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The large literature that aims to find evidence of climate migration delivers mixed findings. This meta-regression analysis i) summarizes direct links between adverse climatic events and migration, ii) maps patterns of climate migration, and iii) explains the variation in outcomes. Using a set of limited dependent variable models, we meta-analyze thus-far the most comprehensive sample of 3,625 estimates from 116 original studies and produce novel insights on climate migration. We find that extremely high temperatures and drying conditions increase migration. We do not find a significant effect of sudden-onset events. Climate migration is most likely to emerge due to contemporaneous events, to originate in rural areas and to take place in middle-income countries, internally, to cities. The likelihood to become trapped in affected areas is higher for women and in low-income countries, particularly in Africa. We uniquely quantify how pitfalls typical for the broader empirical climate impact literature affect climate migration findings. We also find evidence of different publication biases.
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.
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.
In this paper, we study the effect of exogenous global crop price changes on migration from agricultural and non-agricultural households in Sub-Saharan Africa. We show that, similar to the effect of positive local weather shocks, the effect of a locally-relevant global crop price increase on household out-migration depends on the initial household wealth. Higher international producer prices relax the budget constraint of poor agricultural households and facilitate migration. The order of magnitude of a standardized price effect is approx. one third of the standardized effect of a local weather shock. Unlike positive weather shocks, which mostly facilitate internal rural-urban migration, positive income shocks through rising producer prices only increase migration to neighboring African countries, likely due to the simultaneous decrease in real income in nearby urban areas. Finally, we show that while higher producer prices induce conflict, conflict does not play a role for the household decision to send a member as a labor migrant.
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.
The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel, sanctioning only the latter. To this aim, we introduce a participant in the role of the competition authority, who is properly incentivized to judge communication content and price setting behavior of the firms. Using this novel design, we revisit the question whether a leniency rule successfully destabilizes cartels. In contrast to existing experimental studies, we find that a leniency rule does not affect cartelization. We discuss potential explanations for this contrasting result.
Populism has fatally weakened the world’s ability to respond to COVID-19, by undermining the capacity of the structures and mechanisms of international law to address the pandemic. The pandemic has exposed as a fallacy a key tenet of populism – to protect the ‘people’ of a nation from external forces, including international law. In fact international law, through the principle of self-determination, enshrines the ability of peoples to determine their own political organization. But this does not preclude agreement at the international level on matters of common interest to humanity as a whole that require community action. The prevention of infectious disease is just such a case, which states have long agreed could not remain solely the preserve of national polities, but requires a common international response. This paper, placing the current crisis in light of the development of international health law, critically examines the response of key populist governments to COVID-19 in order to address the larger issue of the implications of populism for the fate of international law.
We analyze workers’ risk preferences and training investments. Our conceptual framework differentiates between the investment risk and insurance mechanisms underpinning training decisions. Investment risk leads risk-averse workers to train less; they undertake more training if it insures them against future losses. We use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to demonstrate that risk affinity is associated with more training, implying that, on average, investment risks dominate the insurance benefits of training. Crucially, this relationship is evident only for general training; there is no relationship between risk attitudes and specific training. Thus, as expected, risk preferences matter more when skills are transferable – and workers have a vested interest in training outcomes – than when they are not. Finally, we provide evidence that the insurance benefits of training are concentrated among workers with uncertain employment relationships or limited access to public insurance schemes.
Interest in evaluating the effects of continuous treatments has been on the rise recently. To facilitate the estimation of causal effects in this setting, the present paper introduces entropy balancing for continuous treatments (EBCT) by extending the original entropy balancing methodology of Hainmüller (2012). In order to estimate balancing weights, the proposed approach solves a globally convex constrained optimization problem, allowing for much more computationally efficient implementation compared to other available methods. EBCT weights reliably eradicate Pearson correlations between covariates and the continuous treatment variable. This is the case even when other methods based on the generalized propensity score tend to yield insufficient balance due to strong selection into different treatment intensities. Moreover, the optimization procedure is more successful in avoiding extreme weights attached to a single unit. Extensive Monte-Carlo simulations show that treatment effect estimates using EBCT display similar or lower bias and uniformly lower root mean squared error. These properties make EBCT an attractive method for the evaluation of continuous treatments. Software implementation is available for Stata and R.
Labor market policy tools such as training and sanctions are commonly used to help bring workers back to work. By analogy to medical treatments, the individual exposure to these tools may have side effects. We study effects on health using individual-level population registers on labor market events outcomes, drug prescriptions and sickness absence, comparing outcomes before and after exposure to training and sanctions. We find that training improves cardiovascular and mental health and lowers sickness absence. The results suggest that this is not due to improved employment prospects but rather to instantaneous features of participation such as, perhaps, the adoption of a more rigorous daily routine. Unemployment benefits sanctions cause a short-run deterioration of mental health, possibly due higher stress levels, but this tapers out quickly.