Obesity may not only be linked to undesirable health outcomes but also to limitations in sexual life. The present paper aims to assess whether there is a causal relationship between weight loss and sexual activity in adult obese individuals. To address the endogeneity of weight loss that is...

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 addresses the question of whether the effect of parental drinking on children’s later consumption of alcohol - which is frequently found to be of positive sign - exhibits a certain pattern of heterogeneity. In particular, if this effect is more prominent in the upper tail than...

Die Koexistenz von gesetzlicher und privater Krankenversicherung in Deutschland ist Gegenstand intensiver öffentlicher Debatten. Da lediglich eine Minderheit der Versicherten die Wahl zwischen beiden Systemen hat, wird diese Minderheit oft als privilegiert betrachtet. Auf Basis des...

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...

The classical Heckman (1976, 1979) selection correction estimator (heckit) is misspecified and inconsistent if an interaction of the outcome variable and an explanatory variable matters for selection. To address this specification problem, a full information maximum likelihood estimator and a...

Rebound effects measure the behaviorally induced off set in the reduction of energy consumption following efficiency improvements. Using both panel estimation and quantile-regression methods on household travel diary data collected in Germany between 1997 and 2009, this study investigates the...

In contrast to conventional model selection criteria, the Focused Information Criterion (FIC) allows for purpose-specific choice of models. This accommodates the idea that one kind of model might be highly appropriate for inferences on a particular parameter, but not for another. Ever since its...