Publications

This paper examines the decision-making process of students from an economic perspective to understand the determinants of an individual’s willingness to provide effort. Our theoretical model predicts that ability and job market prospects are positive determinants. Analyzing a novel dataset on thousands of German students, however, we instead find that ability has a significantly negative effect on effort. It seems that the marginal gain of increasing effort in terms of higher expected income after studying is lower for high-ability students compared to low-ability students. In regard to the second determinant, the evidence rejects a similar argument, according to which great job market prospects may impair student effort. Applying an instrumental variable approach based on official unemployment data on regional labor markets, we can confirm our prediction on the positive role of perceived employment prospects in actual student behavior.

The choice between safe and risky assets represents behavior towards risk: more risk‐averse investors buy more safe assets. We develop and test a general model that applies this intuition to the time allocation between risky effort and risk‐free leisure under linear incentives. When risk increases with effort, risk‐averse agents choose less effort, but when risk is independent of effort, effort choice is unaffected by risk preferences. In many incentive contracts, income risk is multiplicative with, rather than additive to effort, sales commissions being one example. In such cases, lower effort by the risk‐averse is a hitherto undocumented behavior towards risk.

Sowohl im privaten Umfeld als auch im schulischen Bereich gewinnen Erklärvideos zunehmend an Bedeutung. Empirische Befunde belegen positive Effekte von Erklärvideos für kognitive (Wissenszuwachs) sowie für nicht-kognitive Faktoren (z.B. Motivation, Aufmerksamkeit). Dies gilt sowohl für die Rezeption als auch die Produktion von Videoerklärungen. Darüber hinaus befassen sich empirische Studien zunehmend mit der Analyse der Wirkung verschiedener Gestaltungselemente von Erklärvideos (z.B. Interaktivität, Eigenschaften der erklärenden Person). Der Beitrag verfolgt das Ziel, vorliegende empirische Befunde zu verschiedenen Gestaltungselementen zu systematisieren. Zu diesem Zweck wurden 24 Studien gesichtet, die sich mit der Wirkung einzelner Gestaltungselemente befassen. Auf Basis der Befunde werden Gestaltungsempfehlungen für Erklärvideos ausgesprochen. Es zeigt sich, dass insbesondere der Einsatz interaktiver Elemente bedeutsam für den Lernerfolg ist. Zudem wirken sich die gewählte Perspektive (d.h. die Entscheidung, ob das Video aus der Sicht des Erklärenden oder der Person, die das Modell beobachtet, gezeigt wird) sowie das Design (z.B. Ästhetik) signifikant auf den Lernerfolg aus. Mit Blick auf die erklärende Person scheint lediglich das Alter bedeutsam zu sein – nicht jedoch das Geschlecht oder deren Sichtbarkeit im Erklärvideo.

Questionnaires eliciting personality traits and other characteristics of a person are important tools for many experimental economists. While a lot is known about how to run experiments and about how to construct and run field surveys, much less is known about how to administer such surveys in a post-experimental context. A short survey among experimental economists documents substantial heterogeneity in the procedures used, and in expectations about the effects of procedural details. I run an experiment on five aspects that are specific to the laboratory context. I find that (i) paying participants as soon as they finish the questionnaire yields a lower answer quality than waiting for all or an intermediate procedure; (ii) having participants enter their names for receipt preparation does not reduce answer quality (and does not increase the social desirability of answers); (iii) a higher overall payment increases answer quality, while (iv) framing the fixed part of participants’ payment as being “for completing the questionnaire” as well as (v) progress feedback do not affect answer quality.

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.

This paper studies the extent to which working couples can insure one another against cyclical fluctuations in the labor market and examines the implications of joint household decision-making for cyclical fluctuations in the unemployment rate. For this purpose, I provide a dynamic life-cycle model of households that make joint savings and job search decisions in the presence of aggregate shocks. I show that two key mechanisms are at play. The first is the added-worker effect, which leads to counter-cyclical search intensity because workers increase search intensity when their spouse becomes unemployed. The second is the comparative advantage effect, according to which couples' job search efforts are coordinated based on the relative returns to search of each spouse. I estimate the model using data from the US Current Population Survey, and find that joint household decision-making contributes to the counter-cyclicality of women’s unemployment rate, but not for men. Moreover, joint household decision-making lowers the welfare costs of cyclicality.

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.

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.

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.

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.