The interest rate is generally considered as a monetary policy tool and, at the same time, via Tobin's q, as an important driver of macroeconomic investment. As an innovation, this paper derives the exact shape of the "hysteretic" impact of changes in the interest rate on macroeconomic...

We study the regional distribution of primary care physicians in Germany to learn about the extent and possible reasons of geographic maldistribution. For this aim, we apply a greedy capacitated algorithm on very fine spatial data. We compare this reference allocation of primary care physicians...

Identifying the incidence of free-ridership is significant to a range of issues relevant to program evaluation, including the calculation of net program benefits and more general assessments of political acceptability. Estimates of free-ridership in the area of energy policy frequently rely on...

Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...

Past empirical studies on the strategic bequest motive have found evidence for the existence of a positive causation of wealth on receiving attention from on's children. This paper illustrates that these results from the past should be interpreted with some care as the relationship between...

This paper analyzes differences in self-assessed debt burdens of German households confronted with an objective debt burden. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, my econometric analysis shows that a household's subjective debt burden is not only influenced by the current...

A nonparametric approach is presented to test whether decisions on a probability simplex could be induced by quasiconcave preferences. Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented. If the answer is affirmative, the methods developed here allow to reconstruct bounds on indifference curves....

Since 2002 the German government seeks to stimulate private retirement savings by means of special allowances and tax exemptions - the so-called Riester scheme. We apply matching and panel regression techniques to assess the impact of the Riester scheme on households' propensities to save in a...

Today more than 2.7 billion people rely on biomass as their primary cooking fuel, with profound implications for the environment and people's well-being. Wood provision is often time-consuming and the emitted smoke has severe health effects - both burdens that afflict women in particular. The...

This paper provides an efficient way to generate a set of random choices on a set of budgets which satisfy the Generalised Axiom of Revealed Preferences (GARP), that is, they are consistent with utility maximisation. The choices are drawn from an approximate uniform distribution on the...