Publications

Am 2. Juli 2018 hat der Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der Entwicklung im Gesundheitswesen sein aktuelles Gutachten „Bedarfsgerechte Steuerung der Gesundheitsversorgung“ an das Bundesgesundheitsministerium übergeben. Die ausgeprägte Trennung von ambulanter und stationärer Versorgung, aber auch zwischen privater und gesetzlicher Krankenversicherung ist typisch für das deutsche System. Die Gutachter empfehlen unter anderem eine bessere Koordinierung der ambulanten und stationären Leistungen, eine monistische Krankenhausfi nanzierung und eine hausarztzentrierte Patientenversorgung. An dem Gutachten wird vor allem kritisiert, dass ihm ein ordnungspolitisches Konzept mit wettbewerblichen Steuerungsstrukturen fehlt.

Individuals are thought to have their own distinctive body odour which reportedly plays an important role in mate choice. In the present study we investigated individual differences in body odours of women and examined whether some women generally smell more attractive than others or whether odour preferences are a matter of individual taste. We then explored whether levels of reproductive hormones explain women's body odour attractiveness, to test the idea that body odour attractiveness may act as a chemosensory marker of reproductive fitness. Fifty-seven men rated body odours of 28 healthy, naturally cycling women of reproductive age. We collected all odours at peak fertility to control for menstrual cycle effects on body odour attractiveness. Women's salivary oestradiol, progesterone, testosterone and cortisol levels were assessed at the time of odour collection to test whether hormone levels explain body odour attractiveness. We found that the men highly agreed on how attractive they found women's body odours. Interestingly, women's body odour attractiveness was predicted by their oestradiol and progesterone levels: the higher a woman's levels of oestradiol and the lower her levels of progesterone, the more attractive her body odour was rated. In showing that women's body odour attractiveness is explained by levels of female reproductive hormones, but not by levels of cortisol or testosterone, we provide evidence that body odour acts as a valid cue to potential fertility.

Sickness-related absence can be viewed as indicator of an employee's health status or work effort. In both cases, absence may affect the employee's career. Evidence from German panel data reveals a significantly negative (positive) link between short-term sickness-related absence and the probability of a subsequent promotion (dismissal). Instrumental variable analyses suggest no causality in this context. We find no evidence of systematic gender differences in the link between absence and subsequent instances of mobility. Throughout our analysis, we give special attention to the role of health. According to our evidence, health appears to play no significant role for individual career advancement.

Using a representative survey of German university students, we confirm that proclaimed support for environment protection policies depends on socio-cultural factors and political ideology. Unlike most related studies for other countries, we find that the environmental policy stance of German partisans does not follow the left-right cleavage. Only about 25% of the social-democratic partisans wholeheartedly support environment protection policies, whereas 50% of the green partisans, who, in Germany, also belong to the political left, do so; and when controlling for socio-cultural influences, social-democratic partisans become undistinguishable from Christian-conservative and market-oriented partisans. Focusing on behavioral influences, we find that some of the respondents' psychological traits are not filtered through their political ideology but directly influence their proclaimed attitudes towards environment protection policies. We identify as important behavioral determinants the locus of control and psychological traits that capture the respondents' susceptibility to making use of expressive rhetoric.

Women remain underrepresented in politics and it remains unclear how this might change. In this paper, we investigate whether female council candidates receive more preferential votes when a female mayor has been recently elected into office. We hand collect data for 109,017 candidates in four open-list local council elections (2001-2016) in all 426 municipalities of a German state. Based on RDD estimations for close mixed-gender races, we show that female council candidates advance more from their initial list rank when the mayor is female. This effect spreads to neighboring municipalities and leads to a rising share of female council members.

This paper studies discounted stochastic games with perfect or imperfect public monitoring and the opportunity to conduct voluntary monetary transfers and possibly burn money. This generalization of repeated games with transfers is ideally suited to study relational contracting in applications with long-term investments and also allows to study collusive industry dynamics. We show that for all discount factors every perfect public equilibrium payoff can be implemented with a class of simple equilibria that have a stationary structure on the equilibrium path and optimal penal codes with a stick-and-carrot structure. We develop an algorithm for perfect monitoring to compute the set of equilibrium payoffs and find simple equilibria that implement these payoffs.

Cross-sections of financial returns are characterized by common underlying factors and exhibit fat tails that may be captured by -stable distributions. This paper focuses on estimating factor models with independent latent factors and idiosyncratic noises featuring a multivariate -stable distribution constant over time (static factor models) or a time-varying conditional multivariate -stable distribution (GARCH factor models). Although the simulation of such a distribution is straightforward, the estimation of its parameters encounters difficulties. These difficulties are overcome in this paper by implementing the indirect inference estimation method with the multivariate Student’s as the auxiliary distribution.

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dc.contributor.author: Kristensen, Dennis; Renault, Eric; Veredas, David

In Europe’s reformed education system, universities may be forced by law to consider undergraduate grade point average (UGPA) as the primary admission criterion in the selection of graduate students. In this article, we investigate whether UGPA predicts graduate student performance in order to discuss its usefulness as an admission criterion. In our theoretical framework, we show that undergraduate students may choose slower study progress in favour of receiving higher grades and conclude that UGPA is a relatively good (weak) predictor for graduate grade point average (study progress). Having data from a cohort of students whose selection was in clear conflict with the legal requirement, we empirically confirm our theoretical predictions by exploiting a unique opportunity for assessing educational policies. Discussion of our findings leads to some important conclusions concerning the Bologna reforms and the lawmakers’ idea of giving some independence to universities, but not too much of it.

This article examines how decision making under uncertainty is affected by the presence of a linearly dependent background risk, for individuals with HARA utility. A linearly dependent background risk is a background risk that increases linearly in the chosen tradable outcome. In order to do this, we construct a parametric class of background risks that we label as risk‐taking‐neutral (RTN). These background risks have the property that they will not alter the decision made with respect to the market risk. As such, these RTN background risks provide a benchmark. In many situations, a background risk that is faced by an investor can be compared to one from the RTN class in order to predict qualitative changes in the investor's choice decision. As this benchmark is easily available, it is convenient to use to predict these changes.

Der Beitrag untersucht stressbegünstigende bzw. -mindernde Bedingungskonstellationen während des berufsschulischen Unterrichts auf Basis des transaktionalen Stressmodells. Dementsprechend interessiert vor allem, inwieweit Einschätzungen eigener Bewältigungsfähigkeiten seitens der Schüler/innen die Beziehung zwischen beobachtbaren Unterrichtsanforderungen und psychischen wie auch physischen Stressreaktionen moderieren. Der Analyse liegen Daten von 53 angehenden Industriekaufleuten zugrunde, welche über drei Wochen im Fach „Betriebswirtschaftliche Geschäftsprozesse“ untersucht wurden. Die Unterrichtsstunden wurden videografiert und von trainierten Beobachtern hinsichtlich situativer Anforderungen kodiert. Zudem bewerteten die Lernenden im zehnminütigen Rhythmus ihre situationsspezifischen Bewältigungsfähigkeiten wie auch ihre Stressempfindungen. Kardiovaskuläre Parameter wurden kontinuierlich über Brustgurte gemessen. Situationsübergreifende Einschätzungen kontextrelevanter Bewältigungsfähigkeiten (schulische Selbstwirksamkeitserwartungen) wurden im Vorfeld der Videoaufzeichnungen mittels Fragebögen erfasst. Als Kontrollvariablen wurden zudem objektivierbare individuelle Bewältigungsressourcen (domänenspezifisches Fachwissen) sowie zeitstabile Personenmerkmale test- bzw. fragebogengestützt erhoben. Für die statistischen Auswertungen wurden die Haupteffekte schulischer Selbstwirksamkeitserwartungen (SWK), situativer Bewältigungsfähigkeiten (BF) und situativer Unterrichtsanforderungen (UA) sowie die Interaktionseffekte zwischen Ressourcenbewertungen und Unterrichtsanforderungen auf das Stresserleben und die Herzrate mehrebenenanalytisch modelliert. Entsprechend des transaktionalen Paradigmas zeigen sich differenzielle Beziehungen zwischen UA und psychischen Stressreaktionen in Abhängigkeit individueller Ressourceneinschätzungen, welche unter Kontrolle weiterer stressrelevanter Prädiktoren für die SWK signifikant ausfallen. Lernende mit unterdurchschnittlichen SWK verzeichnen demnach bei wachsenden UA den größten Anstieg des Stresserlebens. Für die situativen BF zeichnet sich ein ähnliches, wenngleich nicht signifikantes Muster ab. Entsprechend des Korrespondenzerfordernisses von Ressourceneinschätzungen und Zielkategorien liefern aber situative BF größere eigenständige Beiträge zur Erklärung situativ variierender Stressempfindungen als die situationsübergreifende schulische SWK. Dient als Zielvariable jedoch der physische Stressindikator (Herzrate), der erwartungskonform schwach mit dem psychischen Indikator kovariiert, lassen sich diese Ergebnisse nicht replizieren. Forschungs- und unterrichtspraktische Implikationen der Befunde werden diskutiert.

In our recent study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B [1], we investigated the effects of major histocompatibility complex (MHC; or human leucocyte antigen system, HLA in humans) on men’s preferences for women’s body odours. Using rigorous methods, we found no evidence that men find body odours of HLA-dissimilar women more attractive than odours of HLAsimilar women. In his comment, Wedekind [2] claims that our conclusions were premature, because he found (using our data) a stronger negative relationship between pleasantness and intensity for HLA-dissimilar odours than for similar ones. Although this is an interesting finding, it cannot be considered as a support for HLA-related mate preferences.....

In den Koalitionsverhandlungen mit der Union zur Bildung einer neuen Bundesregierung hat sich die SPD eine Beendigung der „Zwei-Klassen-Medizin“ zum Ziel gesetzt, die in Deutschland durch das Nebeneinander der Gesetzlichen (GKV) und der Privaten Krankenversicherung (PKV) begründet ist. Dazu werden in diesem Beitrag drei Fragen behandelt:
1. Welche Phänomene kennzeichnen die kritisierte „Zwei-Klassen-Medizin“ und wie sind diese normativ, d. h. nach Effizienz- und Gerechtigkeitsmaßstäben, zu beurteilen?
2. Ist es möglich und sinnvoll, diese Phänomene durch gesetzgeberische Maßnahmen zu bekämpfen? Braucht man dazu die „Bürgerversicherung“?
3. Gibt es weitere negative Aspekte des Nebeneinanders von GKV und PKV, die durch Reformen beseitigt werden könnten?
Vor der Beantwortung dieser Fragen wird eine kurze Einordnung der Besonderheiten des deutschen Gesundheitssystems im internationalen Vergleich gegeben.

This article analyzes whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after coming to power in 1933. Using newly-collected data on public employment from the German censuses in 1925, 1933, and 1939 and addressing the potential endogeneity of the NSDAP vote share in 1933 by way of an instrumental variables strategy based on a similar party in Imperial Germany, I find that cities with higher NSDAP vote shares experienced a relative increase in public employment: for every additional percentage point in the vote share, the number of public employment jobs increased by around 2.5 percent.

We investigate a crucial event for job satisfaction: changing one's workplace. For representative German panel data, we show that the reason why the previous employment ended is strongly linked to satisfaction with the new job. Workers initiating a change of employer experience extraordinarily high job satisfaction, though in the short term only. To investigate causality, we exploit the event of plant closure as an exogenous trigger of job switching. In this case, we find no significantly positive effect of job changes on job satisfaction. Our findings complement research on workers’ well‐being and concern labor market policies and human resource management.

We study how early child care (ECC) affects children's development in a marginal treatment effect framework that allows for rich forms of observed and unobserved effect heterogeneity. Exploiting a reform in Germany that induced school districts to expand ECC at different points in time, we find strong but diverging effects on children's motor and socio-emotional skills. Children who were most likely to attend ECC benefit in terms of their motor skill development. Children who were least likely to attend ECC gain in terms of their socio-emotional skill development, especially boys and children from disadvantaged families, such as those with low education or migration backgrounds. Simulating expansions of ECC, we find that a moderate expansion fosters motor skills for all children and language skills for boys and immigrant children. A progressive expansion of ECC improves all children's socio-emotional development but neither their motor skills nor their language skills.