The European debt crisis has revealed serious deficiencies and risks on a proper functioning of the monetary union. Against this backdrop, early warning systems are of crucial importance. In this study that focuses on euro area member states, the robustness of early warning systems to predict...

A couple of recent papers have shifted the focus towards disagreement of professional forecasters. When dealing with survey data that is sampled at a frequency higher than annual and that includes only fixed event forecasts, e.g. expectation of average annual growth rates measures of...

Der vorliegende Beitrag ist eine Metaanalyse von 99 deutschen Bevölkerungssurveys aus dem GESIS-Datenarchiv, in denen die postmaterialistische Einstellung der Befragten ermittelt wird. Es wird anhand von Mehrebenenmodellen gezeigt, dass sich der Anteil der Postmaterialisten unter Kontrolle von...

Both crime and terrorism impose costs onto society through the channels of fear and worry. Identifying and targeting groups which are especially affected by worries might be one way to reduce the total costs of these two types of insecurity. However, compared to the drivers of the fear of crime,...

This article investigates the understandings and perceptions of (micro)insurance among low-income people in southern Ghana, using evidence from four focus group discussions. It analyzes how the focus group participants think about various types of insurance - among them a micro life insurance...

The standard approach of analysing gaps in social and labor market outcomes of different ethnic groups relies on analysis of statistical data about the affected groups. In this paper we go beyond this approach by measuring the views of expert stakeholders involved in minority integration. This...

We provide an in-depth theoretical discussion about the differences between attitudes and perceptions, as well as an empirical exercise to analyze its effects. This discussion is of importance, as the large majority of papers considering attitudinal latent variables, just consider those as...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and...

The paper studies opinions and attitudes towards immigrants and minorities and their interactions with other barriers to minorities' economic integration. Specifically, we consider the minority experts' own perceptions about these issues, the veracities and repercussions of unfavorable attitudes...