Supporters of left-wing parties typically place more emphasis on redistributive policies than right-wing voters. I investigate whether this difference in tolerating inequality is amplified by suspicious success - achievements that may arise from cheating. Using a laboratory experiment, I...

In this paper, we examine the economic and political effects of the breakup of East Prussia into what is today Poland, Russia and Lithuania. We explore the dissolution of imperial regions into the boundaries of modern states, adding new insights to the research on the imperial legacies. We...

Es wird eine Methode zur Messung des Produktionsfaktors Kapital vorgeschlagen, in der Vermögensarten nach ihrem Nutzungswert im Produktionsprozess gewichtet werden. Dazu werden Nutzungskosten für die einzelnen Anlageklassen mit Hilfe von Daten der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen sowie...

A method is proposed to measure capital services in production. This means that productive assets are weighted according to their user costs. The user costs of the individual asset classes are estimated based on data from the national accounts and other sources. The results show that, in the...

Using a unique data set on German banks' sector specific loan exposures to the real economy and the corresponding write-offs and write-downs, we examine the impact of loan portfolio sector concentration on credit risk. By controlling for common risk factors, we separate the bank-specific...

This paper points to flaws in Gini decompositions by income sources and population subgroups and to common pitfalls in the interpretation of decomposition results, focusing on methods within the framework of Rao (1969). We argue that within this framework Gini elasticities may provide the only...

How can we assess the welfare of a society, its evolution over time and predict its change due to particular policy interventions? One way is to use survey-based welfare indicators such as the OECD Better Life Index. It invites people to weight a variety of quality of life indicators according...

From September 2011 to January 2015, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) implemented a minimum exchange rate regime (i.e. a one-sided target zone) vis-a-vis the euro to fight deflationary pressures in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis. During this period of unconventional monetary policy,...

The compilation of commercial property price indices is a big challenge. In Germany, substantive data gaps prevent the calculation of official figures by the national statistical authority. By contrast, policymakers urge for timely, reliable and comprehensive data. In this paper, proposals are...

From 2014 until present, housing prices in Germany have been rising faster than consumer prices in all quarters except one, raising concerns about an excessive over-heating of the housing market. To assess the vulnerability of the German housing market to a future realignment of prices or even a...