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...

Drawing on panel data from Germany, this paper analyzes the correlates of happiness, with an eye toward isolating the role of parenthood over the lifecycle. The analysis couples a panel quantile regression with an empirical specification that captures different phases of parenthood, from the...

This note investigates the pass-through of global Brent oil notations to fuel prices across the oligopoly of retail majors in Germany. We assemble a high-frequency panel data set that encompasses millions of price observations and allows us to distinguish effects by brand. Upon establishing a...

Using detailed data originating from several hundred households of the German Residential Energy Survey (GRECS), this paper empirically investigates the returns on investment in home-equipped photovoltaics (PV) installations. We find that these returns were particularly high in the years 2009 to...

Discrete-continuous models have become a common technique for addressing selectivity biases in data sets with endogenously partitioned observational units. Alternative two-stage approaches have been suggested by LEE (1983), DUBIN and MCFADDEN (1984), and DAHL (2002), all of which capture the...

Sample selection models, variants of which are the Heckman and Heckit models, are increasingly used by political scientists to accommodate data in which censoring of the dependent variable raises concerns of sample selectivity bias. Beyond demonstrating several pitfalls in the calculation of...

Using household travel diary data collected in Germany between 1997 and 2012, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) approach to estimate fuel price and efficiency elasticities. The aim is to gauge the relative impacts of fuel economy standards and fuel taxes on distance traveled. We fi nd that...

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...

Drawing on German household data from 1992 to 2011, this paper analyzes how couples allocate housework against the backdrop of three questions: (1) Does an individual's contribution to household income - both in absolute and relative terms - influence his or her contribution to housework? (2) If...

The overestimation of willingness-to-pay (WTP) in hypothetical responses is a wellknown finding in the literature. Various techniques have been proposed to remove or, at least, reduce this bias. Using responses from a panel of about 6,500 German households on their WTP for a variety of power...