History shows militarily dominant states that pursue imperialism, relying on their might to extort resources from weaker states. Occasionally, the latter revolt and the dominant state suffers some casualties. This paper explores imperialism along steady-growth paths. If the dominant state maximizes domestic welfare, it should eventually abandon imperialism because its safety costs asymptotically overrun its material benefits. To shed light on diametrically opposed historical records, I propose a model of endogenous ideology and war bias in which the political elite cares about self-image. If that concern is strong enough, the political elite gradually identifies with its country’s mission of hegemony and imperialism persists. It is first driven by material concerns and later by ideal ones. Despite its divergent preferences, the population of a dominant state generally has little interest to oppose imperialism.

Recently, there is a growing interest in understanding how individuals adapt to changing climate conditions and climate-induced extreme weather events. An underexplored question is whether and how climate-related natural hazards affect household saving behavior. For this purpose, we exploit a natural experiment stemming from the European Flood of August 2002. Combining micro data with geo-coded flood maps allows us to analyze the causal impact of flood exposure on household savings within a differences-in-differences setting. We find that flood exposure depresses household saving behavior in the medium run. The most likely explanation is moral hazard induced by massive government support for affected households.

One of the primary objectives of protests and demonstrations is to bring social, political, or economic issues to the attention of politicians and the wider population. While protests can have a mobilizing and persuading effect, they may reduce support for their cause if they are perceived as a threat to public order. In this study, we look at how local or spontaneously organised xenophobic demonstrations affect concerns about hostility towards foreigners and worries about immigration among natives in Germany. We use a regression discontinuity design to compare the attitudes of individuals interviewed in the days immediately before a large far-right demonstration and individuals interviewed in the days immediately after that demonstration. Our results show that large right-wing demonstrations lead to a substantial increase in worries about hostility towards foreigners of 13.7% of a standard deviation. In contrast, worries about immigration are not affected by the demonstrations, indicating that the protesters are not successful in swaying public opinion in their favour. In the heterogeneity analyses, we uncover some polarisation in the population: While worries about hostility against foreigners increase and worries about immigration decrease in left-leaning regions, both types of worries increase in districts where centre-right parties are more successful. Lastly, we also show that people become more politically interested in response to protests, mainly benefiting left-wing parties, and are more likely to wish to donate money to help refugees.

Behavioral economics has so far largely avoided discussing the psychological origins of preferences, as well as their relation to needs. This has not only restricted interdisciplinary exchange, but also significantly limits the predictive capabilities of models. For example, the revealed preference approach can only reliably predict repeating choices, while needing large amounts of observations for calibration. In this paper, I show how unifying preferences with the psychological concept of needs strengthens economic models, by developing a decision-making framework for well-being assessment and choice prediction. To present the direct merit of this approach, I show how this framework yields a systematic approximation scheme, which is able to solve limitations of current approaches by describing new alternatives, non-repeating choices, or otherwise unobservable desires. Meanwhile, the approximation scheme requires less observations on an individual level than current approaches. I achieve this by constructing a hierarchical dependency between human motivations and preferences through the language of needs. I show the basic feasibility of the approximation scheme through simulations on random populations. In practice, the framework is applicable in situations where individuals exert choices only once and measuring preferences is expensive, like evaluating policy proposals or predicting decisions under technological change

Current time allocation and household production models face three major weaknesses: First, they only describe the average time allocation. Thus, information about the order of activities is lost. Therefore, it is impossible to describe the influence of activities on later ones. Such interactions are likely pervasive, and can significantly alter behavior. Second, they are unable to describe the effort allocation of individuals, although effort influences one’s time allocation. Thereby, they are either unable or very limited in describing labor productivity or multitasking although individuals frequently multitask. Through the omission of interactions and effort allocation, current models yield biased descriptions of e.g. price and time elasticities. Third, they require strong assumptions, such as perfect foresight or periodic environments, and thus cannot describe behavior in unpredictable environments, like reactions to external shocks. In this paper, I provide a remedy for these shortcomings by developing a dynamical model of procedurally rational decision making. The basic idea of the model is a feedback loop between experienced utility, decision utility, and activities. In applications of the model, I show how introducing a work-leisure interaction and multitasking significantly changes elasticities and how nonmarginal external shocks cause short-term demand surges, none of which can be described by current time allocation models.

What can be done to reduce the likelihood of future wars? While states’ decisions that bear on war are ultimately made by their political leaders, strengthening ordinary citizens’ control of those leaders is vital to reduce the risk of future wars. This thesis can be broken down into two claims: first, there is a war bias of political leaders; second, people’s control over those leaders may successfully counteract that bias. Claim n°1 has that in some situations political leaders and citizens have substantially divergent interests with respect to policies that risk the outbreak of war. Political leaders may have a war bias that is so strong that they prefer war occurring with high probability whereas citizens prefer peace occurring with high probability. Claim n°2 has that in some situations strengthening citizens’ control of political decision-makers may be decisive to prevent a war. As I’ll argue shortly, this empowerment can be beneficial only if sufficiently many citizens have previously become alert by productively engaging in a distinctive cognitive effort. This requirement points to a precise responsibility of intellectuals.

Die Einführung neuer Technologien stellt für Organisationen mit hoher Zuverlässigkeit (HROs) oder solche die danach streben (RSOs) eine erhebliche Herausforderung dar. Die vorliegende Arbeit analysiert die mit diesem Prozess verbundenen Herausforderungen, insbesondere in Hinblick auf mögliche Produktionsunterbrechungen, die Einführung neuer Arbeitslogiken und die Unsicherheit im Umgang mit neuer Technologie. In Zusam-menarbeit mit spezialisierten Partnern versuchen Organisationen, Fehler und Kontinui-tätsunterbrechungen während der Implementierung zu vermeiden. Die Arbeit fußt auf einer kritischen Literaturübersicht und untersucht 72 Forschungsbei-träge aus einer Reliabilitätsperspektive. Ziel ist die Identifikation relevanter Diskurse in der bestehenden Literatur sowie die Ableitung von Handlungsempfehlungen für die Technologieimplementierung. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass der Diskurs der Service-Dominant-Logic aus der Marketingforschung und die Reliabilitätsperspektive aus der Managementliteratur als kohärente Perspektiven betrachtet werden können. Diese Arbeit schlägt vor, diese Verbindung in zukünftigen Beiträgen zu überprüfen und trägt damit zur Integration von Erkenntnissen aus verschiedenen Forschungsdisziplinen bei.

Aufbauend auf im Rahmen eines Delphi-Verfahrens erhobenen Daten und Erkenntnissen werden ökonomische Verwertungs- und Geschäftsmodelloptionen für ein Blockchain-basiertes Gesundheitsdatenmanagement- und Zugriff-/Rechteverwaltungssystem zur Einbettung in den ersten deutschen Gesundheitsmarkt diskutiert und reflektiert. Im Fokus steht hierbei die im Rahmen eines BMBF-geförderten Verbundprojekts entwickelte und im Entlassmanagement für onkologische Patientinnen prototypisch umgesetzte BloG³-Lösung. Eine reibungslose sektorenübergreifende, interdisziplinäre Versorgung im Behandlungsprozess von Onkologie-Patientinnen ist als Anwendungsfall von besonderer Relevanz, da hier zahlreiche sowohl stationäre als auch ambulante Versorgungsanbieter eingebunden sind und es hier bei der Überleitung oft noch zu Versorgungs-, Medien- und Informationsbrüchen kommt. In dem Diskussionsbeitrag beschreiben und analysieren wir sowohl den aktuellen und zukünftig zu erwartenden Stand der digitalen Transformation des Gesundheitswesens, als auch die Besonderheiten des deutschen Gesundheitswesens mit Fokus auf die Möglichkeiten für digitale Innovationen profitabel in den regulierten ersten Gesundheitsmarkt in Form von erstattungsfähigen Gesundheitsleistungen zu gelangen. Unter Berücksichtigung der aktuellen und absehbaren zukünftigen Rahmenbedingungen werden mithilfe der Expertinnenmeinungen aus dem Delphi-Verfahren mögliche Szenarien für die Verwertung der BloG³-Lösung für verschiedene Zeithorizonte (kurz-, mittel-, langfristig) reflektiert und diskutiert.

Citizen tax compliance significantly dictates governmental fiscal capacities. Recognizing this, understanding the determinants of tax compliance remains paramount. While existing literature frequently isolates and tests individual determinants such as audit likelihood, penalty structures, tax morale, and perceived fairness, an integrative, bottom-up approach addressing the spectrum of tax compliance attitudes has largely been overlooked. Addressing this gap, our study constructs a multidimensional Tax Compliance Attitude Inventory (TCAI) by harmonizing real taxpayer re-sponses with established theoretical underpinnings. Through factor analysis, we delineate four pivotal factors: (i) morale, (ii) monetary benefit, (iii) deterrence, and (iv) authority. Notably, mo-rale and deterrence emerge as consistent influencers of tax compliance. Embracing this multidi-mensionality, our cluster analysis demarcates two distinct taxpayer personas: (a) moralists and (b) rationalists. Our findings underscore that moralists consistently exhibit higher tax compliance than their rationalist counterparts. We further present a streamlined classification algorithm to operationalize the TCAI in new datasets, minimizing item count. This work serves as a seminal contribution, offering both academia and tax authorities a robust, quantitative tool to gauge tax compliance attitudes.

We use German administrative and survey data to investigate the heterogeneity of part-time penalties in hourly wages and growth rates. Exploiting tax reforms for identication, we find substantial heterogeneity in part-time wage penalties from −28.3% to −7.2% compared to full-time. The heterogeneity in wage growth penalties is less pronounced. Both penalties do not decrease linearly with additional working hours. More weekly working hours might result in a higher hourly wage penalty. The shape of the penalties is driven by workers with non-demanding tasks and professions where working around 30 weekly hours is uncommon, and relatively many females work.

The Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN) – the institutions and arrangements that provide short-term crisis finance – has turned into a highly complex, uncoordinated system of global, multilateral, and bilateral instruments. The present paper elaborates on a composite index of the GFSN to analyse its preparedness for shielding countries from financial crises. This first-of-its-kind index comprises six components that measure the vulnerability and resilience of individual countries to financial crises derived from economic and political economy financial crisis literature. We apply this index to data from 192 UN member countries we collected in the GFSN tracker for the period of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of their asses to and use of the GFSN. This index, and the use of novel forms of graphical displaying, allow us to identify a hierarchy in the access to short-term liquidity by the GFSN. At the bottom, we find low-income countries with sole access to IMF standard conditional crisis finance, while we find at the top countries with access to bilateral currency swaps, especially those provided by the US Federal Reserve. Our analysis also reveals that first, the temporary reformed unconditional access of IMF crisis finance during the pandemic has temporarily improved those countries’ position in the GFSN hierarchy; second, bilateral swaps as crisis finance instruments reinforce the GFSN hierarchy. Since access to adequate emergency liquidity is decisive for a country’s financial crisis prevention capacity and the ability to engage in social cohesion and climate policy, we suggest to flatten the hierarchy by keeping access to IMF unconditional finance open beyond the COVID-19 crisis, expanding regional financial arrangements, and by coordinating GFSN elements, including currency swap providing central banks.

In this paper we deliver first causal evidence on the relationship between immigrant host country language proficiency and homeownership. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we find a substantial positive impact of language skills on the propensity to own a home and the quality of housing. While this effect is mediated by education and household income, our estimates also speak in favor of a direct effect. Our results highlight the importance of host-country-specific human capital and, in particular, language proficiency for socio-economic assimilation.

High nonresponse rates have become a rule in survey sampling. In panel surveys there occur additional sample losses due to panel attrition, which are thought to worsen the bias resulting from initial nonresponse. However, under certain conditions an initial wave nonresponse bias may vanish in later panel waves. We study such a "Fade away" of an initial nonresponse bias in the context of regression analysis. By using a time series approach for the covariate and the error terms we derive the bias of cross-sectional OLS-estimates of the slope coefficient. In the case of no subsequent attrition and only serial correlation an initial bias converges to zero. If the nonresponse affects permanent components the initial bias will decrease to a limit which is determined by the size of the permanent components. Attrition is discussed here in a worst case scenario, where there is a steady selective drift into the same direction as in the initial panel wave. It is shown that the fade away effect dampens the attrition effect to a large extent depending on the temporal stability of the covariate and the dependent variable. The attrition effect may by further reduced by a weighted regression analysis, where the weights are estimated attrition probabilities on the basis of the lagged dependent variable. The results are discussed with respect to surveys with unsure selection procedures which are used in a longitudinal fashion, like access panels.

Die Verknüpfung von administrativen Prüfungsdaten mit Umfragedaten zum sozialen Hintergrund der Studierenden, ihrer Studienfinanzierung, ihrer Motivation für den gewählten Studiengang sowie den Noten für die Zulassung zum Studiengang vermeidet die Schwachstellen üblicher studentischer Befragungen mit hohem Nonresponse und Erinnerungsfehlern. Dieser Ansatz wird hier zum Vergleich von fünf Masterstudiengängen am FB Wirtschaftswissenschaft der Freien Universität Berlin benutzt. Die Studierenden wurden auf der jeweiligen Auftaktveranstaltung ihrer Studiengänge befragt und über die ersten 6 Fachsemester hinsichtlich des Erwerbs von Studienpunkten, dem Abschluss ihres Masterstudiums sowie den dabei erzielten Noten begleitet. Aufgrund der Koppelung mit den administrativen Daten der gesamten Kohorte konnte ein Erfolgsbias der teilnahmebereiten Studierenden festgestellt werden, der aber durch eine geeignete Gewichtung über die Responserate gut beherrschbar ist. Wir vergleichen die Studiengänge in verschiedenen Phasen: Studieneingangsphase, Erreichen der Regelstudienzeit und Abschluss bis zum 6 Fachsemester. Weiterhin wird der Einfluss von Hintergrundmerkmalen auf die erreichte Note beim Studienabschluss untersucht. In der Studieneingangsphase ergeben sich deutliche Unterschiede zwischen den Studiengängen. Konditioniert man allerdings auf den Studienerfolg im ersten Semester, so verschwinden diese Unterschiede für die zweite Studienphase und den Abschluss des Studiums. Überraschend ist der geringe Einfluss der Bachelor-Note auf den Studienerfolg und die erzielte Master-Note. Die Ergebnisse zeigen die Möglichkeit auf, einen möglichen Studienabbruch schon relativ sicher anhand der erzielten Studienpunkte in der Studieneingangsphase zu erkennen.

This paper analyzes the time-varying credibility of the Fed’s inflation target in an empirical macro model with asymmetric information, where the public has to learn about the actual inflation target from the Fed’s interest rate policy. To capture the evolving communication strategy of the Fed, I allow the learning rule and the structural shock variances to change across monetary policy regimes. I find that imperfect credibility is pronounced during the Volcker Disinflation and to a lesser extend in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis. The announcement of the 2% target in 2012 did not affect the learning rule strongly but reduced the variance of transitory monetary policy shocks. The results caution against equating long-term inflation expectations of professionals with the perceived inflation target.

Using a new experimental design, we compare how subjects form beliefs in an investorclient setup under varying degrees of liability. Our results re ect the importance of social preferences when making investment decisions for others. We show that when investors have no liability, those with stronger social preferences are more optimistic about the probability that their investment results in a gain. In other words, we nd that social preferences appear to be correlated with motivated beliefs. This nding suggests the existence of cognitive biases in nancial decision-making and supports the recent literature on the formation of motivated beliefs under limited liability (Barberis, 2015; B enabou and Tirole, 2016).

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to lifestyle changes across Europe with a likely impact on sleep quality. This investigation considers sleep quality in relation to the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in five European countries. Using panel regressions and keeping policy responses to COVID-19 constant, we show that an increase in the four-week average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 inhabitants (our proxy for the evolution of the pandemic) significantly reduced sleep quality in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden between April 2020 and June 2021. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests and are larger for women, parents and young adults. Additionally, we show that about half of the reduction in sleep quality caused by the evolution of the pandemic can be attributed to changes in lifestyles, worsened mental health and negative attitudes toward COVID-19 and its management (lower degree of confidence in government, greater fear of being infected). In contrast, changes in one’s own infection-status from the SARS-CoV-2 virus or sleep duration are not significant mediators of the relationship between COVID-19-related deaths and sleep quality.

We use a representative online survey to investigate the inflation expectations of German consumers and the credibility of the ECB’s inflation target during the recent high inflation period. We find that credibility has trended downwards since summer 2021, reaching an all-time low in April 2022. The high correlation between inflation expectations and the actual rate of inflation strongly indicate that inflation expectations have been de-anchored from the inflation target. With increasing inflation, German consumers are more convinced that - in contrast to the ECB’s inflation target - inflation will be well above 2% over the medium term.

We investigate the welfare effect of increasing competition in an anonymous two-sided matching market, where matched pairs play an infinitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Higher matching efficiency is usually considered detrimental as it creates stronger incentives for defection. We point out, however, that a reduction in matching frictions also increases welfare because more agents find themselves in a cooperative relationship. We characterize the conditions for which increasing competition increases overall welfare. In particular, this is always the case when the incentives for defection are high.

We propose a novel view of selection bias in longitudinal surveys. Such bias may arise from initial nonresponse in a probability sample, or it may be caused by self-selection in an internet survey. A contraction theorem from mathematical demography is used to show that an initial bias can "fade-away" in later panel waves, if the transition laws in the observed sample and the population are identical. Panel attrition is incorporated into the Markovian framework. Extensions to Markov chains of higher order are given, and the limitations of our approach under population heterogeneity are discussed. We use empirical data from a German Labour Market Panel to demonstrate the extend and speed of the fade-away effect. The implications of the new approach on the treatment of nonresponse, and attrition weighting, are discussed.