Publications

In response to the growing burden of obesity, public primary prevention programs against obesity have been widely recommended. Several studies estimated the cost effectiveness of diabetes prevention trials for different countries. Nevertheless, it is still controversial if prevention conducted in more real-world settings and among people with increased risk but not yet exhibiting Increased Glucose Tolerance can be a cost-saving strategy to cope with the obesity epidemic. We examine this question in a simulation model based on the results of the M.O.B.I.L.I.S program, a German lifestyle intervention to reduce obesity, which is directed on the high-risk group of people who are already obese. The contribution of this paper is the use of 4-year follow-up data on the intervention group and a comparison with a control group formed by SOEP respondents as inputs in a Markov model of the long-term cost savings through this intervention due to the prevention of type-2 diabetes. We show that from the point of view of a health insurer, these programs can pay for themselves.

Online education options have proliferated in recent years, with significant growth occurring at statesponsored virtual schools. However, there is no prior credible evidence on the quality of virtual courses compared to in-person courses in U.S. secondary education. We compare the performance of students who took core courses in algebra and English at their traditional public high school to the performance of students who took the same courses through the Florida Virtual School, the largest state virtual school in the U.S. We find that FLVS students are positively selected in terms of prior achievement and demographics, but perform about the same or somewhat better on state tests once their pre-high-school characteristics are taken into account. We find little evidence of treatment effect heterogeneity across a variety of student subgroups, and no consistent evidence of negative impacts for any subgroups. Differences in spending between the sectors suggest the possibility of a productivity advantage for FLVS.

We study partisan favoritism in the allocation of intergovernmental transfers. Our dataset combines local council election data with fiscal data on grant allocations in the German state of Hesse. Our identification strategy is a regression discontinuity design that relies on a perturbation procedure to classify close elections. We find that left-wing state governments favored aligned municipalities while right-wing state governments favored unaligned ones. One plausible explanation for this difference in the behavior of left- and right-wing governments is that only few local councils had absolute right-wing majorities during the tenure of the right-wing state governments. Therefore, right-wing state governments had to use transfers to “buy off” unaligned municipalities, while left-wing state governments could use transfers to enhance their electoral prospects.

This paper studies the effect of demographic change on the technology distribution of an economy and on aggregate productivity growth. In the quantitative dynamic model, firms decide on employment and the technology they use subject to an aging workforce. Firms with a higher share of elderly workers update their technology less often and prefer older technologies than firms with a younger workforce. The shorter expected worklife of elderly workers makes firms reluctant to train them for new technologies. I calibrate the model for the German economy and simulate the projected demographic change. The results indicate that labor force aging reduces the realized annual productivity growth rate by 0.28 percentage points between 2010–2025.

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dc.contributor.author: Gurtner, Jean-Luc

This paper proposes to relate conditional quantiles of stationary macroeconomic time series to the different phases of the business cycle. Based on this idea, I introduce a Bayesian Quantile Structural Vector Autoregressive framework for the analysis of the effects of uncertainty on the US real economy. For this purpose, I define a novel representation of the multivariate Laplace distribution that allows for the joint treatment of multiple equation regression quantiles. I find significant evidence for asymmetric effects of uncertainty over the US business cycle. The strongest negative effects are revealed during recession periods. During boom phases uncertainty shocks improve the soundness of the economy. Moreover, the phase of the financial sector matters when the real economy is at recession but not if the economy is at boom. When the financial system is in a bad state, an uncertainty shock leads to a deeper recession than in times when the financial system is in a good state.