In this paper I investigate the causal returns to education for different educational groups in Germany by employing a new method by Klein and Vella (2010) that bases identification on the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. Compared to IV methods, key advantages of this approach are...

This paper studies how organizational design affects moral outcomes. Subjects face the decision to either kill mice for money or to save mice. We compare a Baseline treatment where subjects are fully pivotal to a Diffused-Pivotality treatment where subjects simultaneously choose in groups of...

The paper investigates the role of social norms as a determinant of individual attitudes by analyzing risk proclivity reported by immigrants and natives in a unique representative German survey. We employ factor analysis to construct measures of immigrants' ethnic persistence and assimilation....

This paper applies the concept of damage coefficients introduced in Houba and Kremers (2008) to provide an estimate of the cost of climate change - in particular the cost of changes in mean regional temperature and precipitation - to the fruit vegetation sector. We concentrate on the production...

This paper questions the perceived wisdom that migrants are more risk-loving than the native population. We employ a new large German survey of direct individual risk measures to find that first-generation migrants have lower risk attitudes than natives, which only equalize in the second generation.

Both crime and terrorism impose costs onto society through the channels of fear and worry. Identifying and targeting groups which are especially affected by worries might be one way to reduce the total costs of these two types of insecurity. However, compared to the drivers of the fear of crime,...

The study analyses the effects of transition on the amount and patterns of alcohol consumption. We test the hypothesis of how far negative experiences induced by the collapse of the Soviet Union have led to drinking in the young generation of Ukrainians. We use data coming from the Ukrainian...

This paper presents new evidence on the distribution of risk attitudes in the population, using a novel set of survey questions and a representative sample of roughly 22,000 individuals living in Germany. Using a question that asks about willingness to take risks on an 11-point scale, we find...

The article discusses the conflict of goals between fair compensation for performance and equitable support based on need in modern welfare states, which is a subject of controversy in various disciplines. It answers the question of the extent to which this policy problem of modern welfare...

Examined the concurrent and cross-lagged spousal similarity in life satisfaction over a 21-year period. Analyses were based on married couples (N = 847) in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Concurrent spousal similarity was considerably higher than one-year retest similarity, revealing...