Extern
Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (27)
Document Type
- Working Paper (27)
Language
- English (27) (remove)
Keywords
- COVID-19 (3)
- carbon pricing (2)
- entrepreneurship (2)
- experiment (2)
- gender (2)
- self-employment (2)
- Active Labor Market Policy (1)
- Backward ownership (1)
- Carbon Capture (1)
- Carbon Dioxide Removal (1)
- Climate Policy (1)
- Covid-19 (1)
- Difference-in-Differences (1)
- E-DSGE (1)
- Employee Training (1)
- Entrepreneurship (1)
- Entry deterrence (1)
- Firm Growth (1)
- Foreclosure (1)
- High growth firms (1)
- Human Capital Investments (1)
- Impermanence (1)
- Innovation (1)
- Institutions (1)
- Job Creation (1)
- Job Search (1)
- Labor Market Mobility (1)
- Manager Decisions (1)
- Minority shareholdings (1)
- PHQ-4 score (1)
- Partial ownership (1)
- Policy Reform (1)
- Push and Pull Theories (1)
- Quality of regional governments (1)
- Regions (1)
- Regulation (1)
- Risk Attitudes (1)
- Search Frictions (1)
- Social Cost of Carbon (1)
- Start-Up Subsidies (1)
- Start-up Motivation (1)
- Survival (1)
- Uniform pricing (1)
- Unintended Consequence (1)
- Vertical integration (1)
- air pollution (1)
- ambiguity attitudes (1)
- behavioral economics (1)
- blended learning (1)
- business services (1)
- carbon debt (1)
- carbon emissions (1)
- carbon price (1)
- carbon removal (1)
- cartel (1)
- climate policy (1)
- collusion (1)
- communication (1)
- commuting (1)
- crowding out (1)
- decomposition methods (1)
- developing country cities (1)
- discrete choice (1)
- discrimination (1)
- double dividend (1)
- efficiency (1)
- emergency-aid (1)
- energy expenditure (1)
- energy policy (1)
- entrepreneurship policy (1)
- environmental tax reform (1)
- equity crowdfunding (1)
- finance (1)
- financial access and inclusion (1)
- gender pay gap (1)
- goal-setting (1)
- gridded data (1)
- habit formation (1)
- home office (1)
- horizontal equity (1)
- income (1)
- instrumental variables (1)
- just transition (1)
- labor productivity (1)
- leadership (1)
- linked employer-employee data (1)
- machine learning (1)
- market-entry game (1)
- mental health (1)
- multi-valued treatment (1)
- natural field experiment (1)
- net-negative emissions (1)
- non-Ricardian households (1)
- obesity (1)
- objective health measures (1)
- physical activity (1)
- pollution (1)
- population density (1)
- primary school (1)
- productivity slowdown (1)
- promises (1)
- property taxes (1)
- public good (1)
- redistribution (1)
- removal subsidies (1)
- renewable energy subsidies (1)
- representative longitudinal survey data (1)
- representative real-time survey data (1)
- resilience (1)
- returns to education (1)
- revenue recycling (1)
- risk attitudes (1)
- school health examinations (1)
- self-employed (1)
- soft information (1)
- stag-hunt game (1)
- strategic-uncertainty attitudes (1)
- subjective survival probability (1)
- tax competition (1)
- taxpayer subsidies (1)
- terms-of-trade effects (1)
- trade (1)
- treatment effects (1)
- unilateral climate policy (1)
- vocational education (1)
- voting (1)
- voucher (1)
- windfall gains (1)
Institute
- Fachgruppe Volkswirtschaftslehre (27) (remove)
Urban pollution
(2022)
We use worldwide satellite data to analyse how population size and density affect urban pollution. We find that density significantly increases pollution exposure. Looking only at urban areas, we find that population size affects exposure more than density. Moreover, the effect is driven mostly by population commuting to core cities rather than the core city population itself. We analyse heterogeneity by geography and income levels. By and large, the influence of population on pollution is greatest in Asia and middle-income countries. A counterfactual simulation shows that PM2.5 exposure would fall by up to 36% and NO2 exposure up to 53% if within countries population size were equalized across all cities.
We investigate how inviting students to set task-based goals affects usage of an online learning platform and course performance. We design and implement a randomized field experiment in a large mandatory economics course with blended learning elements. The low-cost treatment induces students to use the online learning system more often, more intensively, and to begin earlier with exam preparation. Treated students perform better in the course than the control group: they are 18.8% (0.20 SD) more likely to pass the exam and earn 6.7% (0.19 SD) more points on the exam. There is no evidence that treated students spend significantly more time, rather they tend to shift to more productive learning methods. The heterogeneity analysis suggests that higher treatment effects are associated with higher levels of behavioral bias but also with poor early course behavior.
While a growing body of literature finds positive impacts of Start-Up Subsidies (SUS) on labor market outcomes of participants, little is known about how the design of these programs shapes their effectiveness and hence how to improve policy. As experimental variation in program design is unavailable, we exploit the 2011 reform of the current German SUS program for the unemployed which strengthened case-workers’ discretionary power, increased entry requirements and reduced monetary support. We estimate the impact of the reform on the program’s effectiveness using samples of participants and non-participants from before and after the reform. To control for time-constant unobserved heterogeneity as well as differential selection patterns based on observable characteristics over time, we combine Difference-in-Differences with inverse probability weighting using covariate balancing propensity scores. Holding participants’ observed characteristics as well as macroeconomic conditions constant, the results suggest that the reform was successful in raising employment effects on average. As these findings may be contaminated by changes in selection patterns based on unobserved characteristics, we assess our results using simulation-based sensitivity analyses and find that our estimates are highly robust to changes in unobserved characteristics. Hence, the reform most likely had a positive impact on the effectiveness of the program, suggesting that increasing entry requirements and reducing support in-creased the program’s impacts while reducing the cost per participant.
Starting in 2009, the German state of Saxony distributed sports club membership vouchers among all 33,000 third graders in the state. The policy’s objective was to encourage them to develop a long-term habit of exercising. In 2018, we carried out a large register-based survey among several cohorts in Saxony and two neighboring states. Our difference-in-differences estimations show that, even after a decade, awareness of the voucher program was significantly higher in the treatment group. We also find that youth received and redeemed the vouchers. However, we do not find significant short- or long-term effects on sports club membership, physical activity, overweightness, or motor skills.
We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the government-mandated measures to contain its spread, affect the self-employed – particularly women – in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher likelihood of income losses due to COVID-19 than employees, women are 35% more likely to experience income losses than their male counterparts. Conversely, we do not find a comparable gender gap among employees. Our results further suggest that the gender gap among the self-employed is largely explained by the fact that women disproportionately work in industries that are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis of potential mechanisms reveals that women are significantly more likely to be impacted by government-imposed restrictions, i.e. the regulation of opening hours. We conclude that future policy measures intending to mitigate the consequences of such shocks should account for this considerable variation in economic hardship.
We develop a model of optimal carbon taxation and redistribution taking into account horizontal equity concerns by considering heterogeneous energy efficiencies. By deriving first- and second-best rules for policy instruments including carbon taxes, transfers and energy subsidies, we then investigate analytically how horizontal equity is considered in the social welfare maximizing tax structure. We calibrate the model to German household data and a 30 percent emission reduction goal. Our results show that energy-intensive households should receive more redistributive resources than energy-efficient households if and only if social inequality aversion is sufficiently high. We further find that redistribution of carbon tax revenue via household-specific transfers is the first-best policy. Equal per-capita transfers do not suffer from informational problems, but increase mitigation costs by around 15 percent compared to the first- best for unity inequality aversion. Adding renewable energy subsidies or non-linear energy subsidies, reduces mitigation costs further without relying on observability of households’ energy efficiency.
In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000 observations between 2003 and 2017, we analyze this largely uncovered phenomenon among professional services, the 4th largest sector in the EU15 business economy, which provide important intermediate services for the rest of the economy. We show that changes in the value chain explain about half of the decline and the increase in part-time employment is a further minor part of the decline. In contrast to expectations, the entry of micro and small firms, despite their lower productivity levels, is not responsible for the decline. We also cannot confirm the conjecture that weakening competition allows unproductive firms to remain in the market.