logit. These methods involve estimating effects on party preferences (utilities) that are post hoc derived from the data, but such estimates are plagued by a number of difficulties. These difficulties ...

Immigrant's Economic Performance across Europe: Does Immigration Policy Matter?

Drawing on panel data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we compare the economic performance of immigrants to Great Britain, West Germany, Denmark, Luxembourg, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Austria to that of the respective indigenous population. The unit of analysis is the individual in the household ...

How Much Market Do Market-Based Instruments Create? An Analysis for the Case of "White" Certificates

Among the diverse economic instruments to foster energy efficiency (EE) and climate protection, tradable certificates have been investigated for renewable energy, and the EU directive on an emissions-trading scheme for CO2 certificates has been approved in 2003. In contrast, tradable energy efficiency - or "white" - certificates have only lately been considered as a market-based tool to foster EE as ...

Household Taxation, Income Splitting and Labor Supply Incentives: A Microsimulation Study for Germany

We analyze potential labor supply effects of a shift from the current German system of joint taxation of married couples to a system of limited real income splitting on the basis of an econometric household labor supply model embedded in a tax benefit model. Our simulation results show relatively small labor supply effects of a shift from the current system to one of limited real income splitting system. ...

Barefoot and in a German Kitchen: Federal Parental Leave and Benefit Policy and the Return to Work after Childbirth in Germany

Since 1979 German federal maternity leave and benefit policy has given women incentives to stay at home and take care of their newborn and youngest children. In 1986 this leave and benefit policy was changed in several ways, turning it into a powerful instrument for delaying mothers' return to work after childbirth. Using a flexible duration dependence estimation technique for proportional hazards ...

Care of Children in a Low Fertility Setting: Transitions between Home and Market Care for Pre-School Children in Germany

Because it may affect a nation's fertility, child care policy is an important policy instrument for low-fertility countries. Designing an effective policy requires an understanding of the determinants of demand for child care. This study uses a descriptive statistical approach to analyze the dynamics of demand for child care for pre-school children in Germany. Age-specific and duration-specific hazard ...

Contests for Cooperation: A New Approach in German Innovation Policy

A new approach in German innovation policy organizes contests of proposals for developing innovation networks. Based on an overview of the different programs, we investigate the advantages and problems of such an approach. We find that this type of policy may have a relatively large impact and can, therefore, be regarded as a rather efficient instrument of innovation policy. Compared to conventional ...

The Incentives for Takeover in Oligopoly

We present a model of takeover where the target optimally sets its reserve price. Under relatively standard symmetry restrictions, we obtain a unique equilibrium. The probability of takeover is only a function of the number of firms and of the insiders' share of total industry gains due to the increase in concentration. Our main application is to the linear Cournot and Bertrand models. A takeover is ...

Fiscal Federalism in Transition: Evidence from Ukraine

Effects of fiscal federalism on redistribution and economic growth are analyzed for Ukraine, a country with large regional differences. Since there is virtually no such empirical literature, except a study of the German case, and since there are several potential flaws, the results must be interpreted in a very tentative way. We find that this relatively poor, disorganized country with little democracy ...

Long-Run Forecasting in Multicointegrated Systems

Landing on All Fours? Communist Elites in Post-Soviet Russia

This paper analyzes the economic situation of former Communist party members in post-Soviet Russia. On the basis of the Russian Socio-Economic Transition Panel, we are able to identify members of the Communist party prior to transition so that we can assess their relative economic performance between 1993 and 1999. We find a significant wage premium associated with former membership in the Soviet Communist ...

The Welfare State, Thresholds, and Economic Growth

Can a growing welfare state induce a regime switch in the growth rate of an economy? This paper constructs a dynamic political economy model of economic growth and the welfare state in which both variables are nonlinearly related and jointly endogenous. Using a Markov switching framework over the period 1950-2001, we find that the structural decline in growth rates that several welfare state economies ...

How to Turn an Industry Green: Taxes versus Subsidies

Environmental policies frequently target the ratio of dirty to green output within the same industry. To achieve such targets, the green sector may be subsidized or the dirty sector be taxed. We show that in a monopolistic competition setting, the two policy approaches have different welfare effects, depending on the design of the instrument (ad valorem versus unit instrument) and the initial situation ...

Der Einfluss des Einkommens der Eltern auf die Schulwahl

Die Einflüsse der Bildung und der sozialen Position der Eltern auf die Schulverläufe ihrer Kinder sind für Deutschland gut erforscht, die des Einkommens jedoch nicht. Nach den Theorien der Bildungswahl sind allerdings die Kosten des weiterführenden Schulbesuchs und die finanziellen Möglichkeiten der Eltern hierbei zentrale Aspekte. Deshalb konzentriert sich die vorliegende Untersuchung auf den Einfluss ...

Berufliche Weiterbildung in West- und Ostdeutschland: Teilnehmer, Struktur und individueller Ertrag

Norm-Based Trade Union Membership: Evidence for Germany

In the absence of closed shops and discriminatory wage policies, union membership can be explained by the existence of social norms. We describe a model, incorporating institutional features of the German labour market, which explicitly allows for social custom effects in the determination of union membership. Using panel data for Germany, we find evidence for according effects which restrict free-riding. ...

Private Savings and Transition: Dynamic Panel Data Evidence from Accession Countries

After the collapse in the early transition years, saving rates in Eastern European EU-accession countries have recovered strongly. But is private saving in these countries now driven by the same forces as in the EU? A GMM estimator is applied to analyze the determinants of private saving in both country groups. The main results are: saving rates are rather persistent; income growth increases saving, ...

Prediction of Business Cycle Turning Points in Germany

Using a binary reference series based on the dating procedure of Artis, Kontolemis and Osborn (1997) different procedures for predicting turning points of the German business cycles were tested. Specifically, a probit model as proposed by Estrella and Mishkin (1997) as well as Markov-switching models were taken into consideration. The overall results indicate that the interest rate spread, the real ...

Methodological Advances in National Travel Surveys: Mobility in Germany 2002

In Germany, a National Travel Survey was conducted in 2002. The paper describes the process needed to make empirical-based decisions on the main design characteristics of the survey. It outlines the survey operation used in the field during 2002, reports on the relevance of different contact strategies to minimize selectivity and non-response, and refers to issues of data processing and of dissemination ...

Alternative Measures of the Explanatory Power of General Multivariate Regression Models

In this paper R 2-type measures of the explanatory power of multivariate linear and categorical probit models proposed in the literature are reviewed and their deficiencies discussed. It is argued that a measure of the explanatory power should take into account the components which are explicitly modelled when a regression model is estimated while it should be indifferent to components not explicitly ...