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The article focuses on the ongoing skepticism among metalworking companies in North Rhine-Westphalia, in Germany as highlighted by the latest economic survey from the Metal Trade Association of North Rhine-Westphalia. It indicates a deterioration in current economic conditions, with one in ten metalworking firms describing the situation as inadequate. It notes a decline in the demand for skilled labor but highlights that many companies still perceive intense price competition in the market.

Copyright of Züchtungskunde is the property of Verlag Eugen Ulmer and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents the author's views related to neutral effects of global quantitative easing (QE) on the U.S. economy which in turn leads to the problem of Stagflation-global stagnation with high inflation in industrial countries. As mentioned, the World Economic Survey was conducted by the German Ifo Institute, Munich, Germany and Paris, France-based International Chamber of Commerce in the fourth quarter of 2011 which indicated the economic fall in all regions.

The IAB Establishment Panel is a large annual establishment survey and servesas a data source for many empirical analyzes, e.g., on labor demand, wages and industrial relations but also for influential policy evaluations. We analyze the selectivity of the IAB Establishment Panel compared with the administrative population of all establishments in Germany to test whether the IAB Establishment Panel is biased towards ‘‘good employers''. By design the survey over-samples large, thus high paying and stable establishments. After flexibly controlling for elements of the sampling design, we do not detect any meaningful difference between establishments participating in the survey and the full population regarding key economic performance indicators. If anything, we observe a slight overrepresentation of stable and slow growing establishments. For applied research, the results highlight that ‘‘typical'' econometric specifications may not be sufficient to control for selectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the book "OECD Economic Surveys, 1997-1998: Germany." The book presents the annual OECD review of the German economy based on work completed and finalized by July 1998. It reviews recent macroeconomic developments and short-term prospects and discusses some principal structural and microeconomic forces that may be at work and their prospective impact in the medium term. It also examines monetary and fiscal policies.

Using a representative survey of the German population, this article studies self-reported individual consumption responses to a recent exogenous payroll tax reduction. About 55% of the respondents report that they spend the extra money, indicating considerable potential for tax changes to affect consumption and economic activity. Our analysis of the socio-demographic and economic covariates of consumption responses suggests, among other effects, that interest rates are related to consumption responses to tax changes, and that households with higher income have a higher propensity to consume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now a quarter of a century since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the gap in living standards between eastern and western Germany is still not fully closed. Admittedly, this could not realistically have been expected. Despite the increase in life satisfaction in eastern Germany, the east-west divide prevails. Evidence of this can be found in the latest data from the long-term Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study gathered by DIW Berlin in cooperation with the fieldwork organization TNS Infratest Sozialforschung. According to the SOEP data, in 2013, eastern Germans were far less happy than western Germans, although the level of life satisfaction in the east was higher than at any other point in the history of the survey, which was conducted for the first time in eastern Germany in 1990--shortly before economic, currency, and social union. Other subjective indicators reveal differences in satisfaction with household income, health, and childcare. In contrast, job satisfaction, as well as satisfaction with housing, housework, and leisure time have converged. Eastern Germans worry more about crime levels and their own financial circumstances, whereas concerns about xenophobia and employment have diminished throughout Germany. The SOEP surveys show that, according to population, living standards in Germany are now largely aligned. Despite a number of specific problems which, in the coming years, will include the development of new pensions in eastern Germany in particular, German reunification has proven to be an extraordinary success story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of ifo Schnelldienst is the property of ifo Institute for Economic Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose – Service employees frequently engage in emotional labour to express emotions to customers that conform with organizational display rules. Previous studies report equivocal findings regarding the relationships among emotional labour, job satisfaction, and quitting intentions. This paper aims to shed additional light on the links by distinguishing two dimensions of emotional labour and predicting that job satisfaction mediates its relationship with quitting intentions, while gender and age moderate its relationship with job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach – Cross-sectional survey data from German service employees, entered into a structural equation model, test the study's hypotheses. Findings – Job satisfaction partially mediates relationships between emotional labour and quitting intentions. Deep acting positively affects the job satisfaction of male but not female service employees. The surface acting-job satisfaction link is negative for female but not male service employees. The deep acting-job satisfaction link also is stronger for younger than for older service workers. Research limitations/implications – Conservation of resources theory complements and extends previous service research focused on employee-related outcomes of emotional labour. Practical implications – The findings improve service managers' understanding of how employees' emotional labour drive job satisfaction and employee turnover. Originality/value – This study is the first to consider both gender and age as moderators that help explain employee quitting intentions, as well as the first to find a positive effect of deep and surface acting on quitting intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, new evidence from the financial Almost Ideal Demand Sysytem (AIDS) portfolio model is featured, making use of additional exogenous rate-of-return variation, which has been mostly disregarded in the relevant literature so far. A Two-Stage Budgeting Model (2SBM) of asset demand is constructed and applied to German survey data for a time frame where first implementations of a major income tax reform in Germany significantly altered the tax schedule. Marginal Tax Rates (MTR) at the household level are simulated in an income taxation module. Relatively great rate-of-return elasticities for, among others, owner-occupied housing as well as capital and private pension insurances suggest that return-related reactions are stronger at the asset allocation decision than they are usually found for the consumption-savings decision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the GESIS Microcensus-Trendfile, which composed of data from the German Microcensus from 1962 to 2006. The database contains variables which cover a wide array of topics ranging from regional information, employment, education to household and family. The article also describes the strategies and problems of harmonizing the German Microcensus, offers information on services for users and presents insight into the analytical capability of the Trendfile by example.

This study introduces a monthly coincident indicator for consumption in Germany based on Google Trends data on web search activity. In real-time nowcasting experiments the indicator outperforms common survey-based indicators in predicting consumption. Unlike those indicators, it provides predictive information beyond that already captured in other macroeconomic variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the properties of qualitative inflation expectations collected from economic experts for Germany. It describes their characteristics relating to rationality and Granger causality. An out-of-sample simulation study investigates whether this indicator is suitable for inflation forecasting. Results from other standard forecasting models are considered and compared with models employing survey measures. We find that a model using survey expectations outperforms most of the competing models. Moreover, we find some evidence that the survey indicator already contains information from other model types (e.g. Phillips curve models). However, the forecast quality may be further improved by completely taking into account information from some financial indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 to estimate the effects of the tax rate reductions. We base our analysis on the microcensus, the official representative continuous household survey in Germany. The results indicate that the tax rate reductions increased the probability of choosing self-employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effect of public R&D subsidies on firms' private R&D investment per employee and new product sales in German manufacturing. Parametric and semiparametric two-step selection models are applied to this evaluation problem. The results show that the average treatment effect on the treated firms' R&D intensity is positive. The estimated effects are robust with respect to the different selection models. Further results show that publicly induced R&D spending is as productive as private R&D investment in generating new product sales. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the Ifo Business Survey, which is being conducted by Ifo Institute in Germany. It discusses the data quantity, documentation and the availability of the survey, as well as the previous scientific usage of these data. An overview of the Ifo DataPool, in which the micro data of Ifo Business Survey are available, is also offered.

The article focuses on the Ifo World Economic Survey (WES), an economic confidence survey being conducted in more than 90 countries by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Germany. It states that the aim of this survey is to assess worldwide economic trends. It mentions that qualitative information is the emphasis of WES which asks economists for their assessment of main economic indicators for the present and for the future.

The article provides information on various journals related to economics and sociology. The "Economic Journal" contains papers by economist R.L. Wedgwood that discusses the statistics of railway costs. He analyses the recent returns of traffic and receipts, and contends that a more scientific statistical system should be introduced. Economist H.W. Macrosty submits proposals for an economic survey of Great Britain and physician Jacques Dumas discusses the present state of the land system in France. The "International Journal of Ethics" shares the views of economists. Professor J.S. Mackensie gives his opinion that late Edward Cuird has built up a solid treasure-house of wisdom that will outlast many erections in breadth of knowledge, balance and judgment, maturity of insight and power of luminous expression. Professor F. Tidily figures out the late Friedrich Paulsen, as child of a hardy, frugal, clear-headed and warm-hearted seafaring race who gave philosophical expression to the ideals of a stock from which so many intellectual leaders of the old fatherland had sprung, and upon the integrity of which the future glory of Germany depends.

The article reviews the welfare states of Sweden and Labor party England and their reconciliation of socialism and democracy. Specifically discussed is Sweden's national business institute founded in 1932 by the finance ministry for independent reportage of economic survey information and development of a long term economic program. A similar institute for Germany is proposed.

The article summarizes the discussion paper "Conversion of Non-Respondents in an Ongoing Panel Survey: The Case of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)" by Jörg-Peter Schräpler, Jürgen Schupp and Gert G. Wagner.

The article discusses a proposed study commission to conduct a national survey in West Germany to collect information, specifically social statistics relevant to setting social policy. Previous such statistical data gathering efforts such as the Economic Survey of 1933 are described. The difficulty of making sense of income and social security data is remarked on.

The paper examines the causality between the German current account and financial account. It contrasts with past research which assumes the current account and financial account to be jointly determined by a saving-investment imbalance. Our analysis decomposes the current account into exports and imports (real resource flows) and the financial account into domestic capital outflows and foreign capital inflows (gross capital flows). Evidence from the Toda-Yamamoto causality test shows that for Germany from Q1.1980 to Q2.2023, the causality runs from the financial account to the current account. It is not real resource flows but gross capital flows which exert significant impacts on the German real exchange rate. The finding implies that over the long run, strong German capital outflows and weak foreign capital inflows contributed to weak wage growth and stagnant investment in Germany, sustaining the persistent German current account surpluses. A reduction of the German current account surpluses requires a policy mix of fiscal expansion and monetary tightening which would expand the absorption of German and foreign capital in the German economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entertainment products such as movies are risky investments but contribute to societal welfare through their cultural and economic value. Therefore, movie production receives financial support from both private investors and public institutions, in the form of subsidies. Noting the ongoing debate about the actual impact of such funding, in research and practice, this study reviews a large sample of 1984 movies (co-) produced in Germany and released to cinemas over a 10-year period. The findings demonstrate the positive impact of public funding on movie success: indirectly by attracting private funding, and directly by increasing local and global box office revenues. However, public funding does not directly improve movie quality, which contradicts one of the aims of public funding. The analyses reveal different correlations and interaction effects with regard to financing and quality signals generated by the cast, directors, and producers of movies. Public funding emerges not only as relevant for the economic success of movies but also as a factor that supports their cultural contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We conceptualized the novel phenomenon of COVID-induced virtual teams and its implications and provided researchers with the required information on how to conduct a phenomenon-based study for conceptualizing novel phenomena in relevant ways. Design/methodology/approach: This article stems from phenomenon-based and, thus, theory-building and grounded qualitative research in the German industrial sector. We conducted 47 problem-centered interviews in two phases (February–July 2021 and February–July 2022) to understand how team members and team leaders experienced COVID-induced virtual teamwork and its subsequent developments. Findings: Empirically, we found COVID-induced virtual teams to be characterized by a high relevance of shaping positive team dynamics via steering internal moderators; crisis is a novel external moderator and transformation becomes the key output factor to be leveraged. Work-from-home leads to specific configuration needs and interrelations between work-from-home and on-site introduce additional dynamics. Methodologically, the phenomenon-based approach is found to be highly suitable for studying the effects of such novel phenomena. Research limitations/implications: This article is explorative. Thus, we advocate further research on related novel phenomena, such as post-COVID-hybrid and work-from-home teams. A model of how to encourage positive dynamics in post-COVID-hybrid teams is developed and lays the groundwork for further studies on post-COVID teamwork. Concerning methodology, researchers are provided with information on how to conduct phenomenon-based research on novel phenomena, such as the COVID-induced virtual teams that we studied. Practical implications: Companies receive advice on how to encourage positive dynamics in post-COVID teamwork, e.g. on identifying best practices and resilient individuals. Social implications: In a country such as Germany that faces labor shortages, our insights might facilitate better labor-market integration for those with care-work obligations and international workers. Originality/value: We offer a first conceptualization of a relevant novel phenomenon, namely COVID-induced virtual teams. We exemplify the phenomenon-based approach as a suitable methodology that serves to build relevant theory using active categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan and Germany are both facing a rapidly aging population and have similar social insurance-based long-term care systems. However, there are significant differences in utilization and costs. This paper presents a microeconomic decision model validated by regression analysis, Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, and Data Envelopment Analysis to contrast the utilization patterns in the Japanese and German long-term care sectors. The design of the welfare programs for low-income families has been identified as one of the main reasons. In Germany, the welfare system leads to a demand curve for nursing home care that is comparable to that of an inferior good which makes external long-term care in nursing homes the more attractive, the poorer the respective households are. In addition, the resulting inelastic demand of the population groups in need of social benefits seem to reduces competition among Germany's long-term care providers, which is associated with a loss of efficiency in how they use production factors. In Japan, this negative outcome is avoided by a comfort segmentation in the nursing home market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growth model theory has turned the focus of comparative political economy scholars on the demand drivers of economic growth. But while its proponents emphasize the variety and inherent instability of growth models, research so far has been more concerned with the emergence and coherence of stable growth models than in the process of change. We argue that growth model change can be understood as a process of financial rebalancing on the level of institutional sectors. When an overindebted sector is forced to deleverage, a politically contested process emerges over the path of adjustment. We derive various ways in which each sector can contribute to this process of financial adjustment, which we conceptualize as the activation of macroeconomic 'compensation valves'. This process shapes the trajectory of economic performance during financial crisis and determines whether a new feasible growth model can emerge in its aftermath. We apply our analytical lens in a comparative case study of Germany and the Netherlands during the Great Recession. We conclude that future research on growth models should more explicitly problematize the ability of political economies to adapt to financial instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Raumforschung und Raumordnung is the property of Oekom Verlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent studies use Fixed Effects (FE) models to estimate the causal effect of obesity on socioeconomic status, the so-called obesity penalty. In this paper, I will illustrate the advantages of using a Difference in Differences (DID) approach as an alternative method of causal analysis. Combining the German National Health Interview and Examination Survey 1998 (GNHIES98) and the German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Adults 2008 (DEGS1) allowed for a panel analysis of 3934 respondents. The dependent variable is a socioeconomic status score that integrates level of education, occupation and household income. The binary treatment variable is abdominal obesity. To estimate the causal effect of the treatment, FE and DID approaches were used. Both the FE model and the DID estimate show no statistically significant causal effect of abdominal obesity on socioeconomic status for adults in Germany. However, both the respondents who became obese and those who stayed non-obese experience a rise in socioeconomic status over time. Nonetheless, the non-obese group had a more substantial increase in socioeconomic status than the obese group. Therefore, the obesity penalty does not necessarily have to be a decrease in socioeconomic status but could instead be a slowed growth or stagnation in status. The advantage of the DID approach is that the development in the control group is explicit. If obese individuals are more likely to have less favorable positive trends in socioeconomic status over time than other individuals, using DID estimates demonstrates the obesity penalty more effectively than using only FE models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating the causal effects of health policy interventions is crucial for policymaking but is challenging when using real-world administrative health care data due to a lack of methodological guidance. To help fill this gap, we conducted a plasmode simulation using such data from a recent policy initiative launched in a deprived urban area in Germany. Our aim was to evaluate and compare the following methods for estimating causal effects: propensity score matching, inverse probability of treatment weighting, and entropy balancing, all combined with difference-in-differences analysis, augmented inverse probability weighting, and targeted maximum likelihood estimation. Additionally, we estimated nuisance parameters using regression models and an ensemble learner called superlearner. We focused on treatment effects related to the number of physician visits, total health care cost, and hospitalization. While each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, our results demonstrate that the superlearner generally worked well for handling nuisance terms in large covariate sets when combined with doubly robust estimation methods to estimate the causal contrast of interest. In contrast, regression-based nuisance parameter estimation worked best in small covariate sets when combined with singly robust methods., (© 2024 The Author(s). Health Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

This study examines gender differences in human capital, performance characteristics, and earnings among elite athletes in semi-professional sports in Germany. In 2018, a nationwide online survey of elite athletes supported by the German Sports Aid Foundation was conducted where they were asked about their life and earnings situation (n = 1064). Regression analyses were estimated to identify the role of gender while controlling for human capital and performance characteristics. The results showed a significant gender earnings gap in favor of male athletes for annual earnings and calculatory wage rate. This gap is mainly driven by gender differences in earnings from work and public sport funding, while financial support from the German Sports Aid Foundation and from family/friends attenuated the gap. The results can be explained by treatment discrimination and male athletes' preferences for current work, while female athletes invested significantly more time into studying/learning and their human capital, respectively. The findings have implications for funding institutions as well as people involved in supporting elite athletes in semi-professional sports. Since earnings data are typically not publicly available, this study relies on unique data to examine athletes' earnings taking a gender perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature shows that founding-family control tends to positively impact firm performance and valuation. However, it is questioned whether this positive impact also persists in times of crisis or might even be reverted, as in such periods families could be focused on the survival of the firm even at the expense of long-term cash flows. By studying a large sample of listed German firms over the period 1998–2018, we document a significant outperformance of family firms in terms of ROA and (to a lesser extent) Tobin's Q during the crisis years 2008–2010 relative to their non-family counterparts. Moreover, this crisis resilience is more pronounced the stronger the family influence in terms of equity ownership. Outside the crisis period, there is only weak evidence for any outperformance. Digging deeper into this crisis effect, we find family firms to significantly reduce their leverage during the crisis. This, however, is not done at the expense of future cash flows, as we find weak evidence that family firms increase their capital expenditures as well as their employment relative to their non-family counterparts. Given that these results also hold in a dynamic panel system GMM approach and withstand a battery of robustness tests, we hope to add new evidence on the drivers of family firm performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many countries around the world, the number of new doctorate recipients graduating from universities has grown sharply in the past few decades, but the implications of this expansion for the employment situation of doctorate recipients remain largely unexplored in longitudinal studies. In Germany, as in various other countries, the expansion of doctoral education coincided with other changes in higher education that may have had a relevant impact on the careers of doctorate recipients. We explore the labour market outcomes of more than 98,000 doctorate recipients who graduated between 1995 and 2013. Focusing on differences among 19 annual graduation cohorts, we find that, beginning in the mid-2000s, newly graduating doctorate recipients had lower rates of full-time employment and were less likely to earn high incomes than graduates of the 1995–2000 period. At the same time, rates of inter-regional mobility have declined, and more new doctorate recipients remain employed in the academic sector. Differences across cohorts are robust to disaggregation along gender and disciplinary lines and persist for at least five years after graduation. We relate these findings to a stronger socialisation of doctoral students towards academic 'excellence', new employment options in university administration and management as well as increasing fixed-term employment in research projects. Our findings indicate that the expansion of doctoral education, as well as potential reforms in the training of doctoral candidates, must be analysed in the context of the respective university system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates firms' responses to threshold-dependent intensity of tax enforcement. We use administrative tax return data over the entire population of German firms and exploit industry variation in firm size thresholds applied by the tax administration. In our setting, each threshold marks a considerable spike in audit intensity and hence should create strong incentives to bunch below the threshold. However, we find no such effect in our large sample analysis. We attribute this empirical observation to optimization costs, particularly to the costs associated with the operational implementation of size management and to information costs. Our paper adds to the emerging field of studies on potential distortions created by threshold-dependent firm regulation. The findings are also relevant for policymakers, as they suggest that the specific design of threshold-dependent policies might allow governments to increase the efficiency of tax audits without distorting the firm size distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the causal impact of terrorism on immigration policy preferences? Under what circumstances and due to which psychological micro-mechanisms does this impact materialize? To answer these questions, we provide evidence from pre-registered and well-powered experiments for Germany and the United Kingdom. We find that anti-immigration responses to terrorism follow an emotional proximity rationale: terrorism leads to more restrictive migration policy preferences only among individuals with high levels of perceived insecurity, especially when terrorism occurs in their own country. Policy preferences are not affected by terrorism abroad or by information cues on the objectively low probability of being victimized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing demographic change in most developed countries consists of two coinciding independent developments that differ in structure and persistence: A slow, monotonic and (presumably) permanent longevity effect caused by an increasing life expectancy; and a more rapidly changing, non-monotonic and less permanent cohort effect caused by fluctuations in the size of cohorts. This paper shows the longevity effect has a positive impact on the rates of return households generate within a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system. The cohort effect, by contrast, results in winners and losers in PAYG systems. The paper additionally shows that the type of PAYG pension system alters the results significantly. Taking the remarkable demographic change in Germany as an example, a large-scale overlapping generation model quantifies rates of return within the PAYG pension system for every cohort. The results show that the two effects combined cause return differentials of almost 1.3 percentage points between generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente is the property of Universidade Federal do Parana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Participating in further training is strategically important for employees to ensure their employability. Particularly for employees in low‐skilled jobs, works councils — firm‐level organizations that represent employees — constitute an important employee advocacy instrument in European countries, such as France and Germany. With comprehensive co‐determination rights, works councils can influence firms' hiring policies, job design and career paths (e.g. promotions). Using German firm‐level data, we empirically investigate the influence of works councils on firms' training provision for employees in firms below and above the industry level of technology. The results show that works councils have a positive effect on the percentage of employees in general, and of employees in low‐skilled jobs in particular, participating in training, but only for firms below the industry level of technology. These results show the importance of works councils in supporting training in such firms and enhancing the employment prospects of employees in low‐skilled jobs. In contrast, firms above the industry level of technology invest in training with or without a works council, indicating that the training interests of employers and employees are aligned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Corporate managers spend on research and development (R&D) for reasons of growth and survival. However, they may be less willing to invest in R&D because of its long-term horizon, high failure rate and uncertain outcomes. This study aims to explore the extent to which managerial ownership influences R&D expenditure decisions. Design/methodology/approach: Apart from the linear regression models, this study uses a semi-parametric quantile regression analysis for a sample of German non-financial firms throughout 2009–2018. Findings: This study finds a nonmonotonic sensitivity of R&D spending to the level of managerial ownership over various quantiles of R&D distribution. That is, managerial ownership increases the expenditure on R&D at low R&D intensity firms. However, it decreases the expenditure on R&D at high R&D intensity firms. These results suggest the presence of a maximum level of R&D expenditure, after which owner-managers would be unwilling to spend on R&D. Practical implications: The results confirm the importance of corporate ownership structure for firm R&D and innovation activities. It provides an implication for corporate policymakers to reform the corporate ownership structures to encourage corporate managers and owners to invest in R&D projects. Originality/value: This study offers two distinct contributions study. First, it provides the first German shred of evidence on the nonlinear relationship between managerial ownership and R&D expenditure decisions by distinguishing between high and low R&D intensity firms. Second, unlike prior research, it uses a semi-parametric quantile regression analysis. This method is more efficient than least-squares estimators and produces robust estimators to heteroscedasticity of the residuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dealing with weather extremes is a major challenge for farmers and often comes at high costs for public budgets. Therefore, we investigate the influence of specific simplified decision rules, so‐called heuristics, on farmers' willingness to pay (WTP) for protecting themselves against low‐probability and high‐consequence weather shocks. To this end, we conducted a framed field experiment with 237 farmers in Germany, using incentivized lottery‐based multiple price lists. We explored the effects of different heuristics within the prospect theory framework. Our results indicate that, on average, farmers exhibit risk‐loving behavior towards monetary losses, leading to a low WTP for risk mitigation. The results also suggest that the imitation heuristic, shock experience heuristics, and the threshold of concern heuristic influence farmers' WTP. Farmers specifically imitate successful farmers when these are risk‐loving. The lack of personal experience with low‐probability events induces farmers to assign less weight to low‐probability shocks, which lowers their WTP. Farmers also systematically assign less weight to low‐probability shocks that they consider "too rare to be concerned about." Accounting for the use of these heuristics can help design improved risk management instruments and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present new descriptive evidence on the immigrant-native gap in risk and time preferences in Germany, one of immigrants' most preferred destination countries. Using the recent waves of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) dataset, we find that the immigrant-native gap in risk preferences has widened for recent immigration cohorts, especially around the time of the 2015 European Refugee Crisis. We attribute the recent widening to decreased assimilation rates of new immigrants caused by reduced integration due to sudden increases in immigrants flows from culturally diverse parts of the world, particularly around the year 2015. We also find that the immigrant-native gap varies across different migrant groups: "Opportunity seekers," which we define as economic immigrants who intend to stay in Germany only temporarily, are very similar in their risk preferences to natives. Other immigrants, however, are substantially more risk averse than natives. A smaller gap in risk preferences is also found among migrants who are female, highly educated, proficient in the host language, self-employed, and working in predominantly high-skilled jobs. Concerning time preferences, a noticeably large immigrant-native gap is evident, but the gap does not vary across most individual-level socio-economic variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding on a new body of literature on cultural self-selection, the present study investigates how refugees who arrived in Germany since 2013 relate to the general population of their countries of origin in terms of liberal democratic values. The cultural self-selection literature suggests that more liberal individuals may be more likely to flee to Germany. To trace cultural self-selection amongst refugees, a series of analyses is conducted: first, refugees of Iraqi, Russian, and Pakistani descent in Germany (IAB-BAMF-SOEP) and the general populations of their origin countries (World Values Survey) are statistically matched on socio-demographic characteristics and their democratic values are compared. After matching the samples, refugees express significantly higher support for liberal democratic values than the general population of their countries of origin. Second, a series of regression models is calculated, tracing three potential mechanisms for the observable differences: (1) acculturation effects in Germany, (2) the experience of being forcibly displaced, and (3) cultural self-selection. The results speak to the theoretical conjectures of the cultural self-selection literature. Liberal democratic values are not correlated with the time spent in Germany (acculturation), flight reasons, and past traumatic experiences (flight experience) but are positively correlated with a critical stance towards the government in the country of origin as well as with positive feelings towards Germany as the receiving society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]