Latest Publications
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(2005): Quantal Response Equilibrium am Beispiel der strategischen Interaktion zwischen Manager und Prüfer : Theorie und experimentelle Evidenz Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft : ZfB. 2005, 75(4), pp. 325-355. ISSN 0044-2372. eISSN 1861-8928
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(2005): Human Altruism : Proximate Patterns and Evolutionary Origins Analyse & Kritik. 2005, 27(1), pp. 6-47. ISSN 0171-5860. eISSN 2365-9858. Available under: doi: 10.1515/auk-2005-0101
Are people selfish or altruistic? Throughout history this question has been answered on the basis of much introspection and little evidence. It has been at the heart of many controversial debates in politics, science, and philosophy. Some of the most fundamental questions concerning our evolutionary origins, our social relations, and the organization of society are centered around issues of altruism and selfishness. Experimental evidence indicates that human altruism is a powerful force and unique in the animal world. However, there is much individual heterogeneity and the interaction between altruists and selfish individuals is key for understanding the evolutionary dynamics as well as the proximate patterns of human cooperation. Depending on the environment, a minority of altruists can force a majority of selfish individuals to cooperate or, conversely, a few egoists can induce a large number of altruists to defect. Current gene-based evolutionary theories cannot explain important patterns of human altruism pointing towards the need for theories of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution.
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(2005): Übergangsprozesse von Absolventen nichtbetrieblicher Ausbildungsgänge unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Aufnahme einer Zweitausbildung Bildungsforschung. 2005, 2(2). eISSN 1860-8213
Dem Übergang nach dem Berufsabschluss kommt eine für den weiteren Erwerbsverlauf weichenstellende Funktion zu. In diesem Beitrag wird der Frage nachgegangen, welche Übergangsmuster außerbetrieblich bzw. vollzeitschulisch ausgebildete Berliner Absolventen im ersten halben Jahr nach dem Abschluss aufweisen. Von besonderem Interesse ist dabei die Frage nach dem Ausmaß des Besuchs weiterer Ausbildungsgänge als einem empirisch zu beobachtenden Ausdruck verlaufsbezogener Ausdifferenzierungen der Übergangsprozesse von Berufsabsolventen.
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Evaluationsansätze auf Basis von Matchingverfahren werden heute weitgehend als superiores Instrument zur Bewertung der Wirksamkeit der Förderung beruflicher Weiterbildung angesehen. Die vorliegende Arbeit gibt zu bedenken, dass solche Verfahren ungenaue Schätzergebnissen generieren, wenn eine Selektionsverzerrung hinsichtlich zeitinkonsistenter, unbeobachtbarer Variablen vorliegt.
Zu diesem Zweck wird in einer Hazardraten-Analyse der Einfluss von Motivation, die mit Hilfe eines Leistungsmotivationstests gemessen worden ist, auf die Dauer der Arbeitslosigkeit untersucht. Es kann ein kausaler Zusammenhang festgestellt werden und daher abgeleitet werden, dass die ansonst unbeobachtbare Variable Motivation, kausal auf die Partizipationswahrscheinlichkeit wirkt und somit zu einer Selektionsverzerrung beitragen kann. Daraus ergibt sich in matchingbasierten Evaluationsstudien ein Spielraum für inkonsistente Schätzergebnisse. -
The paper contributes to the literature on ability grouping in schools by taking student incentives into account. Education provides both a signal on unobservable ability and improves productivity after education. Sorting sets better incentives in primary education and allows for improved peer group effects in secondary education. Comprehensive education induces higher effort for signalling purposes. Under reasonable circumstances, optimal education policy allows for some imperfection in the sorting process. Taking social heterogeneity into account, policy makers can influence the sorting process by changing support in primary or secondary education.
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(2005): Why does consumption fall at retirement? : evidence from Germany Economics Letters. 2005, 89(3), pp. 300-305. ISSN 0165-1765. eISSN 1873-7374. Available under: doi: 10.1016/j.econlet.2005.06.014
Analyzing the consumption behavior over retirement in Germany, this paper finds a negative correlation between income replacement and the increase in home-production-related activities. This might reconcile the observed drop in consumption at retirement with the predictions of the standard life cycle model. However, since individuals with fairly stable income over retirement also increase home production, this increase cannot be entirely attributed to a substitution effect.
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(2005): Default risk sharing between banks and markets : the contribution of collateralized debt obligations
This paper contributes to the economics of financial institutions risk management by exploring how loan securitization affects their default risk, their systematic risk, and their stock prices. In a typical CDO transaction a bank retains through a first loss piece a very high proportion of the default losses, and transfers only the extreme losses to other market participants. The size of the first loss piece is largely driven by the average default probability of the securitized assets. If the bank sells loans in a true sale transaction, it may use the proceeds to expand its loan business, thereby affecting systematic risk. For a sample of European CDO issues, we find an increase of the banks betas, but no significant stock price effect around the announcement of a CDO issue.
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Mit einer fundierten und umfassenden Darstellung des internationalen Marketing-Managements, wendet sich dieses Buch sowohl an Studierende als auch an Praktiker. Es behandelt ausführlich die internationalen Aspekte der Marketing-Planung, des Marketing-Controlling und der Marketing-Organisation sowie das Human Resources Management. Auch die Marktforschung auf internationalen Märkten wird berücksichtigt. Gestützt werden die Ausführungen durch aktuelle Daten zu den Rahmenbedingungen auf internationalen Märkten.
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This paper surveys recent evidence suggesting that market-oriented institutions and policies are strongly related to economic growth, focusing on studies using the economic freedom indicator of the Fraser Institute. This index is critically discussed. Also various serious shortcomings of empirical studies using this index are identified. Nevertheless there are strong indications that liberalization, i.e. an increase in the economic freedom index, stimulates economic growth. The paper also reviews studies on the determinants of economic freedom. Political liberalization is often found to enhance economic liberalization, while there is less evidence for causality running in the other direction.
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This paper considers training, mobility decisions and wages together to test for the specificity of human capital contained in continuing training courses. We empirically analyse the relationship between training, mobility and wages in two ways. First, we examine the correlation between training and mobility. In a second step, we consider wage effects of mobility taking training participation into account. First, we find that training participation is negatively correlated with the mobility decision and that training participation decreases the probability of individuals to change the job. Second, we find that wages are lower for job changers for the group of training participants, so wages decrease when trained individuals are mobile. Finally, training participation negatively affects the individuals' subjective valuation of the quality of their last job change. Taken together, these results suggest that there is some specific human capital, which is incorporated into training and lost when moving between jobs.
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We present a necessary and sufficient condition on an agent s utility function for a simple mean preserving spread in an independent background risk to increase the agent s risk aversion (incremental risk vulnerability). Gollier and Pratt (1996) have shown that declining and convex risk aversion as well as standard risk aversion are sufficient for risk vulnerability. We show that these conditions are also sufficient for incremental risk vulnerability. In addition, we present sufficient conditions for a restricted set of stochastic increases in an independent background risk to increase risk aversion.
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(2005): The Effects of Employment on Time-to-Degree in Higher Education: Does the type of Employment matter?
In this paper I scrutinize the impact of employment on time-to-degree in Higher Education. In contrast to the previous literature, I look at different types of working while being enrolled at university. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), I find that full-time employment and part-time employment significantly decreases the probability of graduating from university at any point of enrollment.
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By combining expansionary open market operations with sales of foreign exchange, the central bank can expand the monetary base without depreciating the exchange rate. Thus, if there is a monetary political business cycle, sales of foreign exchange are especially likely before elections. Our panel data analysis for up to 158 countries in 1975-2001 supports this hypothesis. Foreign exchange reserves relative to trend GDP depend negatively on the pre-election index regardless of the exchange rate system. The relationship is significant and robust irrespective of the type of electoral variable, the choice of control variables and the estimation technique.
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dc.contributor.editor: Ronning, Gerd; Gottschalk, Sandra; Wagner, Joachim
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dc.contributor.author: Deaves, Richard; Lüders, Erik; Luo, Guo Ying
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The home market effect (HME) is a distinguishing feature of the new theory of international trade, but it is uncertain whether this effect survives if one moves beyond the simplifying setup with only two countries. We present a three-country version of the seminal model by Krugman (1980) and analyse under which circumstances the HME is present once third country effects are taken into account. We show that an exogenous increase in the home country s expenditure level on the modern good will unambiguously lead to an over-proportional output reaction. If production in the foreign world shifts from a more remote to a better accessible economy, industry location in the home country is negatively affected. Thus, if the expenditure increase is small relative to the foreign expenditure shifting, an under-proportional output reaction in the home country can result. In a more extreme case the industry share of the home country can even decrease. This phenomenon is labelled the home market shadow .
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(2005): The economics of strong reciprocity GINTIS, Herbert, ed. and others. Moral sentiments and material interests : the foundations of cooperation in economic life. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005, pp. 151-192. MIT Press series on economic learning and social evolution. 6. ISBN 0-262-07252-1
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dc.contributor.author: Fehr, Ernst
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(2005): Pricing American-Style Options By Simulation Financial Markets and Portfolio Management. 2005, 19(1), pp. 109-116. ISSN 1555-4961. eISSN 1555-497X. Available under: doi: 10.1007/s11408-005-2300-0
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In the absence of a perfect risk adjustment scheme, reimbursing health insurers' costs can reduce risk selection in community-rated health insurance markets. In this paper, we develop a model in which insurers determine the cost efficiency of health care and have incentives for risk selection. We derive the optimal cost reimbursement function which balances the incentives for cost efficiency and risk selection. For health cost data from a Swiss health insurer, we find that an optimal cost reimbursement scheme should reimburse costs only up to a limit.
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A high degree of cyclical synchronization between central and east European countries (CEECs) and the euro area is generally seen as a pre-requisite for successful EMU enlargement. This paper investigates comovements between CEECs and the euro area. We first establish stylized facts on economic linkages using dynamic correlation and cohesion measures. By means of a large-scale dynamic factor model, we then identify the main structural common euro-area shocks and investigate their transmission to the CEECs in comparison to the current EMU members. We finally carry out a counterfactual experiment which allows us to assess costs and benefits of an accession to EMU for individual CEECs in terms of economic volatilities and implications of an enlargement for synchronization. Overall, our results are mixed. Dynamic business cycle and inflation correlations between CEECs and the euro area are lower on average than between individual EMU members and the euro area, but they are higher than for some small peripheral EMU countries. This is confirmed by our other measure, variance shares of output and inflation explained by common euro-area factors. The proliferation of euro-area shocks to the CEECs does not differ significantly from the propagation to EMU countries in most cases. Based on our counterfactual experiment, we do not find significant stabilizing or destabilizing effects through a common monetary policy and fixed exchange rates. We also find that business cycle synchronization between CEECs and between most CEECs and the euro area will increase. There seems to be considerable heterogeneity across CEECs implying that for some countries, accession to EMU would be more costly than for others. According to our analysis and based on our measures, Poland, Slovenia, Hungary and Estonia are more suitable EMU candidates than other countries.