The life-cycle hypothesis implies that consumption would not decline at retirement. However, several studies found relevant declines in food consumption after retirement for the United States. Others concluded that this contradiction of the life-cycle hypothesis is solved by allowing for broader...

This paper investigates the influence of the political regime on the relative importance of conspicuous consumption. We use the separation of Germany into the communist GDR and the democratic FRG and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment. Relying on household data that are...

This paper investigates empirically the consumer demand of environmentally relevant goods for Germany, as well as their relationship to the demand for leisure. Higher prices for energy goods like gas, electricity or fuel oil due to higher indirect taxation amongst others may have serious welfare...

We study how website defaults affect consumer behavior in the domain of charitable giving. In a field experiment that was conducted on a large platform for making charitable donations over the web, we exogenously vary the default options in two distinct choice dimensions. The first pertains to...

This paper analyses the relationship between locus of control (LOC) and the demand for supplementary health insurance. Drawing on longitudinal data from Germany, we find robust evidence that individuals having an internal LOC are more likely to take up supplementary private health insurance...

This paper empirically investigates whether individuals withhold a certain amount of cash for precautionary reasons at the point-of-sale (POS) in order to be able to cover future transactions that might have to be paid for in cash. Such behaviour is costly for consumers because it imposes...

This paper examines the effects of real estate transfer taxes (RETT) on property prices using a rich micro dataset of roughly 17 million German properties for the period from 2005 to 2019. We exploit a 2006 constitutional reform that allows states to set their own RETT rates, leading to frequent...

This paper analyses the behaviour of prices and supply on the German housing market taking into account the interaction between prices and quantities. A novel price index for residential property prices covering the whole country going back to 1993 is used in a macroeconomic model to estimate...

Environmental considerations are becoming increasingly important in the decision making process of consumers and producers. A credible environmental label can only be established if it is issued by a neutral or state organisation on the basis of scientifically derived criteria. This holds true...

In this paper, we first recover the individual valuation of expected future fuel costs at the time of a car purchase and then explore how various factors relate to the recovered consumer undervaluation of fuel savings (on average, consumers' willingness-to-pay for a AC1 reduction in fuel costs...