This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries. We use quarterly data in the 1980.1-2005.4 period and exclude EMU countries. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant index of central bank independence with...

Gemäß der klassischen ökonomischen Theorie der Kriminalität sollte ein Anstieg der erwarteten Strafe (also des Produktes aus Strafwahrscheinlichkeit und Strafmaß) eine Reduktion der Kriminalität bewirken. In der empirischen Analyse gestaltet sich ein Test dieser überschaubar anmutenden...

Recent years have witnessed a rise in right-wing extremism among German youth and young adults. This paper investigates the extent to which the experience of parental unemployment during childhood affects young people's far right-wing attitudes and xenophobia. Estimates from three German data...

Using a research design that traces siblings' preferences for postmaterialistic values in Germany over two decades, this paper provides new evidence on the origins of value preferences. Focusing on Inglehart's thesis of value change, we test the combined socialization and scarcity hypothesis...

In this paper a new method to estimate the equivalence scale elasticity using individual panel data on income satisfaction will be developed. In contrast to other subjective approaches, the present one benefits from the fact that no direct cardinal individual welfare function has to be...

We link life-satisfaction data to inequality of the pre-government income distribution at the regional level, to estimate the degree of inequality aversion. In addition, we investigate whether a reduction in inequality by the state increases individual well-being. We find that Germans are...

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of non-financial firms' leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of...

This article contributes to the literature on innovation and development by identifying the determinants of innovation, and the role of intellectual property rights, in industrialized and developing countries. Controlling for sample selection, I find that, in general, the level of intellectual...

This paper tackles the issue of cross-section dependence for the monetary exchange rate model in the presence of unobserved common factors using panel data from 1973 until 2007 for 19 OECD countries. Applying a principal component analysis we distinguish between common factors and idiosyncratic...

We link life-satisfaction data to inequality of the pre- and post-government income distribution at the regional level, to estimate the degree of inequality aversion. Three different inequality measures are used. In addition, we investigate whether a reduction in inequality by the state...