This dissertation includes three empirical essays on development economics and one on the economics of education. The first essay (co-authored by Stephan Klasen) is a contribution to the debate surrounding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the on-going debate about what international...

Diese Arbeit ist eine Sammlung von Studien, welche sowohl die makro-, als auch die mikroökonomischen Aspekte und Charakteristika von Rücküberweisungen pakistanischer Migranten in ihr Heimatland analysieren, sowie deren ökonomische Auswirkungen auf das Konsumverhalten und die...

Frequent problems in applied research that prevent the application of the classical Poisson log-linear model for analyzing count data include overdispersion, an excess of zeros compared to the Poisson distribution, correlated responses, as well as complex predictor structures comprising...

The Basel II framework strictly defines the conditions under which financial institutions are authorized to accept real estate as collateral in order to decrease their credit risk. A widely used concept for its valuation is the hedonic approach. It assumes, that a property can be characterized...

Die drei Kapitel der Dissertation behandeln unterschiedliche Aspekte der quantitativen Impactevaluatierung im mikroökonomischen Kontext. Das erste Kapitel betrachtet den Einfluss von Arbeitsmigration auf das Konsumverhalten von Haushalten in Tadschikistan. Es scheint sich hierbei um einen...

In this thesis, so far insufficiently considered characteristics of long-run equilibriums in food markets are investigated. For this purpose, multivariate time series methodologies, which were developed for the estimation of long-run relationships by allowing for causality and convergence, are...

The dissertation consists of three essays. The main focus is set on semiparametric regression modeling, which embodies the strength of parametric and nonparametric regression models in terms of flexibility, dimensionality and interpretability. The first essay is “Some Recent Advances in...

Empirical studies on farmland rental rates have predominantly concentrated on modelling conditional means using spatial autoregressive models, where a linear functional form between the response and the covariates is usually assumed. However, if it is in fact non-linear, misspecifying the...

In this paper we explore the application of structured additive distributional regression for the analysis of conditional income distributions in Germany following the reunification. Using a bootstrapped Kolmogorov-Smirnov test we find that conditional personal income distributions can generally...

In this paper, we propose a unified Bayesian approach for multivariate structured additive distributional regression analysis where inference is applicable to a huge class of multivariate response distributions, comprising continuous, discrete and latent models, and where each parameter of these...