Publikationen

People with little motivation to participate in surveys can affect empirical research when they abstain from but also when they actually participate in interviews. This paper investigates whether happiness data are susceptible to such measurement bias. Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) reveals a strong relationship between self-reported life satisfaction and several indicators of respondent motivation, such as subsequent panel attrition. One explanation for this finding is that respondents on the margin of participation truly have lower life satisfaction. Alternatively, their low motivation may be the cause for an underreporting of life satisfaction. To learn more about this, an instrumental variable approach identifies future panel quitters with low motivation by using the occurrence of interviewer attrition in the year after the interview. The results of this analysis suggest that self-reported life satisfaction declines because of low respondent motivation. A discussion of the implications for analyses of happiness data underscores the potential importance of respondent motivation regardless of the explanation for why interviewees with low motivation report lower life satisfaction.

We build a life‐cycle model of housing decisions under divorce risk that predicts that the recent increase in divorce rates leads to reduced homeownership rates. The risk of a divorce triggers a precautionary‐savings motive. However, this motive is weaker when individuals can invest in owner‐occupied homes because homeowners' higher savings partially substitute for precautionary savings. When young, the larger asset accumulation due to divorce‐risk‐induced precautionary savings enables households to buy homes earlier, whereas the presence of transaction costs leads to reduced homeownership for middle‐aged and older households when divorce risk goes up.

We analyze whether the audit firm type and abnormal audit fees are associated with the market valuation of banks' fair‐value assets. Our results indicate that different auditor types use different strategies when auditing fair values. First, we show that Big 4 auditors restrict the Level 3 valuations to the most illiquid assets. Thus, those banks audited by a Big 4 auditor have a lower proportion of Level 3 assets. Second, the market discount on the Level 3 assets is higher for the banks audited by a Big 4 auditor than for those audited by a non‐Big 4 auditor. Third, the discount on the Level 3 portfolios of banks with non‐Big 4 auditors is higher if the unexpected audit fees are high. Thus, non‐Big 4 auditors seem to allow more high‐uncertainty valuations but charge a risk premium. We find similar effects for industry‐specialist auditors.

Asymmetric volatility concerns the relation of returns to future expected volatility. Much is known from option prices about the marginal risk-neutral distributions (RNDs) of S&P 500 returns and of relative changes in future expected volatility (VIX). While the bivariate RND cannot be inferred from the marginals, we propose a novel identification based on long-dated index options. We estimate the risk-neutral asymmetric volatility implied correlation (AVIC) and find it to be significantly lower than its realized counterpart. We interpret the economics of the asymmetric volatility correlation risk premium and use AVIC to predict returns, volatility, and risk-neutral quantities.

Voting advice applications (VAAs) are voter information tools that millions of individuals have used in recent elections throughout the world. However, little is known about how they affect political behavior. Until now, observational studies of VAA have produced inconclusive results. Here we present the results from a randomized field experiment in Switzerland that estimates the causal effects of VAA use on voters’ vote intentions. Our results suggest that usage of the Swiss VAA smartvote strengthened the vote intention for the most preferred party and also increased the number of parties considered as potential vote options. These results imply that VAAs can influence voting behavior and that they can play an important role in electoral politics.

We evaluate the relative importance of aggregate labor productivity versus income taxes and social contributions for tax compliance in an economy with a large degree of informality. Empirical evidence points out that tax evasion in Europe happens through partially concealing wages and profits in formally registered enterprises. To this end, we build a model in which employer-employee pairs of heterogeneous productive capacities make joint decisions on the degree of tax evasion. The quantitative model is used to analyze the case of Bulgaria which has the largest informal economy in Europe and underwent a number of important tax reforms over the period 2000–2014, including the introduction of a flat income tax in 2008. The estimation strategy relies on matching the empirical series for the size of the informal economy and other aggregate outcomes for 2000–2014. Our counterfactual experiments show that the most important factor for the changing size of the informal economy is labor productivity, which accounts for more than 75% of the change. The variation in corporate income tax accounts for the rest. We find that the 2008 flat tax reform did not play any visible role in coping with informality.

One concern about direct democracy is that citizens may not be sufficiently competent to decide about complex policies. This may lead to exaggerated conservatism in the voting decision (status quo bias). To investigate how complexity affects individual voting behavior, we develop a novel measure of proposition complexity (using official pre-referendum booklets) and combine it with post-referendum survey data from Switzerland. Using Heckman selection estimations to account for endogenous variation in participation rates, we find that an increase in proposition complexity from the 10th to the 90th percentile would decrease voters' approval by 5.6 ppts, which is often decisive: an additional 12% of the propositions in our sample would be rejected.

We empirically explore the risk relevance of Level 3 fair value estimates. Thereby we focus on banks’ default risk as well as banks’ default costs. Both variables are especially important to banks’ creditors and the regulatory authorities that rely on the information in financial statements. In a fixed-effects panel model, we find an association between banks’ share of Level 3 estimates and higher volatilities as well as lower market values. Both factors add up to much higher default risks in bank-quarters with a larger share of Level 3 estimates. The association remains strong even after controlling for the systematic information risk in Level 3 estimates. Furthermore, we find a strong association between the share of Level 3 estimates and banks’ default costs in transactions with low information risk. Combining the different pieces of evidence, our results show the presence of two underlying estimation errors in Level 3 assets: information risk and overvaluation. Our results point towards the benefits of complementing the information in financial statements with capital market information for bank creditors and bank regulators.

In Anlehnung an Gruhl gehen wir im Beitrag von 3 Resilienzfacetten aus, welche die Fähigkeiten beschreiben, dynamisch Veränderungen gestalten zu können, flexibel auf Erfordernisse reagieren zu können sowie sich angemessen von den Erwartungen anderer abgrenzen zu können, d. h., resistent zu sein. Da kein Instrument zur Erfassung dieser Resilienzfacetten vorliegt, setzt sich der Beitrag das Ziel, ein solches fragebogenbasiertes Instrument vorzustellen und interindividuelle Unterschiede herauszuarbeiten. Zur Bearbeitung der Fragestellung wird auf Daten von 200 Personen zurückgegriffen. In den Ergebnissen ließen sich auf Grundlage des multifaktoriellen Resilienzmodells mittels explorativer und konfirmatorischer Faktorenanalyse die 3 Resilienzfacetten Resistenz, Dynamik und Flexibilität identifizieren, welche mit jeweils 4 Items gemessen werden. Zur Identifikation verschiedener Personengruppen, die sich hinsichtlich ihrer Resilienzfacetten unterscheiden, kam eine latente Klassenanalyse zum Einsatz. Implikationen aus unseren Befunden ergeben sich u. a. für die Resilienzförderung in Lern- und Arbeitskontexten, da hieraus erste Ansatzpunkte einer personen- bzw. organisationsspezifischen Förderung gewonnen werden können.

Die digitale Transformation hat weitreichende Auswirkungen auf Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Davon sind auch der Bildungssektor und damit die Lehrpersonen betroffen. Der vorliegende Beitrag verfolgt das Ziel, ein Rahmenkonzept professioneller Kompetenzen von Lehrpersonen in der kaufmännischen Domäne im Kontext der digitalen Transformation zu entwickeln und dieses anhand von Selbsteinschätzungen empirisch zu prüfen. Das vorgeschlagene Modell orientiert sich dabei am Konzept der professionellen Kompetenz von Baumert und Kunter (2006) und greift zudem Modellelemente von Koehler und Mishra (2009), Blömecke (2003) sowie Carretero et al. (2017) auf. Die zentralen Kompetenzfacetten sind im Einzelnen: Fachwissen, fachdidaktisches sowie pädagogisches Wissen, Beratungs-und Organisationswissen (jeweils unter Bezugnahme auf digitale Instrumente bzw. Medien), instrumentelle Fertigkeiten im Umgang mit digitalen Medien und Einstellungen. Eine Literaturanalyse sowie Interviews mit fünf Schulleitungsteams, fünf Fokusgruppengespräche mit Lehrpersonen und 14 Interviews mit Experten aus dem Bildungssektor in der Deutschschweiz dienten zur Ausdifferenzierung der genannten Facetten anhand von Selbsteinschätzungsfragen. Zur Prüfung der Struktur des Rahmenkonzepts wurden 215 Lehrpersonen an kaufmännischen Schulen der Deutschschweiz befragt. Konfirmatorische Faktorenanalysen zeigen grundsätzlich gute Werte, ebenso Messinvarianzanalysen hinsichtlich Alter, Geschlecht und vorgelagerter Lerngelegenheiten. Alle Konstrukte lassen sich zudem reliabel erfassen. Das entwickelte und validierte Rahmenkonzept schließt eine Forschungslücke, da es einschlägige Modelle und Facetten der professionellen Kompetenz von Lehrpersonen auf Anforderungssituation im Kontext des digitalen Wandels bezieht, neben dem Unterricht die Schulentwicklung berücksichtigt und zudem instrumentelle Fertigkeiten und Einstellungen bzgl. digitaler Medien integriert. Das Rahmenmodell ist auch als normatives Modell zu verstehen, da es sich explizit nicht nur an der heutigen Praxis, sondern vielmehr an Anforderungssituationen orientiert, die in Zukunft für Lehrpersonen in der kaufmännischen Berufsbildung wichtiger werden.

Whether social transfers should be targeted or universal is an unsolved debate particularly relevant for the implementation of social protection schemes in developing countries. While the limited availability of public resources encourages targeting, the difficulty to identify the poor promotes a universal allocation of benefits. To address this question, this study examines the targeting performance of and access to a social welfare scheme for an increasingly vulnerable group – India’s poor older people. The results show that during a time period of social pension reforms, exclusion and inclusion errors were successfully reduced but the exclusion of poor older people continues to be extremely high. Comparing the existing targeting approach to a random allocation, I show that the benefits of targeting are limited. The reforms aimed at increasing the transparency of social pension allocation indeed made the Below Poverty Line ration card the most important determinant of access to social pensions for older people. However, this focus on the ration card promoted by the national government has its own weaknesses. Non-poor older people exploit the unwarranted possession of this ration card and results suggest that after the reforms individuals with direct connections to local government officials are more likely to access social pension benefits. The current targeting approach seems to be beneficial for well-connected older individuals while many poor older people typically lacking these connections lag behind.

We study the general-equilibrium effects of the corporate debt tax shield in an endowment economy with a redistributive tax system that taxes firm profits and household income and redistributes tax revenues in an attempt to harmonize households’ lifetime consumption opportunities. In general equilibrium, the debt tax shield not only affects corporate capital structure and valuation but also causes poorer households to consume more and save less at a younger age. Without the debt tax shield, the same welfare improvements for poorer households are achievable with significantly lower tax rates.

We show that control function estimators (CFEs) of the firm production function, such as Olley–Pakes, may be biased when productivity evolves with a firm‐specific intercept, in which case the correctly specified control function will contain a firm‐specific term, omitted in the standard CFEs. We develop an estimator that is free from this bias by introducing firm fixed effects in the control function. Applying our estimator to the data, we find that it outperforms the existing CFEs in terms of capturing persistent unobserved heterogeneity in firm productivity. Our estimator involves minimal modification to the standard CFE procedures and can be easily implemented using common statistical software.

Humans vary substantially in their willingness to take risks. In a combined sample of over 1 million individuals, we conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general risk tolerance, adventurousness, and risky behaviors in the driving, drinking, smoking, and sexual domains. Across all GWAS, we identified hundreds of associated loci, including 99 loci associated with general risk tolerance. We report evidence of substantial shared genetic influences across risk tolerance and the risky behaviors: 46 of the 99 general risk tolerance loci contain a lead SNP for at least one of our other GWAS, and general risk tolerance is genetically correlated ([Formula: see text]  ~ 0.25 to 0.50) with a range of risky behaviors. Bioinformatics analyses imply that genes near SNPs associated with general risk tolerance are highly expressed in brain tissues and point to a role for glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission. We found no evidence of enrichment for genes previously hypothesized to relate to risk tolerance.

In many markets supply contracts include a series of small, regular payments made by consumers and a single, large bonus that consumers receive at some point during the contractual period. But, if for instance its production costs exceed its value to consumers, such a bonus creates inefficiencies. We offer a novel explanation for the frequent occurrence of bonus contracts, which builds on a model of attentional focusing. Our main result identifies market conditions under which bonus contracts should be observed: while a monopolist pays a bonus to consumers—if at all—only for low-value goods, firms standing in competition always—i.e., independent of the consumers’ valuation—offer bonus contracts. Thus, competition does not eliminate but rather exacerbates inefficiencies arising from contracting with focused agents. Common contract schemes in markets for electricity, telephony, and bank accounts are consistent with our model, but cannot be reconciled with alternative approaches such as models on consumption smoothing, (quasi-)hyperbolic discounting, or switching costs.