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This paper studies the long-term distribution of energy-efficiency outcomes in the German residential sector. To uncover the underlying energy efficiency of buildings, we estimate the causal response of building-level heat energy demand to variability in heating degree days. We examine heterogeneity in temperature response using both panel fixed-effects and causal forests. Our results suggest that the distribution of energy-efficiency is not equitable in the West of Germany, with buildings located in the South attaining the best energy performance standards. Although the housing stock in the East is significantly older and thus less subject to building standards, they perform better than the West counterpart, likely as a result of large investments in retrofitting post-reunification. Finally, we show that the regional distribution of energy-efficiency reflects differences in heating needs - thus, the poorer energy performance of buildings in the North-West should be weighed against the warmer climatic zone.

What caused the recovery from the British Great Depression? A leading explanation – the ‘expectations channel’ – suggests that a shift in expected inflation lowered real interest rates and stimulated consumption and investment. However, few studies have measured, or tested the economic consequences of, inflation expectations. In this paper, we collect high‐frequency information from primary and secondary sources to measure expected inflation in the United Kingdom between the wars. A high‐frequency vector autoregression suggests that inflation expectations were an important source of the early stages of economic recovery in interwar Britain.

We examine the mortality effects of a 1947 school reform in Japan, which extended compulsory schooling from primary to secondary school by as much as 3 years. The abolition of secondary school fees also indicates that those affected by the reform likely came from disadvantaged families who could have benefited the most from schooling. Even in this relatively favorable setting, we fail to find that the reform improved later-life mortality up to the age of 87 years, although it significantly increased years of schooling. This finding suggests limited health returns to schooling at the lower level of educational attainment., CINCH working paper series, vol. 2023, no. 02

This paper investigates the potential of new technologies to reduce disparities in the provision of healthcare services. Differences in providers’ skills may cause variation in patient outcomes. The adoption of innovations, like robots, can attenuate this problem if technological gains are decreasing in users’ skills or may exacerbate existing variation in performance otherwise. I show that, in England, the diffusion of surgical robots coincided with an improvement in average surgical performance and a convergence in outcomes between high and lower-skilled surgeons for prostate cancer patients. I study whether this pattern can be attributed to the adoption of robots using the universe of inpatient admissions to the National Health Service (NHS). To identify the effects of robotic surgery on patient outcomes, I exploit quasi-random variation in the geographic allocation of robots, allowing for selection and heterogeneity in treatment effects. I find that robots shorten patients’ length of stay in hospital and decrease the incidence of adverse events from surgery, but their effects significantly depend on surgeons’ skills. The robot has little impact on the performance of highly skilled surgeons, while lower skilled surgeons gain the most from it. I also uncover a strong pattern of negative selection on both observable and unobservable characteristics. Although the attainable gains are higher for lower-skilled surgeons, they use the robot the least. My results suggest that the potential benefit of a new technology largely depends on how it combines with the skills of the individual users., CINCH working paper series, vol. 2023, no. 01

Das Problem der Entscheidung bei mehreren Zielgrößen unter Ungewissheit betrifft den Umstand, dass bei der Entscheidungsfindung mehr als einer Zielgröße zu berücksichtigen ist und zusätzlich keine Informationen über mögliche Umweltzustände vorhanden sind. Durch die Ungewissheit, hier definiert als Unsicherheit im engeren Sinne, ist es einem Entscheider kaum mehr möglich eine optimale Alternative zu finden. Um sich gegen Folgen dieser starken Unsicherheit zu schützen, wird das Prinzip der Robustheit angewendet. Robustheit bedeutet, dass sich ein Entscheider unter Definition von bestimmten Effizienzkonzepten gegen zukünftige Entwicklungen absichert. Im Extremfall können diese Effizienzkonzepte pessimistische oder optimistische Sichtweisen auf zukünftige Entwicklungen einnehmen. Daher ist es eines der Ziele der Arbeit das Entscheidungsverhalten hinsichtlich robuster Alternativen zu untersuchen, die eben bei stärkeren Formen der Unsicherheit noch gute Ergebnisse liefern. Um das Entscheidungsverhalten bei mehreren Zielgrößen unter Ungewissheit analysieren und bewerten zu können, werden die robusten multikriteriellen Effizienzkonzepten der robusten multikriteriellen Optimierung genutzt. Diese Arbeit stellt eine erste experimentelle Untersuchung zu dieser Thematik vor. In dieser explorativen Untersuchung verwendet diese Arbeit die Effizienzkonzepte der mengenbasierten minmax und maxmax robusten Effizienz, die hier synonym für pessimistisches und optimistisches Verhalten stehen. Zur Bewertung des Entscheidungsverhaltens dienen zwei Experimente. Das erste Experiment wurde im Verlustbereich und das zweite im Gewinnbereich durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf eine allgemeine Tendenz zur pessimistischen Alternative hin. Pessimistische Alternativen werden durch die Existenz eines negativen Extrempunkts verdrängt, sodass die optimistische Alternative vorgezogen wird. Zusätzlich werden geschlechtsspezifische Effekte beobachtet. Frauen neigen mehr als Männer zur pessimistischen Alternative und je älter ein Proband ist, desto eher wird die pessimistische Alternative vorgezogen. Eine Erhöhung des Volumens der Zielgrößen führte zu pessimistischeren Entscheidungen. Unterschiedliches Verhalten konnte im Vergleich der Verlust- und der Gewinnsituation nicht festgestellt werden., The problem of decision-making with multiple objectives under uncertainty concerns the fact that more than one objective has to be considered in the decision-making process and, in addition, no information is available about possible environmental states. Due to the uncertainty, defined here as uncertainty in the narrower sense, it is hardly possible for a decision maker to find an optimal alternative. To protect against the consequences of this strong uncertainty, the principle of robustness is applied. Robustness means that a decision maker protects himself against future developments by defining certain efficiency concepts. In extreme cases, these efficiency concepts can take pessimistic or optimistic views of future developments. Therefore, one of the goals of this thesis is to investigate the decision behavior with respect to robust alternatives that still deliver good results even under stronger forms of uncertainty. In order to be able to analyze and evaluate the decision behavior in the presence of multiple objectives under uncertainty, the robust multicriteria efficiency concepts of robust multicriteria optimization are used. This paper presents a first experimental investigation on this topic. In this exploratory study, this work uses the efficiency concepts of quantity-based minmax and maxmax robust efficiency, which are synonymous here with pessimistic and optimistic behavior. Two experiments are used to evaluate the decision behavior. The first experiment was conducted in the loss domain and the second in the gain domain. The results indicate a general tendency toward the pessimistic alternative. Pessimistic alternatives are crowded out by the existence of a negative extreme, so that the optimistic alternative is preferred. In addition, gender-specific effects are observed. Women tend to prefer the pessimistic alternative more than men and the older a subject is, the more likely the pessimistic alternative is preferred. Increasing the volume of the target variables led to more pessimistic decisions. Different behavior could not be found when comparing the loss and gain situation.

This paper empirically examines the behavioral precautionary saving hypothesis that uncertainty about future income triggers an increase in saving because of loss aversion. Guided by the theoretical model of Koszegi and Rabin (2009), we first extend their theoretical analysis to also consider the internal margin, i.e., the strength, of loss aversion, and then empirically study the relation between income risk, experimentally elicited loss aversion, and precautionary savings. We do so using a sample of 640 individuals from the low-income population of Bogotá, characterized by limited financial education and subject to substantial income risk. In line with the theoretical predictions, we find that an increase in income risk is associated with higher savings for loss-averse individuals, and that this increase in savings grows with the degree of loss aversion. An accompanying laboratory experiment confirms that an exogenous increase in income risk causally leads to this observed pattern. Thus, consistent with the theoretical predictions derived from the model of Koszegi and Rabin (2009), but in contrast to common assumptions, our findings establish that loss aversion is not necessarily an obstacle to saving, and thus identify new approaches of increasing saving among individuals with low financial education.

This dissertation explores corporate social responsibility (CSR) and unethical corporate behavior (corporate social irresponsibility, CSI) in a financial context. The four research papers in this dissertation examine the relationship of CSR and CSI with financial performance in a portfolio context and analyze political, cultural, social, and firm-specific factors and their relationship with corporate scandals. This Dissertation also examines how efficient capital markets price corporate scandals and analyzes the relationship between CSR and CSI with corporate payout., Diese Dissertation befasst sich mit unternehmerischer Nachhaltigkeit (Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR) und unethischem Unternehmensverhalten (Corporate Social Irresponsibility, CSI) im Kontext finanzwirtschaftlicher Fragestellungen. Die vier Forschungsarbeiten dieser Dissertation untersuchen zum einen den Zusammenhang von CSR und CSI mit der finanziellen Performance in einem Portfoliokontext und betrachten politische, kulturelle, gesellschaftliche und unternehmensspezifische Faktoren und deren Beziehung mit Unternehmensskandalen. Weiterhin wird untersucht, wie effiziente Kapitalmärkte Unternehmensskandale bepreisen, sowie die Beziehung zwischen CSR und CSI mit Unternehmensausschüttung analysiert.

In examining the effect of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) on the amounts of Aid for Trade (AfT) that accrue to developing countries, Lee et al. (2015) (The World Economy, 38, 2015 and 1462) have found that developing country members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) received higher AfT flows than non-WTO developing members. The present paper deepens the analysis by Lee et al. (2015) by investigating the effect of the duration of WTO membership on the amounts of AfT flows that accrue to recipient countries. The duration of membership in the WTO captures both the membership in the WTO and the time spent by a country in the organization. The main argument in this analysis is that the duration of WTO membership matters more than the mere WTO membership for the degree of liberalization in AfT recipient countries’ trade regimes and their participation in international trade, the latter being a critical determinant of the AfT flows supplied by donors. This analysis has relied on a panel dataset of 136 countries over the period from 2002 to 2019, and the two-step generalized method of moments estimator. It has established that countries receive higher AfT flows as their membership duration increases, and the amounts of these resource inflows increase as recipient countries further liberalize their trade regime and further participate in international trade. Additionally, the effect of the duration of WTO membership on total AfT flows depends on donor-countries’ commercial self-interest in recipient countries, including the latter’s economic growth performance and endowment in natural resources.

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to investigate the role of civil aviation in the case of Montenegro, one of the smallest countries in Europe and one whose economy heavily relies on tourism. Methods: For this research, a dynamic panel data approach is used, where five models are proposed for modelling tourism demand. Available seats per kilometer, the Herfindahl–Hirschman index, jet fuel prices, exchange rates, and seasonality are used as the models’ explanatory variables, in line with the available litetrature. Results: The econometric results show that all suggested models are valid, the explanatory variables are statistically significant, and their coefficients have the expected sign, suggesting a strong relationship between tourism demand and civil aviation. Implications: Apart from being one of the first attempts to highlight the civil aviation and tourism nexus in the context of Montenegro, this paper contributes to the literature by suggesting a way forward for destination managers and policymakers in small countries with great tourism potential., SUBMITTED: OCT 2022, REVISION SUBMITTED: JAN 2023, ACCEPTED: MAR 2023, REFEREED ANONYMOUSLY, PUBLISHED ONLINE: 10 JUNE 2023

Firms without paid employees account for up to 80% of all firms, but only a small minority ever hires. This paper investigates the relationship between labour costs and the decision to hire a first employee and become an employer. Leveraging a unique policy in Belgium that permanently reduced the labour cost of the first employee by 13%, we find that the number of new, first-time employers jumped by 31% immediately following the reform. The elasticity of the probability to hire the first employee with respect to the labour cost is −2.39 [95% CI: −3.45, −1.25].

This paper deals with the complex relationship between innovation and the labor market, analyzing the impact of new technological advancements on overall employment, skills and wages. After a critical review of the extant literature and the available empirical studies, novel evidence is presented on the distribution of labor-saving automation (namely robotics and AI), based on natural language processing of US patents. This mapping shows that both upstream high-tech providers and downstream users of new technologies - such as Boeing and Amazon - lead the underlying innovative effort.

This cumulative dissertation combines four papers that aim to provide insights into how the economic outcomes of companies and the accompanying social wellbeing can be protected or enhanced. More specifically, this dissertation offers three investigations into how companies can be more successful when starting a change project by using nudging, can avoid managerial risk or uncertainty aversion by implementing a default rule, and can avoid managerial risk aversion by introducing a recommendation nudge at different stages of the decision-making process. All of these are primarily aimed at supporting business efforts but also aid social wellbeing by guiding employee behavior towards supporting change and managerial decision-making towards more neutrality. The lack of supportive behavior for change by employees and neutral managerial decisions can put economic growth in jeopardy. All three projects feature intervention rooted in the concept of libertarian paternalism. Nudge interventions can be described as changing parts of the choice architecture to increase the likelihood of people altering their behavior while not forbidding any options or changing the economic incentives significantly. In addition, the fourth project in this dissertation offers an experimental study that aims to understand the gender-specific spread of unethicality. This project sheds light on a very important issue: enabling further research to try to find practical solutions for resisting unethicality and, therefore, avoiding the economic, social, and ecological damages caused by its spread. All the papers feature experimental work settled in the discipline of behavioral economics and were conducted either online or in a laboratory. Dissertation, Universität Duisburg-Essen, 2022

Ethnic groups tend to agglomerate and assemble, mostly in urban areas. While ethnic clustering is critically debated in societies and the consequences for economic outcomes are under debate in research, the process is not yet well understood. A separate literature has also examined the cultural and ethnic identity of immigrants and how these affect their economic performance and societal integration. However, an unexplored channel connects ethnic clustering with ethnic identity formation. Therefore this paper examines the role of ethnic geographic clustering in the sociocultural integration of immigrants. It employs survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, combined with disaggregated information at a low geographical level from the unexploited German full census of 1970 and 1987. We employ the exogenous placement of immigrants during their recruitment in the 1960s and 1970s and find that local co-ethnic concentration affects immigrants' cultural integration. Residential ethnic clustering strengthens immigrants' retention of an affiliation with their respective country of origin and weakens identification with the host society. The effects are nonlinear and only become significant at relatively high levels of co-ethnic concentration for the minority identity and at very low levels of local concentration for the majority identity. Our findings are robust to the use of an instrumental variable approach.

Reducing institutional rigidities in product and labour markets is key to lowering unemployment. The impact of such labour and product market reforms, however, depends crucially on the country-specific regulatory framework. In this paper, we estimate the country-specific impact of changes in six categories of institutional regulation conditional on the country-specific regulatory environment for a dynamic panel of 26 OECD countries. We overcome existing problems of modelling a large set of institutional interdependencies by applying a model selection approach which is innovative within this literature. In doing so, we provide evidence for the existence of higher-order institutional interdependencies. We further document that especially for changes in employment protection and the unemployment benefit system the impact on unemployment is mixed across countries, thus questioning the relevance of best-practice policies.

To study the effects of reminder nudges in complex environments, we apply a novel experimental approach based on a computer game in which decision makers have to pay attention to and perform multiple actions within a short period of time. The set-up allows us, first, to test the effect of reminders both on reminded and non-reminded actions and thus to observe whether reminders have (positive or negative) spillovers. Second, we investigate spillovers between multiple nudges by testing the effect of scaling up the number of reminded actions. Third, we study intertemporal spillovers by investigating whether the effects of having been exposed to reminders persist after reminders are withdrawn. We observe that reminders have positive effects in the short run – multiple reminders more so than single reminders: while reminders lead to crowding-out of non-reminded actions, the positive effect on the reminded actions dominates. Yet, after withdrawal of the reminders, the negative spillover effect persists, while the positive effect partially fades out so that, overall, reminders have no effect.

This paper examines the production and hedging decisions of the competitive firm under price uncertainty when the firm is not only risk averse but also regret averse. Regret-averse preferences are characterized by a modified utility function that includes disutility from having chosen ex post suboptimal alternatives. The extent of regret depends on the difference between the actual profit and the maximum profit attained by making the optimal production, and hedging decisions had the firm observed the true realization of the random output price. While the separation theorem holds under regret aversion, the prevalence of hedging opportunities may have perverse effect on the firm’s optimal output level, particularly when the firm is sufficiently regret averse. The full-hedging theorem, however, does not hold. We derive sufficient conditions under which the regret-averse firm’s optimal futures position is an under-hedge (over-hedge). We further show that the firm optimally increases (decreases) its futures position when the price risk possesses more positive (negative) skewness.

During the Corona-Pandemic, information (e.g. from the analysis of balance sheets and payment behavior) traditionally used for corporate credit risk analysis became less valuable because it represents only past circumstances. Therefore, the use of currently published data from social media platforms, which have shown to contain valuable information regarding the financial stability of companies, should be evaluated. In this data e. g. additional information from disappointed employees or customers can be present. In order to analyze in how far this data can improve the information base for corporate credit risk assessment, Twitter data regarding the ten greatest insolvencies of German companies in 2020 and solvent counterparts is analyzed in this paper. The results from t-tests show, that sentiment before the insolvencies is significantly worse than in the comparison group which is in alignment with previously conducted research endeavors. Furthermore, companies can be classified as prospectively solvent or insolvent with up to 70% accuracy by applying the k-nearest-neighbor algorithm to monthly aggregated sentiment scores. No significant differences in the number of Tweets for both groups can be proven, which is in contrast to findings from studies which were conducted before the Corona-Pandemic. The results can be utilized by practitioners and scientists in order to improve decision support systems in the domain of corporate credit risk analysis. From a scientific point of view, the results show, that the information asymmetry between lenders and borrowers in credit relationships, which are principals and agents according to the principal-agent-theory, can be reduced based on user generated content from social media platforms. In future studies, it should be evaluated in how far the data can be integrated in established processes for credit decision making. Furthermore, additional social media platforms as well as samples of companies should be analyzed. Lastly, the authenticity of user generated contend should be taken into account in order to ensure, that credit decisions rely on truthful information only.

Eine Vielzahl der Rohstoffe, die in unserer Zeit industriell verarbeitet werden, wird im Bergbau gewonnen. Die vorliegende Arbeit hat den Abbau von Kalisalz unter Tage vor Augen. Der Abbau von Salz in großen Mengen erfordert den Einsatz von Maschinen. Für deren Instandhaltung sowie die Versorgung mit Betriebsstoffen stehen unter Tage Werkstätten und Lager zur Verfügung. Zur Gewährleistung eines reibungslosen Abbaus sind zahlreiche Transporttätigkeiten erforderlich. Zu transportieren sind beispielsweise Maschinenöle, Baumaterialien, Ersatzteile, defekte Maschinenteile und Abfälle. Die möglichen Strecken zur Nutzung für Transporte sind durch das Grubengebäude vorgegeben. Das Grubengebäude wächst mit fortschreitendem Abbau der Lagerstätte, wobei im Wesentlichen die räumliche Ausdehnung der Lagerstätte die resultierende Gestalt des Grubengebäudes bestimmt. Das Streckennetz eines Grubengebäudes, das die verfügbaren Fahrwege für Fahrzeuge definiert, weist in der Regel wenig Redundanzen auf. Gründe dafür sind zum einen der Aufwand der Auffahrung von Strecken und zum anderen der Aufwand für die kontinuierliche Sicherung aller zugänglichen Bereiche des Grubengebäudes. Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit werden Bäume und die neu eingeführte Struktur des Brückengraphen, als eine verallgemeinerte Baumstruktur, zur Darstellung des Streckennetzes eines Bergwerks verwendet. Als Problemstellungen werden die kapazitierte Tourenplanung auf Bäumen und Brückengraphen, der Ein- und Mehr-Fahrzeug-Fall des Gabelstaplerproblems auf Bäumen und schließlich die Planungsaufgabe einer Transportabteilung, die Abrollcontainer zur Durchführung von Transportaufträgen nutzt, untersucht. Für die kapazitierte Tourenplanung wird auf die Besonderheit der Problemstellung mit einer Baumstruktur eingegangen. Auf den Erkenntnissen basierend werden zwei mathematische Modelle für Brückengraphen als Streckennetz der Problemstellung vorgestellt. Zusätzlich wird ein zweistufiges Verfahren zur Näherung einer guten Lösung beschrieben. Die Anforderungen an das Gabelstaplerproblem auf Bäumen im Ein- und Mehr-Fahrzeugfall (MV)-TSCP werden beschrieben und auf dieser Grundlage mathematische Modelle formuliert. Weiter werden Möglichkeiten zur Komprimierung der Instanzen beschrieben. Während manche Instanzen des TSCP mit linearem Aufwand gelöst werden können, ist bei Vorliegen von Kurzzyklen aus Aufträgen im Allgemeinen die Lösung eines Steinerbaumproblems erforderlich. Die betrachtete Planungsaufgabe einer Transportabteilung unterstellt fünf Basistypen von Aufträgen und ermöglicht durch deren Verknüpfung die Abbildung zahlreicher weiterer Transporttätigkeiten. Die Berücksichtigung heterogener Mitarbeiter und Fahrzeuge sowie von Kompatibilitäten zwischen Fahrzeugen, Mitarbeitern, Material- und Containertypen ermöglicht die Abbildung realer Situationen. Die Transporttätigkeiten werden als Aufträge verwaltet. Innerhalb der Planungsperiode können nicht alle Aufträge durchgeführt werden, sodass eine Auswahl zu treffen ist. Ein gemischt-ganzzahliges, lineares Modell wird für die Problemstellung formuliert. Im Anschluss wird eine Möglichkeit zur Integration einer Pausenregelung in das Modell erläutert und ein Vorgehen zur Einbeziehung einer Priorisierung bei der Bestimmung von Nutzenwerten vorgestellt. Ein deterministisches, heuristisches Lösungsverfahren wird beschrieben. Anschließend werden eine Verfahrensvariante und die Möglichkeiten zur Erweiterung der Verfahrensvarianten zu Multi-Start-Verfahren vorgestellt. Die vorgestellten Modelle und Verfahren werden in Testläufen gegenübergestellt. Dafür kommt für mathematische Modelle kommerzielle Optimierungssoftware zum Einsatz. Die Resultate der Testläufe werden in der Arbeit beschrieben. Bezüglich der als Planungsaufgabe einer Transportabteilung untersuchten Problemstellung liefern alle Varianten des heuristischen Verfahrens gegenüber der kommerziellen Optimierungssoftware bessere Lösungen., Many of today's industrially processed raw materials are extracted in mines. Mining raw materials in large quantities requires machinery. Underground workshops and warehouses are available for their maintenance and the supply of operating materials. To ensure that mining runs smoothly, numerous transport activities are required. For example, machine oils, construction materials, spare parts, defective machine parts and waste need to be transported. The possible routes for transport are determined by the mine system. The mine system grows as the deposit is mined, with the spatial extent of the deposit largely determining the resulting shape of the mine system. The road network of a mine system, which defines the available routes for vehicles, usually has few redundancies. The reasons for this are, on the one hand, the cost of excavating the routes and, on the other hand, the effort required to continuously secure all accessible areas of the mine system. In the context of the present work, trees and the newly introduced structure of the bridge graph as a generalised tree structure are used to represent the road network of a mine. As problems, the capacitated routing problem on trees and bridge graphs, the single and multi-vehicle case of the stacker crane problem on trees and, finally, the planning task of a transport department using roll-off containers for the execution of transport jobs are investigated. For the capacitated routing problem, the specificity of the problem with a tree structure is addressed. Based on the findings, two mathematical models for the problem with bridge graphs as the network are presented. In addition, a two-step procedure for approximating a good solution is described. The requirements for the stacker crane problem on trees in the single and multi-vehicle (MV)TSCP cases are described. On this basis, mathematical models are formulated. In addition, ways of compressing the instances of the problem are described. While some instances of the TSCP can be solved with linear effort, the presence of short cycles between jobs generally requires the solution of a steiner tree problem. The considered planning task of a transport department assumes five basic types of jobs and allows the mapping of numerous other transport activities by linking them. The consideration of heterogeneous employees and vehicles as well as compatibilities between vehicles, employees, material and container types enables the mapping of real situations. Transport activities are managed as jobs. Not all jobs can be executed within the planning period, so jobs must be selected. A mixed integer linear model is formulated for the problem. A way of incorporating a break rule into the model is then explained, and a procedure for incorporating prioritisation into the determination of utility values is presented. A deterministic heuristic solution procedure is described. A variant of the procedure is then presented, together with the possibility of extending the procedure to multi-start procedures. The models and methods presented are tested and compared. For this purpose, commercial optimisation software for mathematical models is used. The results of the test runs are described in the paper. With regard to the investigated problem as a planning task of a transport department, all variants of the heuristic procedure provide better solutions than the commercial optimisation software.

In this paper, we deal with a class of time-homogeneous continuous-time Markov processes with transition probabilities bearing a nonparametric uncertainty. The uncertainty is modeled by considering perturbations of the transition probabilities within a proximity in Wasserstein distance. As a limit over progressively finer time periods, on which the level of uncertainty scales proportionally, we obtain a convex semigroup satisfying a nonlinear PDE in a viscosity sense. A remarkable observation is that, in standard situations, the nonlinear transition operators arising from nonparametric uncertainty coincide with the ones related to parametric drift uncertainty. On the level of the generator, the uncertainty is reflected as an additive perturbation in terms of a convex functional of first order derivatives. We additionally provide sensitivity bounds for the convex semigroup relative to the reference model. The results are illustrated with Wasserstein perturbations of L\'evy processes, infinite-dimensional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, geometric Brownian motions, and Koopman semigroups., Comment: Accepted for publication in Ann. Inst. H. Poincar\'e Probab. Statist

The idea of a common unemployment benefit system for the European Monetary Union (EMU) has provoked increasing interest in both the political and academic spheres because of its potential to smooth fluctuations in income across member states and to strengthen income security for the unemployed. In this paper, we simulate two hypothetical negative employment shocks and make use of the microsimulation model EUROMOD to explore the implications for income protection of the introduction of an EMU unemployment insurance (EMU-UI) scheme, for a selected number of countries of the Monetary Union. Our results show that the EMU-UI has the potential to reduce the risk of poverty for those affected by the negative employment shock and to have an additional positive effect on within-country income stabilisation, although the effects of the EMU-UI vary considerably in size across the countries analysed.

The Ukrainian economy cannot ensure economic reconstruction after the war and needs new opportunities for its development. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is an important instrument that can help. FDI provides capital relevant for increasing the profitability of economic sectors. FDI is also part of political investment - should be given priority in government activities. For this reason, it triggers economic growth and improves macroeconomic performance when it is used to develop the market and its infrastructure. In this article, I give an overview of the understanding of FDI and its actual situation in Ukraine. The arguments reflect mainly an investor's point of view. This helps to emphasize the importance of realistic and informative data for assessing the attractiveness of Ukraine. A first step in this direction is made with reference to international indices. I will try to review a reflection of relevant indices, which provide an assessment of the macroeconomic situation in Ukraine. The main results of the article: an overview of the real situation with FDI in Ukraine and the importance of using international indices during the FDI processes. The benefits of FDI do not appear automatically. It depends on the investment policy of host countries, especially Ukraine. My contribution to this article is to draw attention to the current situation with FDI in Ukraine and the issue of the lack of systematic use of international indices during the FDI processes. Without a clear understanding of these issues, it is impossible to answer the following questions that need to be studied, such as how to solve the challenges with FDI and attract new foreign capital to Ukraine. The article will be of interest to those who are interested in the issue of investment policy in the context of Ukraine, study this issue at the scientific level, and practically develop and implement the strategy of investment policy in Ukraine. The main conclusion of the article is to show the importance of revising the approaches to political investment in Ukraine, taking into account the international evaluation indices.

Henry et al (2022) examine whether people are willing to share "alternative facts" espoused by right-wing populist parties before the 2019 European elections in France and how this interacted with the availability of fact-checking information. They find that both imposed and voluntary fact-checking reduce the likelihood of sharing false statements by approximately 45%, and that imposed and voluntary fact-checking have similar effect sizes. We reproduce these findings and introduce several alternative estimates to assess the robustness of the original results, including resolving an inconsistency in the handling of pre-treatment controls. Overall, our results align with the results of the original paper. The differences we find are small in absolute magnitude but, since many effects were small, not always trivial in terms of relative differences. This replication supports the conclusions of the original paper., This replication was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence Scheme, FAIR Project 262675.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that are central players in U.S. secondary mortgage markets. Over the past decade, these institutions have amassed enormous mortgage- and non-mortgage-oriented investment portfolios that pose significant interest-rate risks to the companies and a systemic risk to the financial system. This paper describes the nature of these risks and systemic concerns and then evaluates several policy options for reducing the institutions’ investment portfolios. We conclude that limits on portfolio size (assets or liabilities) would be the most desirable approach to mitigating the systemic risk posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The notion of a nation-specific inflation trauma among the German population is ubiquitous in the public debate in Germany and beyond. Because of its experience with hyperinflation in 1923, the German population fears rising prices and favors stability-oriented monetary as well as fiscal policy. It is less clear, however, whether this contemporary understanding of the German inflation trauma is as old as its historical point of reference. The majority of the literature presumes that such a traumatic disposition has persisted since 1923 and has been transposed intergenerationally (persistence thesis). Others, however, point to an ex-ante reconstruction of past experiences (reconstruction thesis). By employing an interdisciplinary approach of methodological triangulation drawing on both methods of history and political sciences, we provide new insights on the question of origin. Specifically, we examine the remembrance of hyperinflation in personal memoirs and the German Bundestag in regard to the monetary and fiscal policy lessons connected to memories of 1923. Doing so, we find support for the logic of reconstruction. We show that the hyperinflation was not remembered unambiguously, and that memories were not immediately linked to specific policy lessons. Only from the 1980s onwards, a process of discursive alignment occurred that mirrors the contemporary understanding of the inflation trauma. By providing this insight, our paper allows to better understand the historical origins of today’s popular memory and its political uses. Not Reviewed

This paper studies the effect of public child care on mothers’ career trajectories. To this end, we combine county-level data on child care coverage with detailed individual-level information from the German social security records and exploit a set of German reforms leading to a substantial temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three. We conduct an event study approach that investigates the labor market outcomes of mothers in the years around the birth of their first child. We thereby explore career trajectories, both in terms of quantity and quality of employment. We find that public child care improves maternal labor supply in the years immediately following childbirth. However, the results on quality-related outcomes suggest that the effect of child care provision does not reach far beyond pure employment effects. These results do not change for mothers with different ‘career costs of children’., CEPA Discussion Papers; 64

How costly are droughts to individuals' nutrition in Africa? We measure severe droughts using a detailed satellite-based vegetation index observed bi-monthly for 0.08° grids between 1982 and 2015. Across 32 African countries, conditional on individual characteristics, timing relative to growing seasons, irrigation, climate, and country-year effects, we show that, unlike recurring droughts, a first-time exposure to a three-month severe drought reduces individuals' body mass index by 2.5%. Droughts are worse for underweight and uneducated individuals. The uneducated are more likely to become unemployed during first-time droughts, whereas both labor reallocation across occupations and migration mitigate the effect of recurring droughts.

A sizeable proportion of enterprises, especially SMEs, in receipt of financial assistance from the government, will fail to repay. In this paper we asked whether, and to what extent, it may be beneficial to apply a screening mechanism to deter those mostly likely to fail to repay from seeking such financial assistance in the first place. The answer largely turns on the relative weights attached for the objectives of stabilisation as compared with allocative efficiency. For this purpose, we develop a two-sector infinite horizon model featuring oligopolistic small businesses and a screening contract in the presence of a pandemic shock with asymmetric information. The adversely affected sector with private information can apply for government loans to reopen businesses once the pandemic has passed. First, we show that a pro-allocation government sets a harsh default sanction to deter entrepreneurs with bad projects from reentering and improves aggregate productivity in the long run, but the economy suffers persistent unemployment in the near term. However, a pro-stabilisation government sets a lenient default sanction or provides full guarantees to reach full employment in the short term, but the economy will be shifted to a lower equilibrium in the long run. The optimal default sanction balances the trade-off between allocation and stabilisation. Then, we derive an analytic measure of “Stabilisation Proclivity” and characterise the parameter space and the macro-financial frictions that render the government either more pro-allocation or more pro-stabilisation. Finally, we solve for the optimal default sanction numerically and conducts comparative statics for various policy analyses.

Summary: This paper focuses on the identification and quantitative estimation of sanctions on the Iranian economy over the period 1989–2019. It provides a new time series approach and proposes a novel measure of sanctions intensity based on daily newspaper coverage. In absence of sanctions, Iran's average annual growth could have been around 4–5%, as compared to the 3% realized. Estimates of the proposed sanctions‐augmented structural VAR show that sanctions significantly decrease oil export revenues and result in substantial depreciation of Iranian rial, followed by subsequent increases in inflation and falls in output growth. Keeping other shocks fixed, 2 years of sanctions can explain up to 60% of output growth forecast error variance, although a single quarter sanction shock proves to have quantitatively small effects.

Ich schätze die Auswirkungen des neuen Wohnungsangebots auf die lokale Mietpreisverteilung. Als Instrument nutze ich wetterbedingte Verzögerungen während der Bauphase. Eine Erhöhung des neuen Wohnungsangebots um 1 Prozent senkt den durchschnittlichen Mietpreis um 0,2 Prozent und erhöht überproportional die Zahl der zur Miete angebotenen Bestandswohnungen. Die Effekte des Angebotsschocks sind an Standorten mit wachsender Wohnungsnachfrage ähnlich stark, dieser wirkt sich außerdem auf die gesamte Mietpreisverteilung aus. Mithilfe eines quantitativen Modells lässt sich dieses Muster durch das sekundäre Angebot erklären: Der Wohnungsneubau löst eine Kaskade von Umzügen aus, durch die in allen Segmenten des lokalen Marktes Wohnungen frei werden., IAB-Discussion Paper

In West Africa, the Value Added Tax (VAT) policy consists of a uniform tax rate, but several items consumed by rich and poor households, are exempted. We provide an optimal tax framework to reflect on the welfare effects of such a tariff structure, in the context of current debates on domestic resource mobilisation in low-income countries (LICs). Our analysis includes the distinguishing feature that a significant part of the consumption goods in LICs stems from own production, and can therefore not be taxed. We also account for preference heterogeneity over market goods and auto-consumption. A preference consistent individual welfare measure that depends on both types of goods, is used. To determine optimal tax rates, individual welfare levels are aggregated by social welfare functions with different degrees of inequality aversion. We apply this framework to household data from Benin. The results support reforms for alternative VAT rate structures that improve welfare in the region. In comparison to the current VAT policy, our reforms yield higher average relative welfare gains for the lower deciles. Due to preferences heterogeneity, however, we find winners and losers in all welfare deciles. We develop a bootstrap procedure to construct confidence intervals on welfare indicators.

This perspective article on using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is intended as a guide for authors who wish to publish datasets that can be analysed with this method as stand-alone data articles. Stand-alone data articles are different from supporting data articles in that they are not linked to a full research article published in another journal. Nevertheless, authors of stand-alone data articles will be required to clearly demonstrate and justify the usefulness of their dataset. This perspective article offers actionable recommendations regarding the conceptualisation phase, the types of data suitable for PLS-SEM and quality criteria to report, which are generally applicable to studies using PLS-SEM. We also present adjusted versions of the HTMT metric for discriminant validity testing that broaden its applicability. Further, we highlight the benefit of linking data articles to already published research papers that employ the PLS-SEM method.

This paper develops a novel procedure for proxying economic activity with daytime satellite imagery across time periods and spatial units, for which reliable data on economic activity are otherwise not available. In developing this unique proxy, we apply machine-learning techniques to a historical time series of daytime satellite imagery dating back to 1984. Compared to satellite data on night light intensity, another common economic proxy, our proxy more precisely predicts economic activity at smaller regional levels and over longer time horizons. We demonstrate our measure’s usefulness for the example of Germany, where East German data on economic activity are unavailable for detailed regional levels and historical time series. Our procedure is generalizable to any region in the world, and it has great potential for analyzing historical economic developments, evaluating local policy reforms, and controlling for economic activity at highly disaggregated regional levels in econometric applications.

Leveraging two cohort-specific pension reforms, this paper estimates the forward-looking effects of an exogenous increase in the working horizon on (un)employment behaviour for individuals with a long remaining statutory working life. Using difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity approaches based on administrative and survey data, I show that a longer legal working horizon increases individuals’ subjective expectations about the length of their work life, raises the probability of employment, decreases the probability of unemployment, and increases the intensity of job search among the unemployed. Heterogeneity analyses show that the demonstrated employment effects are strongest for women and in occupations with comparatively low physical intensity, i.e., occupations that can be performed at older ages.

Social networks are a key factor of success in life, but they are also strongly segmented on gender, ethnicity, and other demographic characteristics (Jackson, 2010). We present novel evidence on an understudied source of homophily, namely behavioral traits. Behavioral traits are important determinants of life-time outcomes. While recent work has focused on how these traits are influenced by the family environment or how they can be affected by childhood interventions, little is still known about how these traits are associated to social networks. Based on unique data that we collected using incentivized experiments on more than 2,500 French high-school students, we find high levels of homophily across all ten behavioral traits that we study (including social, risk, competitive preferences, and aspirations). Notably, the extent of homophily depends on similarities in demographic characteristics, in particular with respect to gender. Furthermore, the larger the number of behavioral traits that students share, the higher the overall homophily. Then, using network econometrics, we show that the observed homophily is not only an outcome of endogenous network formation, but is also a result of friends influencing each others' behavioral traits. Importantly, the transmission of traits is larger when students share demographic characteristics, such as gender, have been friends for longer or are friends with more popular individuals.

AI advice is becoming increasingly popular, e.g., in investment and medical treatment decisions. As this advice is typically imperfect, decision-makers have to exert discretion as to whether actually follow that advice: they have to "appropriately" rely on correct and turn down incorrect advice. However, current research on appropriate reliance still lacks a common definition as well as an operational measurement concept. Additionally, no in-depth behavioral experiments have been conducted that help understand the factors influencing this behavior. In this paper, we propose Appropriateness of Reliance (AoR) as an underlying, quantifiable two-dimensional measurement concept. We develop a research model that analyzes the effect of providing explanations for AI advice. In an experiment with 200 participants, we demonstrate how these explanations influence the AoR, and, thus, the effectiveness of AI advice. Our work contributes fundamental concepts for the analysis of reliance behavior and the purposeful design of AI advisors., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2204.06916

We investigate experimentally the effects of information about native/immigrant identity, and the ability to communicate a self-chosen personal characteristic towards the rival on conflict behavior. In a two-player individual contest with British and Immigrant subjects in the UK we find that neither information about identity nor communicating self-characteristics significantly affect the average level of conflict. Both of those, however, significantly affect players’ strategies, in the sense of the extent they involve conflict over time. Overall, the results indicate that inter-personal communication may help to mitigate high intensity conflicts when the identities are common knowledge among rivals.

In contrast to the classic result in Diamond and Mirrlees (1971) that fiscal taxes should not be levied on intermediate use of goods, Newbury (1985) showed that, in a closed economy with Leontief technology, input taxes should be used to indirectly tax commodities that for some reason are untaxed in final consumption. This paper extends the Newbury result to more general cases; i.e., to open economies with substitution possibilities in the production functions. Moreover, it shows that the welfare maximizing proportion between the tax rate for intermediate use by firms and final demand by households declines with higher elasticities of substitution in production functions and with higher price elasticities in import demand functions and export supply functions. It also shows that the welfare maximizing proportion of tax rates between households and firms for one commodity will depend upon the corresponding proportion of tax rates for important substitutes for that commodity. These results are shown both in stylized Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models and in an applied CGE model of the Swedish economy where the tax on electricity is used as an example.

Brazil, Russia, India and China, also known as BRIC countries or the BRICs, are among the fastest growing economies in the world and have excellent raw material deposits for the chemicals and related industries. By 2007 the BRICs' combined weight in the global economy exceeded 15 % of GDP (O´Neill, 2007). Along with their fast integration into the international trading scheme, many companies within the BRICs emerged as global players, thereby becoming competitive on a global scale. International investors have thus been attracted and driven up the number of takeovers of BRIC-enterprises. More recently, BRIC companies are themselves started acquiring enterprises abroad, e.g. in order to gain access to new markets, know-how, feedstock and/or to increase the economies of scale (Schmiele/Sofka, 2008). Chemicals are among the key industries within the BRIC economies and have been impacted both by the generally observable M&A momentum and by the chemicals specific global reorganization process. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of M&A deals and trends in the chemicals subsectors involving BRIC countries since the year 2000 ("Y2K").

The adoption of a single currency was considered one of the most important successes of the effort to unify the countries of the European Union. Obviously, a common currency has indisputable advantages, the most important being that of stimulating trade in countries that have joined the Eurozone. Meanwhile, the euro has several disadvantages, the most important being that the excessive centralization of monetary policy in the European Union. Moreover, the introduction of a single currency generated some disadvantages, which to some extent can be considered drawbacks in terms of efficiency of resource allocation in the European Union countries.

There have been ongoing discussions within the WTO Doha Round on Trade Facilitation and the wider Aid for Trade agenda to assist developing countries in reducing behind-the-border restrictions and to help them benefit from trade reform. Our paper contributes to this debate by analyzing the impact of foreign aid spent on Aid for Trade and Trade Facilitation on the costs of trading. In our empirical investigation, we conduct a panel data estimation for a sample of 99 developing countries for the period 2004-2009. Overall, we find that our aid measures have a negative effect on the costs of trading.

Many preschool-age children in the U.S. attend center-based child care programs that are of low quality. This paper examines the extent to which teacher qualifications widely considered important inputs to classroom quality are valued by providers during the hiring process. To do so, we administered a resume audit study in which job-seeker characteristics were randomly assigned to a large number of resumes that were submitted in response to real child care job postings in 14 cities. Our results indicate that center-based providers may not hire the most qualified applicants. For example, we find that although providers have a strong preference for individuals with previous work experience in early childhood education (ECE), those with more ECE experience are less likely to receive an interview than those with less experience. We also find that individuals with bachelor's degrees in ECE are no more likely to receive an interview than their counterparts at the associate's level, even in the market for lead preschool-age teachers. Furthermore, those revealing high levels of academic performance, as measured by grade point average, are generally not preferred by child care providers. Finally, it appears that some non-quality attributes do not influence hiring decisions (e.g., signaling car ownership), while others have large effects on teacher hiring (e.g., applicant race/ethnicity). Together, our findings shed light on the complex trade-offs made by center-based providers attempting to offer high-quality programs while earning sufficient revenue to stay in business.

Motivated reasoning, the tendency to seek and interpret information in ways that confirm preexisting beliefs, values, and identities, is one of the most important explanations for why people form polarizing beliefs. Understanding why people engage in this form of reasoning and finding ways around it is vital for any information-driven society, especially now in light of climate change and global pandemics. The cumulative dissertation presented here consists of five essays that explore motivated reasoning from different angles. The first essay lays the theoretical foundation for the following chapters. It combines the latest research in behavioral economics into a conceptual framework that sheds light on the role of mechanisms underlying the development of beliefs and decision-making, such as categories, identities, narratives, values, and worldviews, which can be united under the collective term mental models. This conceptual framework helps to understand the various drivers of motivated reasoning, such as protecting one's identity or values, maintaining certain narratives or worldviews, or simply using mental shortcuts, i.e., heuristics, to maintain limited mental capacities. Essays two and five directly measure motivated reasoning and examine the factors involved. The third and fourth essays, however, look at the consequences of motivated reasoning. While the former examines why people persist in sea-level rise (SLR) threatened areas and form unrealistic migration aspirations, the latter addresses the prevention of polarizing beliefs about COVID-19 vaccines that cause people to delay or refuse vaccination. In the first essay, written by Maximilian N. Burger, Björn Vollan, and myself, we discuss the urgency of systematic change in our society. This is needed to develop a civilization that can thrive within ecological boundaries without depleting the bases of life for future generations. We outline the potential of behavioral economics — the pairing of individual-centered research (behavioral) with the science of the allocation of scarce resources (economics) — to contribute to this transformation. We argue that behavioral economics has, up to this point, mainly contributed to the understanding and realization of marginal changes, not deep sustainable transformations. For example, hard rules (i.e., command-and-control policies) and incentives (i.e., price-based mechanisms) may be effective in regulating specific actions but fail to alter underlying values and, hence, rarely promote a change in general behavior. We present a conceptual framework that builds on current research in behavioral economics and combine it with insights from other behavioral sciences to explore far-reaching changes in human behavior. In the second paper, I present the results of four studies conducted in the United States, Solomon Islands, Bangladesh, and Vietnam that measure the motivated reasoning of people exposed to SLR risks. For this study, I conducted N = 885 online surveys in the United States that included respondents living in less exposed, landlocked counties as well as respondents living in counties exposed to flooding, coastal erosion, and storms exacerbated by SLR. In the Solomon Islands (N = 478), Bangladesh (N = 229), and Vietnam (N = 366), I led small research teams of 6 to 10 people to conduct face-to-face surveys with respondents living in areas vulnerable to risks associated with SLR. I developed a flexible, survey-based design for measuring motivated reasoning that allows for comparison across subjects and contexts. Respondents are presented with two equally true but conflicting pieces of information and asked which (if any) should be ignored by people like themselves. Although the information pieces are adapted to the local context of the four study sites, they always follow the same pattern: one highlighted SLR risks for the local area, and the other highlighted adaptation options or alternative explanations for increased risks of coastal flooding and erosion. The results reveal strong discrepancies in motivated reasoning across countries. In the United States, we find the expected polarization along partisan lines, with one group downplaying SLR risks and the other exaggerating them. In contrast, respondents in the Solomon Islands almost exclusively exaggerated SLR risks, and almost no motivated reasoning was measured in Vietnam. In the Bangladesh study, we find similar patterns of motivated reasoning as in the United States, but with much weaker polarization. Overall, these stark differences across countries suggest that the reasons why people engage in motivated reasoning in the face of SLR risks are multifaceted, complex, and depend on the local socio-political context. I argue that motivated reasoning is more likely to be politically conditioned than the result of cognitive traits or personality types. The third essay, written by Ivo Steimanis, Björn Vollan, and myself, takes a close look at the survey data from Bangladesh (N = 247) and Vietnam (N = 377) to examine why people are staying in coastal regions threatened by SLR, such as the Ganges and Mekong deltas. To better understand societal resilience in risky environments, we analyzed people’s attachment to their place of living, their willingness to take risks, and how these change in response to extreme weather events. Our findings confirm that most people prefer staying. Yet crucially, we find that (i) self-reported experiences of climate-related hazards are associated with increased risk aversion and place attachment, reinforcing people’s preferences to stay in hazardous environments; (ii) people with hazard experiences are more likely to aspire to move to high-income countries, arguably beyond the reach of their capabilities; and (iii) changes in aspirations to move abroad are connected to the changes in risk aversion and place attachment. The fact that preferences are associated with cumulative experiences of hazards and interact with aspirations to move to high-income destinations may contribute to our understanding of why so many people stay in hazardous environments. For example, co-evolving preferences might prolong the time people remain in hazardous regions where they are increasingly exposed to immediate impacts and gradual impacts of climate-related hazards, increasing the risk for socioeconomically marginalized households to eventually lose the ability to move abroad. We argue that there is a strong need for developing anticipatory governance regimes to identify affected communities at risk of (further) falling into poverty and being exposed to an increasing number of climate-related hazards. The fourth essay, written by Maximilian N. Burger, Ivo Steimanis, and myself, assesses whether (i) debunking vaccination myths or (ii) highlighting the benefits of being vaccinated decreases vaccination hesitancy. We conducted a preregistered survey experiment with N = 1,324 participants in Germany in May/June 2021. This was followed by a series of emails reinforcing the information treatments in the survey experiment, and finally, a follow-up survey was conducted three months later in September 2021 to determine whether participants got vaccinated. We find that one-time exposure to information, irrespective of the content, does not increase vaccination intentions in the survey experiment. However, communicating vaccination benefits over several weeks increased the likelihood of taking action toward vaccination by 9 percentage points, which translates into a 27% increase compared to the control group. Debunking vaccination myths had no significant effect. Our findings suggest that if soft governmental interventions such as information campaigns are employed, highlighting benefits should be given preference over debunking vaccination myths. Furthermore, it seems that repeated messages affect vaccination action while one-time messages might be insufficient, even for increasing vaccination intentions. Moreover, our explorative results suggest that providing relatively small monetary incentives could help to further increase vaccination rates. Furthermore, our study underscores the importance of testing interventions outside of survey experiments that are limited to measuring vaccination intentions – not actions – and immediate changes in attitudes and intentions – not long-term changes. The fifth and final essay explores the question of whether German farmers are as polarized concerning a sustainable transformation of agriculture as they are perceived to be by the general public. We conducted N = 110 online surveys with farmers from Hesse, Germany, to explore whether they are prone to engage in motivated reasoning when confronted with information that challenges their farming practices. While we find evidence of motivated reasoning among both conventional and organic farmers, organic farmers appear to be much more ideologically polarized than conventional farmers. Furthermore, we carried out N = 821 online surveys with respondents from the general public and asked them to predict how farmers answered our questions. In contrast to public expectations, farmers in our sample are far less polarized, and conventional farmers, in particular, are much more open-minded and concerned about the environment than the public expects. Our results suggest that farmers are strongly misperceived by the public and that a sustainable transformation of agriculture in Germany is not hindered by the motivated reasoning of farmers. Furthermore, our results make it clear that a binary distinction between organic and conventional farming methods overlooks important differences among conventional farmers. Many of the farmers we surveyed already use largely organic practices, but are not certified as such. A more accurate classification that distinguishes not only between organic certified and non-certified farmers could help policymakers target their regulations more accurately to promote sustainable agriculture.

This paper studies the age-group-specific evolution of inequality of total income among highly and less educated females and males at ages 26-80 from 2005 to 2018. On the one hand, it presents time series of Gini coefficients and associated decompositions by different income components. On the other hand, it investigates the extent to which changes in Gini coefficients were associated with a redistribution of total income between the bottom 40 percent, the middle class, and the top 10 percent. The results indicate that increases in inequality particularly burdened the youngest age groups in the bottom 40 percent. However, older age groups, especially elderly individuals, from the middle class also contributed to the increasing income shares of the top 10 percent.

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a concept for collecting and sharing product-related information along the life cycle of a product. DPPs are currently the subject of intense discussion, and various development efforts are being undertaken. These are supported by regulatory activities, especially in the case of the battery passport. The aggregation of product life-cycle data and their respective use, as well as the sharing of these data between companies, entrepreneurs, and other actors in the value chain, is crucial for the creation of a resource-efficient circular economy. Despite the urgent need for such a solution, there is currently little attention given to the digital infrastructure for the creation and handling of the DPPs (i.e., the so-called DPP system). Moreover, there is so far no common understanding of what the requirements for a DPP system are. This is the background and underlying motivation of our paper: we identify the requirements for a DPP system in a structured way, i.e., based on stakeholder involvement and current literature from science and industry. In addition, we compose, categorize, and critically analyze the results, i.e., the list of requirements for DPP systems, in order to identify gaps. Summarized, our research provides insights into the criteria to be considered in the creation of an actual DPP system.

Conditional heteroskedasticity of the error terms is a common occurrence in financial factor models, such as the CAPM and Fama-French factor models. This feature necessitates the use of heteroskedasticity consistent (HC) standard errors to make valid inference for regression coefficients. In this paper, we show that using weighted least squares (WLS) or adaptive least squares (ALS) to estimate model parameters generally leads to smaller HC standard errors compared to ordinary least squares (OLS), which translates into improved inference in the form of shorter confidence intervals and more powerful hypothesis tests. In an extensive empirical analysis based on historical stock returns and commonly used factors, we find that conditional heteroskedasticity is pronounced and that WLS and ALS can dramatically shorten confidence intervals compared to OLS, especially during times of financial turmoil.

Using microdata from 17 OECD countries, this paper documents a negative cross-country correlation between gender gaps in market hours and wages. We find that the cross-country differences in market hours are mostly accounted for by female market hours and the size of the sector that produces close substitutes to home production. We quantify the role played by taxes and family care subsidies on the two gender gaps in a multi-sector model with home production. Higher taxes and lower subsidies reduce the marketization of home production, leading to lower market hours. The effect is largely on women because both home production and the production of its market substitutes are female-intensive. The larger fall in female market hours reduces relative female labour supply, contributing to a higher female to male wage ratio.

This study aims to explore the contribution of “The New World of Work” to farming, a career often viewed as unattractive among youth, and, as highlighted by the “young farmer problem” in the literature. This paper draws upon research on the role of “new ways of working” in work engagement and farmer identity among young farmers. A mixed-method approach is used based on data from two Mediterranean Islands, Crete and Cyprus. Based on the polymedia- new theory of digital media, the study focuses both on new media use and new media engagement for work-related tasks. Our findings highlight that the “The New World of Work” is an important phenomenon for initiating positive change toward cohesive social-self in a career (subjective perception of a farming career concerning others). However, we identified binary terms used by farmers when explaining conflicts between cohesive self-concept (expression of a strong sense of self regarding their farming career) and social-self in a career. The study concludes that the duality between career self-concepts and social-self still holds patterns even among young generation farmers, regardless of their integration level to new media.

The primary objective of this paper is to develop a two-country, dynamic, general equilibrium model with innovation contests to formally analyze the impact of globalization on the skill premium and fully-endogenous growth. Higher quality products are endogenously discovered through stochastic and sequential global innovation contests in which challengers devote resources to R&D, while technology leaders undertake rent-protection activities (RPAs) to prolong the expected duration of their temporary monopoly power by hindering the R&D effort of challengers. The model generates intra-sectoral trade, multinationals, and international outsourcing of investment services. Globalization, captured by a move from autarky to the integrated-world equilibrium, leads to convergence of wages and growth rates. Globalization and long-run growth are either substitutes or complements depending on a country’s relative skill abundance and the ranking of skill intensities between RPAs and R&D services. Trade openness between two countries that possess identical relative skill endowments but differ in size does not affect either country’s long-run growth.

"In Deutschland gibt es bislang wenige Untersuchungen zum Zusammenhang zwischen Betriebsmerkmalen auf der einen Seite und individuellen Einstellungen und Merkmalen von Beschäftigten auf der anderen Seite. Dabei wird angesichts einer fortschreitenden Destandardisierung und Deregulierung von Beschäftigungsverhältnissen die Ebene der einzelnen Arbeitsorganisationen gerade in Deutschland für eine Reihe ökonomischer und sozialer Phänomene relevanter. Der Autor berichtet aus einem Forschungsprojekt, in dem ein so genannter Linked-Employer-Employee-Datensatz (LEE) generiert wird, der sowohl ausführliche Informationen über die ökonomischen, personalpolitischen und arbeitsorganisatorischen Strukturen und Prozesse von Betrieben enthält, als auch Informationen über die soziale und ökonomische Situation der Beschäftigten und deren Haushalte bietet. Für die Informationen auf Individualebene wird auf die Befragungsdaten des ALLBUS 2008 zurückgegriffen. Im Vordergrund des Projektes steht die Frage nach der Realisierbarkeit survey-basierter Personen-Betriebsdatensätze. Der Autor diskutiert dementsprechend methodische Fragen des Vorgehens und der Qualität der resultierenden LEE-Datensätze und gibt Ausblicke auf zukünftige interdisziplinäre Längsschnittstudien." (ICI)

This paper proposes a methodology for building Multivariate Time-Varying STCC–GARCH models. The novel contributions in this area are the specification tests related to the correlation component, the extension of the general model to allow for additional correlation regimes, and a detailed exposition of the systematic, improved modelling cycle required for such nonlinear models. There is an R-package that includes the steps in the modelling cycle. Simulations demonstrate the robustness of the recommended model building approach. The modelling cycle is illustrated using daily return series for Australia’s four largest banks.