Fachgruppe Volkswirtschaftslehre
Refine
Document Type
- Working Paper (49)
- Article (24)
- Doctoral Thesis (7)
- Postprint (3)
- Review (2)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (1)
- Other (1)
Keywords
- experiment (6)
- entrepreneurship (5)
- survival (5)
- COVID-19 (4)
- Experiment (4)
- gender (4)
- innovation (4)
- E-DSGE (3)
- air pollution (3)
- cartel (3)
Institute
Reinhard Hujer
(2020)
This study analyses the impact of managers’ risk preferences on their training allocation decisions. We begin by providing nationally representative evidence that managers’ risk-aversion is negatively correlated with the likelihood that their firms engage in any worker training. Using a novel vignette study, we then demonstrate that risk-tolerant and risk-averse decision makers have significantly different training preferences. Risk aversion results in increased sensitivity to turnover risk. Managers who are risk-averse offer less general training and are more reluctant to train workers with a history of job mobility. Adopting a weighting approach to flexibly control for observed differences in the characteristics of risk-averse and risk-tolerant managers, we show that our findings cannot be explained by heterogeneity in either managers’ observed characteristics or the type of firms where they work. All managers, irrespective of their risk preferences, are sensitive to the investment risk associated with training, avoiding training that is more costly or that targets those with less occupational expertise or nearing retirement. This provides suggestive evidence that the risks of training are primarily due to the risk that trained workers will leave the firm (turnover risk) rather than the risk that the benefits of training do not outweigh the costs (investment risk).
Drinking is different!
(2022)
Locus of control (LOC) measures how much an individual believes in the causal relationship between her own actions and her life’s outcomes. While earlier literature has shown 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 very informative German panel data, we extend and generalize previous findings and find a significant positive association between having an internal LOC and the probability of occasional and regular drinking for men and women. An increase in an individual’s LOC by one standard deviation increases the probability of occasional or regular drinking on average by 3.4% for men and 6.9% for women. Using a decomposition method, we show that roughly a quarter of this association can be explained by differences in the social activities between internal and external individuals.
The effects of energy price increases are heterogeneous between households and firms. Financially constrained poorer households, who spend a larger relative share of their income on energy, are particularly affected. In this analysis, we examine the macroeconomic and welfare effects of energy price shocks in the presence of credit-constrained households that have subsistence-level energy demand. Within a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model calibrated for the German economy, we compare the performance of different policy measures (transfers and energy subsidies) and different financing schemes (income tax vs. debt). Our results show that credit-constrained households prefer debt over tax financing regardless of the compensation measure due to their difficulty to smooth consumption. On the contrary, rich households tend to prefer tax-financed measures as they increase the labor supply of poor households. From an aggregate perspective, tax-financed measures targeting firms effectively cushion aggregate output losses.
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.
Essays in public economics
(2023)
This cumulative dissertation uses economic theory and micro-econometric tools and evaluation methods to analyse public policies and their impact on welfare and individual behaviour. In particular, it focuses on policies in two distinct areas that represent fundamental societal challenges in the 21st century: the ageing of society and life in densely-populated urban agglomerations. Together, these areas shape important financial decisions in a person's life, impact welfare, and are driving forces behind many of the challenges in today's societies. The five self-contained research chapters of this thesis analyse the forward looking effects of pension reforms, affordable housing policies as well as a public transport subsidy and its effect on air pollution.
Self-efficacy reflects the self-belief that one can persistently perform difficult and novel tasks while coping with adversity. As such beliefs reflect how individuals behave, think, and act, they are key for successful entrepreneurial activities. While existing literature mainly analyzes the influence of the task-related construct of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, we take a different perspective and investigate, based on a representative sample of 1,405 German business founders, how the personality characteristic of generalized self-efficacy influences start-up performance as measured by a broad set of business outcomes up to 19 months after business creation. Outcomes include start-up survival and entrepreneurial income, as well as growth-oriented outcomes such as job creation and innovation. We find statistically significant and economically important positive effects of high scores of self-efficacy on start-up survival and entrepreneurial income, which become even stronger when focusing on the growth-oriented outcome of innovation. Furthermore, we observe that generalized self-efficacy is similarly distributed between female and male business founders, with effects being partly stronger for female entrepreneurs. Our findings are important for policy instruments that are meant to support firm growth by facilitating the design of more target-oriented offers for training, coaching, and entrepreneurial incubators.
Economic agents often irrationally base their decision-making on irrelevant information. This research analyzes whether men and women react to futile information about past outcomes. For this purpose, we run a laboratory experiment (Study 1) and use field data (Study 2). In both studies, the behavior of men is consistent with falsely assumed negative autocorrelation, often referred to as gambler’s fallacy Women’s behavior aligns with falsely assumed positive autocorrelation, a notion of the hot hand fallacy. On the aggregate, the two fallacies cancel out. Even when individuals are, on average, rational, the biases in the decision-making of subgroups might cause inefficient outcomes. In a mediation analysis, we find that a) the agents stated perceived probabilities of future outcomes are not blurred by irrelevant information and b) about 40 % of the observed biases are driven by differences in the perceived attractiveness of available choices caused by the irrelevant information.
Divergent thinking is the ability to produce numerous and diverse responses to questions or tasks, and it is used as a predictor of creative achievement. It plays a significant role in the business organization’s innovation process and the recognition of new business opportunities. Drawing upon the cumulative process model of creativity in entrepreneurship, we hypothesize that divergent thinking has a lasting effect on post-launch entrepreneurial outcomes related to innovation and growth, but that this relation might not always be linear. Additionally, we hypothesize that domain-specific experience has a moderating role in this relation. We test our hypotheses based on a representative longitudinal sample of 457 German business founders, which we observe up until 40 months after start-up. We find strong relative effects for innovation and growth outcomes. For survival we find conclusive evidence for non-linearities in the effects of divergent thinking. Additionally, we show that such effects are moderated by the type of domain-specific experience that entrepreneurs gathered pre-launch, as it shapes the individual’s ideational abilities to fit into more sophisticated strategies regarding entrepreneurial creative achievement. Our findings have relevant policy implications in characterizing and identifying business start-ups with growth and innovation potential, allowing a more efficient allocation of public and private funds.
We analyze the impact of women’s managerial representation on the gender pay gap among employees on the establishment level using German Linked-Employer-Employee-Data from the years 2004 to 2018. For identification of a causal effect we employ a panel model with establishment fixed effects and industry-specific time dummies. Our results show that a higher share of women in management significantly reduces the gender pay gap within the firm. An increase in the share of women in first-level management e.g. from zero to above 33 percent decreases the adjusted gender pay gap from a baseline of 15 percent by 1.2 percentage points, i.e. to roughly 14 percent. The effect is stronger for women in second-level than first-level management, indicating that women managers with closer interactions with their subordinates have a higher impact on the gender pay gap than women on higher management levels. The results are similar for East and West Germany, despite the lower gender pay gap and more gender egalitarian social norms in East Germany. From a policy perspective, we conclude that increasing the number of women in management positions has the potential to reduce the gender pay gap to a limited extent. However, further policy measures will be needed in order to fully close the gender gap in pay.
