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While some pronouncements of expert treaty bodies have been considered ‘key catalysts’ for the development of international human rights law, others are only selectively referred to in legal practice. This article argues that the varying normative impact is due to the informal character of pronouncements. In the absence of treaty provisions specifying their legal effect, practitioners tend to rely on different factors and arguments when either drawing on or rejecting certain pronouncements. Scholars in turn face difficulties when trying to identify explanatory patterns within this diverging practice as the informal character confronts both international lawyers and international relations scholars with their respective methodological ‘blind spots’. In light of these intradisciplinary challenges, this article explores the extent as to which an interdisciplinary approach helps to assess the reasons for the varying impact of pronouncements. After analysing the factors determining their legal significance on the basis of State practice and the academic debate, this article identifies the drafting process as a factor which promises to be particularly insightful when explored from an interdisciplinary perspective and sketches out a framework for future research.
Stochastic uncertainty can cause difficult coordination problems that may hinder mutually beneficial cooperation. We propose a mechanism of ex-post voluntary transfers designed to circumvent these coordination problems and ask whether it can do so. To test this, we implement a controlled laboratory experiment based on a repeatedly played Ultimatum Game with a stochastic endowment. Contrary to our hypothesis, we find that allowing voluntary transfers does not entail an efficiency increase. We suggest and analyze two main reasons for this finding: First, the stochastic uncertainty forces proposers to accept high strategic uncertainty if they intend to cooperate by claiming a low amount (which many proposers do not). Second, many responders behave only incompletely conditionally cooperative by transferring too little (which hinders cooperation in future periods).
Numerous studies investigate which sanctioning institutions prevent cartel formation but little is known as to how these sanctions work. We contribute to understanding the inner workings of cartels by studying experimentally the effect of sanctioning institutions on firms’ communication. Using machine learning to organize the chat communication into topics, we find that firms are significantly less likely to communicate explicitly about price fixing when sanctioning institutions are present. At the same time, average prices are lower when communication is less explicit. A mediation analysis suggests that sanctions are effective in hindering cartel formation not only because they introduce a risk of being fined but also by reducing the prevalence of explicit price communication.
Drinking is Different!
(2020)
Unhealthy behavior can be extremely costly from a micro- and macroeconomic perspective and exploring the determinants of such behavior is highly important from an economist’s point of view. We examine whether locus of control (LOC) can explain alcohol consumption as an important domain of health behavior. LOC measures how much an individual believes that she is in control of the consequences of her own actions for her life’s future outcomes. While earlier literature showed that an increasing internal LOC is associated with increased health-conscious behavior in domains such as smoking, exercise or diets, we find that drinking seems to be different. Using German panel data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we find a significant positive effect of having an internal LOC on the probability of moderate and regular drinking. We suggest and discuss two likely mechanisms for this relationship and find interesting gender differences. While social investments play an important role for both men and women, risk perceptions are especially relevant for men.
Envy is an unpleasant emotion. If individuals anticipate that comparing their payoff with the (potentially higher) payoff of others will make them envious, they may want to actively avoid information about other people’s payoffs. Given the opportunity to reduce another person’s payoff, an individual’s envy may trigger behavior that is detrimental to welfare. In this case, if individuals anticipate that they will react in a welfare-reducing way, they may also avoid information about other people’s payoffs from the outset. We investigated these two hypotheses using three experiments. We found that 13% of our potentially envious subjects avoided information when they did not have the opportunity to reduce another participant’s payoff. Psychological scales do not explain this behavior. We also found that voluntarily uninformed subjects did neither deduct less of the payoff nor less frequently than subjects who could not avoid the information.
This paper evaluates the construction of the rights of human rights defenders within international law and its shortcomings in protecting women. Human rights defenders have historically been defined on the basis of their actions as defenders. However, as Marxist-feminist scholar Silvia Federici contends, women are inherently politicised and, moreover, face obstacles to political action which are invisible to and untouchable by the law. Labour rights set an example of handling such a disadvantaged political position by placing vital importance on workers’ right to association and collective action. The paper closes with the suggestion that transposing this construction of rights to women would better protect women as human rights defenders while emphasising their capacity for self-determination in their political actions.
Mit RISE-DE liegt als FDMentor-Projektergebnis ein Referenzmodell für Strategieprozesse im institutionellen Forschungsdatenmanagement vor. RISE-DE bietet einen Bewertungsrahmen zur Selbstevaluation und Zielbestimmung und eignet sich als Werkzeug zur Gestaltung einer strukturierten, Stakeholder-orientierten Strategieentwicklung für das Forschungsdatenmanagement an Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen.
RISE-DE basiert auf dem lose an Reifegradenmodellen orientierten RISE-Framework des DCC (RISE v1.1), wurde aber für den Einsatz in partizipativen Prozessen deutlich überarbeitet sowie inhaltlich an den deutschen Wissenschaftskontext und Entwicklungen in der guten Praxis im FDM angepasst. Ein mit Hilfe von RISE-DE erarbeitete Strategie erfüllt zugleich die von der Hochschulrektorenkonferenz und der League of European Research Universities formulierten Anforderungen.
Mit RISE-DE liegt als FDMentor-Projektergebnis ein Referenzmodell für Strategieprozesse im institutionellen Forschungsdatenmanagement (FDM) vor. RISE-DE bietet einen Bewertungsrahmen zur Selbstevaluation und Zielbestimmung und eignet sich als Werkzeug zur Gestaltung einer strukturierten, Stakeholder-orientierten Strategieentwicklung für das FDM an Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen.
RISE-DE basiert auf dem lose an Reifegradenmodellen orientierten Research Infrastructure Self-Evaluation Framework (RISE v1.1) des Digital Curation Centre (DCC), wurde aber für den Einsatz in partizipativen Prozessen deutlich überarbeitet sowie inhaltlich an den deutschen Wissenschaftskontext und Entwicklungen in der guten Praxis im FDM angepasst. Eine mit Hilfe von RISE-DE erarbeitete Strategie erfüllt zugleich die von der Hochschulrektorenkonferenz (HRK) und der League of European Research Universities (LERU) formulierten Empfehlungen.
Die hier vorliegende RISE-DE Version 1.0 nimmt Erfahrungen aus dem Piloteinsatz an der Universität Potsdam sowie Feedback aus der Community auf. Es beinhaltet gegenüber der Vorversion zum einen Veränderungen an den Themen des Referenzmodells, zum anderen wurden Empfehlungen für FDM-Beginner deutlich erweitert und Erläuterungen für die Durchführung partizipativer Strategieprozesse hinzugefügt. In Zusammenarbeit mit der Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg entstand außerdem ein digitales Evaluations-Tool.
Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women’s employment rates but decrease their wages in case of extended leave durations. In view of these potential trade-offs, many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major parental leave reform on mothers’ long-term earnings. The 2007 German parental leave reform replaced a means-tested benefit with a more generous earnings-related benefit that is granted for a shorter period of time. Additionally, a “daddy quota” of two months was introduced. To identify the causal effect of this policy on long-run earnings of mothers, we use a difference-in-difference approach that compares labor market outcomes of mothers who gave birth just before and right after the reform and nets out seasonal effects by including the year before. Using administrative social security data, we confirm previous findings and show that the average duration of employment interruptions increased for high-income mothers. Nevertheless, we find a positive long-run effect on earnings for mothers in this group. This effect cannot be explained by changes in working hours, observed characteristics, changes in employer stability or fertility patterns. Descriptive evidence suggests that the stronger involvement of fathers, incentivized by the “daddy months”, could have facilitated mothers’ re-entry into the labor market and thereby increased earnings. For mothers with low prior-to-birth earnings, however, we do not find any beneficial labor market effects of this parental leave reform.
Using quantile regression methods, this paper analyses the gender wage gap across the wage distribution and over time (1990–2014), while controlling for changing sample selection into full-time employment. Our findings show that the selection-corrected gender wage gap is much larger than the one observed in the data, which is mainly due to large positive selection of women into full-time employment. However, we show that selection-corrected wages of male and female workers at the lower half of the distribution have moderately converged over time. The reason for this development have been changes in the composition of the male full-time employment force over time, which in spite of the rather constant male full-time employment rate, have given place to a small but rising selection bias in male observed wages. In the upper half of the wage distribution, however, neither the observed nor the selection-corrected gender wage gap has narrowed over time.