We estimate household equivalence scales using income satisfaction data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We extend previous studies applying this approach by taking reference income into account. This allows separating needs-based from reference effects in the determination of income...

Business climate indicators are used to receive early signals for turning points in the general business cycle. Therefore methods for the detection of turning points in time series are required. Estimations of slopes of a smooth component in the data can be calculated with local polynomial...

The German government provides discretionary investment grants to structurally weak regions to reduce regional disparities. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits an exogenous discrete jump in the probability of receiving investment grants, to identify the causal effects of the...

Negative income shocks can either be the consequence of risky choices or random events. A growing literature analyzes the role of responsibility for neediness for informal financial support of individuals facing negative income shocks based on randomized experiments. In this paper, we show that...

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...

Empirical evidence that migrants send home more remittances after disasters raises the question of whether remittances can be used to self-insure, substituting for both formal and informal insurance. We investigate this question using a unique data set on the usage patterns of financial services...

We estimate and decompose family income-related inequality in child health in the US and analyze its dynamics using the income-related health mobility index recently introduced by Allanson et al., 2010. Data come from the 1997, 2002, and 2007 waves of the Child Development Supplement (CDS) of...