This paper investigates the relationship between wealth, ageing and saving behaviour of private households by using pooled cross sections of German consumption survey data. Different components of wealth are distinguished, as their impact on the savings rate is not homogeneous. On average, the...

Empirical evidence from the psychology literature suggests that reactions towards health shocks depend strongly on the personality trait of locus of control, which is usually unobservable to the analyst. In this paper, the role of this discrete heterogeneity in shaping the effects of health...

Recent research suggests that households increase their electricity consumption in the aftermath of installing photovoltaic (PV) panels, a behavioral change commonly referred to as the solar rebound. Drawing on panel data originating from the German Residential Energy Consumption Survey (GRECS),...

This paper deals with the impact of the $/Euro exchange rate on German exports in the period from 1995Q1 to 2008Q4. Our main aim is to identify "pain thresholds" for German exporters. We rely on a non-linear model according to which suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the EXR...

This paper examines the interactions between money, interest rates, goods and commodity prices at a global level. For this purpose, we aggregate data for major OECD countries and follow the Johansen/Juselius cointegrated VAR approach. Our empirical model supports the view that, when controlling...

This paper examines the importance of different economic sentiments, e.g. consumer moods, for the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) during the transition process. We first analyze the importance of economic confidence with respect to the CEECs'; financial markets. Since the...

Traditional specifications of export equations incorporate foreign demand as a demand pull factor and the real exchange rate as a relative price variable. However, such standard export equations have failed to explain the export performance of euro area countries during the crisis period. In...

This paper investigates the effects of global oil and food price shocks to consumer prices in Middle East-North African (MENA) countries using threshold cointegration methods. Oil and food price shocks increase domestic prices in the long run, whereby the impact of food prices dominates. While...

This note attempts to reconcile a range of primary methods for dealing with price asymmetry, such as the approaches proposed by Tweeten and Quance (1969), Wolffram (1971) and Houk(1977). Using Wolffram’s stylized example, we first illustrate that the notion of asymmetry can be captured in a...