We provide evidence that motorists respond to short-run fluctuations in fuel prices at the gas pump and not on the road. Employing variants of censored panel regression to control for unobserved heterogeneity and censoring of the dependent variable, we find that the fuel price has a large and...

The euro area is experiencing a severe and highly complex crisis. It comprises three problem areas, the difficulties of some highly indebted European sovereigns to ascertain funding at palatable cost, the disconcerting fragility of the European banking system and disappointing growth prospects...

Improving the regulation of banks has been at the centre of economic policy actions since the outbreak of the global financial crisis. One of the many and conceptually very different measures proposed is to improve the corporate governance of banks by setting qualification standards for banks'...

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...

This paper examines weight loss and the formation of healthy habits through cash rewards in the context of a multi-phase randomized controlled trial involving 700 obese individuals. We find effects of monetary incentives for weight loss of up to EUR 300 on body weight during all experimental...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...

Arguably, one of the most important developments in the field of applied economics during the last decades has been the emergence of systematic policy evaluation, with its distinct focus on the establishment of causality.By contrast to the natural sciences, the objects of our scientific interest...

The question of whether two drugs - namely alcohol and tobacco - are used as complements or substitutes is of crucial interest if side-effects of anti-smoking policies are considered. Numerous papers have empirically addressed this issue by estimating demand systems for alcohol and tobacco and...

This article demonstrates that the large feed-in tariffs currently guaranteed for solar electricity in Germany constitute a subsidization regime that, if extended to 2020, threatens to reach a level comparable to that of German hard coal production, a notoriously outstanding example of misguided...

As part of its efforts to reach the targets of the Kyoto Protocol, the European Commission is currently considering a new directive to reduce the per-kilometer CO2 emissions of newly registered automobiles. This paper critically assesses this proposal with respect to its economic and...