Cities are increasingly hold accountable for climate action. By demonstrating their proenvironmentality through own climate-related activities, they not at least aspire to encourage individual climate protection efforts. Based on standard economic theory there is little reason to assume that...

Purpose – The paper aims to discover the role of the middle classes in the development of the ethnic minorities of China, given the importance of the middle classes in international economic development in the modern age. Design/methodology/approach – The paper offers a definition of the...

Purpose – The paper aims to discover the role of the middle classes in the development of the ethnic minorities of China, given the importance of the middle classes in international economic development in the modern age. Design/methodology/approach – The paper offers a definition of the...

In this paper, we explore the effects of dialectal diversity on economic performance by drawing evidence from Chinese prefecture-level cities. Our dataset is a panel of 5-year average data over the period from 2001 to 2015 including 274 cities. We compute five indices of Chinese dialectal...

The Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) provides information about household wealth (real and financial assets as well as liabilities) from 15 Euro-countries after the financial crisis of 2007/8. The survey will be the central dataset in this topic in the future. However, several...

More than 25 years after German reunification, key economic indicators for households living in eastern German regions are still below the western German levels. This particularly holds for private net wealth, which reaches only about 40% of the western German level. However, a more granular...

We study the relationship between overconfidence and the political and financial behavior of a nationally representative sample. Consistent with theoretical predictions, our findings indicate that excessive confidence in one's judgment is associated with lower portfolio diversification, greater...

In a randomized experiment embedded in a survey, I test the effects of variations in question wording and format on consumer response behavior and the corresponding inflation expectations. To this end, survey participants from a representative sample of German consumers are broken down into four...

We use a representative online survey to investigate the inflation expectations of German consumers and the credibility of the ECB's inflation target during the recent high inflation period. We find that credibility has trended downwards since summer 2021, reaching an all-time low in April 2022....

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the formation of energy conservation routines. To do so, we use data from two nationwide surveys of German households, conducted before and during the pandemic. Across the two survey waves, we document a significant increase in the likelihood...