Extern
Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (29)
Document Type
- Working Paper (29) (remove)
Language
- English (29)
Keywords
- COVID-19 (3)
- experiment (2)
- gender (2)
- mental health (2)
- migration (2)
- self-employment (2)
- Active Labor Market Policy (1)
- Africa (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 emissions (1)
- carbon price (1)
- carbon pricing (1)
- cartel (1)
- childcare provision (1)
- climate (1)
- climate change (1)
- climate policy (1)
- collusion (1)
- communication (1)
- commuting (1)
- crowding out (1)
- decomposition (1)
- decomposition methods (1)
- double dividend (1)
- efficiency (1)
- emergency-aid (1)
- energy expenditure (1)
- entrepreneurship (1)
- entrepreneurship policy (1)
- environmental tax reform (1)
- equity crowdfunding (1)
- finance (1)
- financial access and inclusion (1)
- food prices (1)
- generalized difference-in-difference (1)
- goal-setting (1)
- gridded data (1)
- habit formation (1)
- hate crime (1)
- home office (1)
- horizontal equity (1)
- human capital (1)
- income (1)
- inequality (1)
- inequality of opportunity (1)
- instrumental variables (1)
- just transition (1)
- labor productivity (1)
- labour migration (1)
- leadership (1)
- machine learning (1)
- market-entry game (1)
- meta-analysis (1)
- mother’s labor supply (1)
- multi-valued treatment (1)
- natural field experiment (1)
- non-Ricardian households (1)
- obesity (1)
- objective health measures (1)
- physical activity (1)
- population density (1)
- primary school (1)
- productivity slowdown (1)
- promises (1)
- property taxes (1)
- public good (1)
- redistribution (1)
- refugees (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)
- wealth (1)
- windfall gains (1)
Institute
- Center for Economic Policy Analysis (CEPA) (29) (remove)
Leadership plays an important role for the efficient and fair solution of social dilemmas but the effectiveness of a leader can vary substantially. Two main factors of leadership impact are the ability to induce high contributions by all group members and the (expected) fair use of power. Participants in our experiment decide about contributions to a public good. After all contributions are made, the leader can choose how much of the joint earnings to assign to herself; the remainder is distributed equally among the followers. Using machine learning techniques, we study whether the content of initial open statements by the group members predicts their behavior as a leader and whether groups are able to identify such clues and endogenously appoint a “good” leader to solve the dilemma. We find that leaders who promise fairness are more likely to behave fairly, and that followers appoint as leaders those who write more explicitly about fairness and efficiency. However, in their contribution decision, followers focus on the leader’s first-move contribution and place less importance on the content of the leader’s statements.
Access to digital finance
(2024)
Financing entrepreneurship spurs innovation and economic growth. Digital financial platforms that crowdfund equity for entrepreneurs have emerged globally, yet they remain poorly understood. We model equity crowdfunding in terms of the relationship between the number of investors and the amount of money raised per pitch. We examine heterogeneity in the average amount raised per pitch that is associated with differences across three countries and seven platforms. Using a novel dataset of successful fundraising on the most prominent platforms in the UK, Germany, and the USA, we find the underlying relationship between the number of investors and the amount of money raised for entrepreneurs is loglinear, with a coefficient less than one and concave to the origin. We identify significant variation in the average amount invested in each pitch across countries and platforms. Our findings have implications for market actors as well as regulators who set competitive frameworks.
While inequality of opportunity (IOp) in earnings is well studied, the literature on IOp in individual net wealth is scarce to non-existent. This is problematic because both theoretical and empirical evidence show that the position in the wealth and income distribution can significantly diverge.We measure ex-ante IOp in net wealth for Germany using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Ex-ante IOp is defined as the contribution of circumstances to the inequality in net wealth before effort is exerted. The SOEP allows for a direct mapping from individual circumstances to individual net wealth and for a detailed decomposition of net wealth inequality into a variety of circumstances; among them childhood background, intergenerational transfers, and regional characteristics. The ratio of inequality of opportunity to total inequality is stable from 2002 to 2019. This is in sharp contrast to labor earnings, where ex-ante IOp is declining over time. Our estimates suggest that about 62% of the inequality in net wealth is due to circumstances. The most important circumstances are intergenerational transfers, parental occupation, and the region of birth. In contrast, gender and individuals’ own education are the most important circumstances for earnings.
High growth firms (HGFs) are important for job creation and considered to be precursors of economic growth. We investigate how formal institutions, like product- and labor-market regulations, as well as the quality of regional governments that implement these regulations, affect HGF development across European regions. Using data from Eurostat, OECD, WEF, and Gothenburg University, we show that both regulatory stringency and the quality of the regional government influence the regional shares of HGFs. More importantly, we find that the effect of labor- and product-market regulations ultimately depends on the quality of regional governments: in regions with high quality of government, the share of HGFs is neither affected by the level of product market regulation, nor by more or less flexibility in hiring and firing practices. Our findings contribute to the debate on the effects of regulations by showing that regulations are not, per se, “good, bad, and ugly”, rather their impact depends on the efficiency of regional governments. Our paper offers important building blocks to develop tailored policy measures that may influence the development of HGFs in a region.
Carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere is becoming an important option to achieve net zero climate targets. This paper develops a welfare and public economics perspective on optimal policies for carbon removal and storage in non-permanent sinks like forests, soil, oceans, wood products or chemical products. We derive a new metric for the valuation of non-permanent carbon storage, the social cost of carbon removal (SCC-R), which embeds also the conventional social cost of carbon emissions. We show that the contribution of CDR is to create new carbon sinks that should be used to reduce transition costs, even if the stored carbon is released to the atmosphere eventually. Importantly, CDR does not raise the ambition of optimal temperature levels unless initial atmospheric carbon stocks are excessively high. For high initial atmospheric carbon stocks, CDR allows to reduce the optimal temperature below initial levels. Finally, we characterize three different policy regimes that ensure an optimal deployment of carbon removal: downstream carbon pricing, upstream carbon pricing, and carbon storage pricing. The policy regimes differ in their informational and institutional requirements regarding monitoring, liability and financing.
Predicting entrepreneurial development based on individual and business-related characteristics is a key objective of entrepreneurship research. In this context, we investigate whether the motives of becoming an entrepreneur influence the subsequent entrepreneurial development. In our analysis, we examine a broad range of business outcomes including survival and income, as well as job creation, expansion and innovation activities for up to 40 months after business formation. Using self-determination theory as conceptual background, we aggregate the start-up motives into a continuous motivational index. We show – based on a unique dataset of German start-ups from unemployment and non-unemployment – that the later business performance is better, the higher they score on this index. Effects are particularly strong for growth oriented outcomes like innovation and expansion activities. In a next step, we examine three underlying motivational categories that we term opportunity, career ambition, and necessity. We show that individuals driven by opportunity motives perform better in terms of innovation and business expansion activities, while career ambition is positively associated with survival, income, and the probability of hiring employees. All effects are robust to the inclusion of a large battery of covariates that are proven to be important determinants of entrepreneurial performance.
Strategic uncertainty is the uncertainty that players face with respect to the purposeful behavior of other players in an interactive decision situation. Our paper develops a new method for measuring strategic-uncertainty attitudes and distinguishing them from risk and ambiguity attitudes. We vary the source of uncertainty (whether strategic or not) across conditions in a ceteris paribus manner. We elicit certainty equivalents of participating in two strategic 2x2 games (a stag-hunt and a market-entry game) as well as certainty equivalents of related lotteries that yield the same possible payoffs with exogenously given probabilities (risk) and lotteries with unknown probabilities (ambiguity). We provide a structural model of uncertainty attitudes that allows us to measure a preference for or an aversion against the source of uncertainty, as well as optimism or pessimism regarding the desired outcome. We document systematic attitudes towards strategic uncertainty that vary across contexts. Under strategic complementarity [substitutability], the majority of participants tend to be pessimistic [optimistic] regarding the desired outcome. However, preferences for the source of uncertainty are distributed around zero.
The self-employed faced strong income losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many governments introduced programs to financially support the self-employed during the pandemic, including Germany. The German Ministry for Economic Affairs announced a €50bn emergency-aid program in March 2020, offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue declines. By reassuring the self- employed that the government ‘would not let them down’ during the crisis, the program had also the important aim of motivating the self-employed to get through the crisis. We investigate whether the program affected the confidence of the self-employed to survive the crisis using real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations. We employ propensity score matching, making use of a rich set of variables that influence the subjective survival probability as main outcome measure. We observe that this program had significant effects, with the subjective survival probability of the self- employed being moderately increased. We reveal important effect heterogeneities with respect to education, industries, and speed of payment. Notably, positive effects only occur among those self-employed whose application was processed quickly. This suggests stress-induced waiting costs due to the uncertainty associated with the administrative processing and the overall pandemic situation. Our findings have policy implications for the design of support programs, while also contributing to the literature on the instruments and effects of entrepreneurship policy interventions in crisis situations.
The COVID-19 pandemic created the largest experiment in working from home. We study how persistent telework may change energy and transport consumption and costs in Germany to assess the distributional and environmental implications when working from home will stick. Based on data from the German Microcensus and available classifications of working-from-home feasibility for different occupations, we calculate the change in energy consumption and travel to work when 15% of employees work full time from home. Our findings suggest that telework translates into an annual increase in heating energy expenditure of 110 euros per worker and a decrease in transport expenditure of 840 euros per worker. All income groups would gain from telework but high-income workers gain twice as much as low-income workers. The value of time saving is between 1.3 and 6 times greater than the savings from reduced travel costs and almost 9 times higher for high-income workers than low-income workers. The direct effects on CO₂ emissions due to reduced car commuting amount to 4.5 millions tons of CO₂, representing around 3 percent of carbon emissions in the transport sector.
Subsidizing the geographical mobility of unemployed workers may improve welfare by relaxing their financial constraints and allowing them to find jobs in more prosperous regions. We exploit regional variation in the promotion of mobility programs along administrative borders of German employment agency districts to investigate the causal effect of offering such financial incentives on the job search behavior and labor market integration of unemployed workers. We show that promoting mobility – as intended – causes job seekers to increase their search radius, apply for and accept distant jobs. At the same time, local job search is reduced with adverse consequences for reemployment and earnings. These unintended negative effects are provoked by spatial search frictions. Overall, the unconditional provision of mobility programs harms the welfare of unemployed job seekers.