Social networks can serve as an instrument to link agents with each other over space and time. The emerging pattern can display the flow of information, the diffusion of technology or the trade flow of products between all kinds of agents. Networks are very flexible constructs, which are defined...

Essay 1: We reexamine the effect of economic development on the level of democracy based on the data sets of Acemoglu et al. (2008) with a novel regression specification utilizing a zero-one-inflated beta distribution for the response variable democracy. Contrary to the results of Acemoglu et...

Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular in the past two decades. With the constant rise of computational power even very complex models can be estimated on virtually any modern computer. Moreover, interest has shifted from conditional mean models to probabilistic distributional models...

In this paper we reconsider the relationship between income on health, taking a distributional perspective rather than one centered on conditional expectation. Using Structured Additive Distributional Regression, we find that the association between income on health is larger than generally...

This thesis is motivated by the wish to balance the public debate on regulation. It aims to teach public and policy-makers about the seen und unseen effects as well as regulatory options of a particular form of regulation – occupational licensing – by using the German crafts experience....