To assess the likely effects of population ageing on the outcomes of direct democracy, we analyze the effect of age on voting decisions in public referenda. To this end, we provide the first quantitative review of the literature and a case study of the Stuttgart 21 referendum on one of the...

Recent analyses relate increases in the growth rate of countries to anticipation effects caused by bidding for the Olympic Games, so called news shocks. We argue that these findings should be interpreted cautiously. First, these analyses may suffer from an omitted variable bias because they...

This contribution analyzes 132 factors on their potential to discriminate countries bidding for hosting the Olympic Games from non-bidding countries. Our binary, clustered model using generalized estimating equations (GEE) shows that countries recording long-term economic growth and pursuing a...

While urban renewal programs have become widely used policy measures to target urban development less is known about the reasons why certain areas are more responsive to policy inter-ventions than others. With this study we address some of these issues by analyzing an urban re-newal program in...

We conduct an innovative analysis of sporting world records by a) using economic instead of sporting determinants and b) by using multivariate stochastic frontier functions. Using data from 48 different disciplines between 1970 and 2014, we show that world records are close to full efficiency...

In empirischen Analysen werden Testergebnisse häufig tabellarisch als statistisch signifikante oder insignifikante Resultate ausgewiesen. Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der sachgerechten Interpretation der insignifikanten Resultate und der Analyse möglicher Ursachen. Als...