Academic education is generally rewarded by employers, but what happens to graduates if they are trained for two years less and have to compete with vocationally trained labor market entrants in a similar field of study? Focusing on Germany, we analyze labor market entries of individuals eligible for higher education, who either opted for newly introduced short bachelor’s degrees, or for well-established vocational degrees. Based on Microcensus data, we find that bachelor’s degrees from classical universities are associated with higher earnings and more prestigious jobs than initial vocational training degrees, and with higher prestige (but similar earnings) than further vocational degrees. However, bachelor’s degrees from universities are also related to higher risks of unemployment or fixed-term employment. Universities of applied sciences, which combine academic and practical training, offer both high earnings and prestigious jobs as well as low risks of unemployment or fixed-term employment at the bachelor’s and the master’s level. Overall, ‘general’ academic education provides advantages over vocational education, despite these structural changes. Variations by field of study are reported.

We propose a new view of initial nonresponse bias in longitudinal surveys. Under certain conditions, an initial bias may "fade-away" over consecutive waves. This effect is discussed in a Markovian framework. A general contraction theorem for time inhomogeneous Markov chains is presented. The result is that two chains with different starting distributions will eventually converge to equal state distributions. Two conditions are required: transition probabilities must be equal for respondents and nonrespondents, and attrition in later panel waves must not depend on the state of the individuals. The theory is applied to a German survey on social benefit recipience. Minor deviations from assumptions are shown to have only a negligible impact on the strength of the fade-away effect. Results from other European surveys indicate that the fade-away effect is present in them, as well. Extensions are pointed out.

A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile this puzzle by generalizing the optimal taxation framework by Saez (2002) to allow for alternatives to welfarism. We calculate weights of a social planner’s function as implied by the German tax and transfer system based on the concepts of welfarism, minimum absolute and relative sacrifice, as well as subjective justness. For the latter we use a novel question from the German Socio- Economic Panel. We find that the minimum absolute sacrifice principle is in line with social weights that decline with net income. Absolute subjective justness is roughly in line with decreasing social weights, which is reflected by preferences of men, West Germans, and supporters of the grand coalition parties.

Well-anchored inflation expectations should not react to short-term oriented macroeconomic news. This paper analyzes the dynamic response of inflation expectations to macro news shocks in a structural VAR model. As identification of structural macro news shocks is controversial, we use a proxy SVAR model where, by construction, unobservable macro news shocks correlate with observable surprises from macroeconomic news announcements. Our results confirm that macro news shocks have no impact on U.S. long-term inflation expectations in the long run. In the short run, however, the degree of expectations de-anchoring is non-negligible.

This paper employs mobility matrices, univariate regressions and multivariate econometric techniques based on the recently published nationally representative household survey (PNAD-2014) from Brazil to investigate the relevance of the gendered patterns in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment between parents and their descendants. The empirical evidence from these three different approaches is absolutely unanimous: In Brazil there is a significant variation in degree of mobility across genders, with a higher mobility level for daughters than for sons. The reason for this gender gap in mobility lies in the chances of attaining the educational levels: regardless of the educational background of the parents, females have a lower chance of remaining without school certificate and a greater probability to achieve a tertiary education. The results of this paper point out also that the educational attainment of children is strongly associated with the education of their most educated parent, regardless of their gender and this correlation is higher for female than for male. Concerning the evolution of the persistence in education over time, the findings indicate for both sexes a significant increase in intergeneration mobility over the last decades. However this positive evolution is much more modest when the relative deviation in education across generations is excluded from the investigation. Finally, this study has demonstrated that parental occupation levels and individual characteristics (race, locality of residence and year of birth) also have a statistically significant effect on the prospects for mobility.

In January 2015, Germany introduced a federal, statutory minimum wage of 8.50 € per hour. This study evaluates the effects of this policy on regular and marginal employment and on welfare dependency. Based on county-level administrative data, this study uses the difference-in-differences technique, exploiting regional variation in the bite of the minimum wage, i.e. the county-specific share of employees paid less than 8.50 € before the introduction of the minimum wage. The minimum wage had a considerable negative effect on marginal employment. There is also some indication that regular employment was slightly reduced. Concerning welfare dependency, the minimum wage reduced the number of working welfare recipients, with some indication that about one half of them left welfare receipt due to the minimum wage.

Auf den Daten einer systematischen Literaturrecherche und des Forschungsverbundprojekts „Beatmungspflege@Zuhause (Bea@Home)“ als qualitative Fallstudie basierend, analysieren wir adäquate Geschäftsmodelle und Wertschöpfungsarchitekturen für innovative intersektorale, IT-unterstützte Versorgungsmodelle. Im Fokus steht dabei das im Rahmen des Forschungsverbundprojekts „Bea@Home“ entwickelte, prototypisch umgesetzte und evaluierte integrierte, IT-unterstützte Versorgungskonzept für langzeitbeatmete Patienten in Deutschland. In dem Diskussionsbeitrag werden die ökonomische Bedeutung intersektoraler, IT-unterstützter Versorgungskonzepte aus einer betriebswirtschaftlichen Perspektive analysiert und eine Typologie möglicher tragfähiger Geschäftsmodelle für solche Versorgungskonzepte entwickelt sowie entsprechende Wertschöpfungsarchitekturen abgeleitet. Auf dieser empirisch und konzeptionell gestützten Grundlage können abschließend Empfehlungen für die Adaptionen der Geschäftsmodelle und Wertschöpfungsarchitekturen auf andere Indikationsbereiche, Regionen und Gesundheitssysteme getroffen werden.

This paper examines the implications of habit formation in private and public consumption for the Pareto-efficient provision of public goods, based on a two-period model with nonlinear taxation. If the public good supply is time- invariant, the presence of habit formation generally alters the standard rules for public good provision. In contrast, if the public good is a flow-variable such that the government directly decides on the level of the public good in each period, habit formation leads to a modification of the first best Samuelson condition only if the degrees of habituation differ for private and public consumption. Since habit formation affects the incentives to relax the self-selection constraint through public good provision, however, habituation alters the second-best analogue to the Samuelson condition also when the degrees of habituation in private and public consumption coincide.

2016 jährte sich das Erscheinen des Artikels von John Maurice Clark mit dem in der Überschrift genannten Titel im Journal of Political Economy zum hundertsten Mal. Clark legt in diesem Artikel seine Vorstellungen zur Entwicklung einer „economics of responsibility“ und zur Wahrnehmung von „responsibility in the economy“ dar. Diese Ideen werden hier vorgestellt und die Rezeptionsgeschichte des Artikels in ausgewählten Forschungsgebieten skizziert. Clarks Artikel ist ein wichtiger Beitrag zur Diskussion der ökonomischen Verantwortung und damit eines Themas, das in der Wirtschaftswissenschaft und in der Wirtschafts- und Unternehmensethik Beachtung finden sollte.

The causes and consequences of the intergenerational persistence of inequality are a topic of great interest among various fields in economics. However, until now, issues of data availability have restricted a broader and cross- national perspective on the topic. Based on rich sets of harmonized household survey data, we contribute to filling this gap computing time series for several indexes of relative and absolute intergenerational education mobility for 18 Latin American countries over 50 years, and making them publicly available. We find that intergenerational mobility has been rising in Latin America, on average. This pattern seems to be driven by the high upward mobility of children from low-educated families; at the same time, there is substantial immobility at the top of the distribution. Significant cross- country differences are observed and are associated with income inequality, poverty, economic growth, public educational expenditures and assortative mating.

Due to its extraordinary explanatory power for individual behavior, the interest in the concept of locus of control (LOC) has increased substantially within applied economic research. But, even though LOC has been found to affect economic behavior in many ways, the reliability of these findings is at risk as they commonly rely on the assumption that LOC is stable over the life course. While absolute stability has been generally rejected, the extent to which LOC and thus personality changes is, nonetheless, strongly debated. We contribute to this discussion by analyzing the effect of unemployment on LOC. Based on German panel data, we apply a difference-in-difference approach by using an involuntary job loss as trigger for unemployment. Overall, we find a significant shift in stated LOC due to unemployment. Because the effect is observable during unemployment only and not heterogeneous with respect to individual characteristics or unemployment duration, we conclude that only the stated LOC is biased during unemployment but the underlying personality trait itself is not affected.

We investigate how personal income taxes affect the portfolio share of personal wealth that entrepreneurs invest in their own business. In a reformulation of the standard portfolio choice model that allows for underreporting of private business income to tax authorities, we show that a fall in the tax rate may increase investment in risky entrepreneurial business equity at the intensive margin, but decrease entrepreneurial investment at the extensive margin. To test these hypotheses, we use household survey panel data for Germany eliciting the personal wealth composition in detail in 2002, 2007, and 2012. We analyze the effects of personal income taxes on the portfolio shares of six asset classes of private households, including private business equity. In a system of simultaneous demand equations in first differences, we identify the tax effects by an instrumental variables approach exploiting tax reforms during our observation period. To account for selection into entrepreneurship, we use changes in entry regulation into skilled trades. Estimation results are consistent with the predictions of our theoretical model. An important policy insight is that lower taxes drive out businesses that are viable only due to tax avoidance or evasion, but increase investment in private businesses that are also worthwhile in the absence of taxes.

This study uses German social security records to provide novel evidence about the heterogeneity in life expectancy by lifetime earnings and, additionally, documents the distributional implications of this earnings-related heterogeneity. We find a strong association between lifetime earnings and life expectancy at age 65 and show that the longevity gap is increasing across cohorts. For West German men born 1926-28, the longevity gap between top and bottom decile amounts to about 4 years (about 30%). This gap increases to 7 years (almost 50%) for cohorts 1947-49. We extend our analysis to the household context and show that lifetime earnings are also related to the life expectancy of the spouse. The heterogeneity in life expectancy has sizable and relevant distributional consequences for the pension system: when accounting for heterogeneous life expectancy, we find that the German pension system is regressive despite a strong contributory link. We show that the internal rate of return of the pension system increases with lifetime earnings. Finally, we document an increase of the regressive structure across cohorts, which is consistent with the increasing longevity gap.

Auf den Daten einer systematischen Literaturrecherche und des Forschungsverbundprojekts „Beatmungspflege@Zuhause (Bea@Home)“ als qualitative Fallstudie basierend, untersuchen wir die Auswirkungen von derzeitig erkennbaren sowie zukünftig möglichen Governancestrukturen und –mechanismen auf verschiedene Versorgungssituationen und die beteiligten Akteure. Im Fokus steht dabei das im Rahmen des Forschungsverbundprojekts „Bea@Home“ entwickelte, prototypisch umgesetzte und evaluierte integrierte, IT- unterstützte Versorgungskonzept für langzeitbeatmete Patienten in Deutschland. Da die Diffusion von integrierten, IT-unterstützten Versorgungsmodellen immer wichtiger wird, um den aktuellen Herausforderungen des deutschen Gesundheitswesens (demographischer Wandel, steigende Anzahl chronischer Krankheiten und multimorbider Patienten, zunehmender Fachkräftemangel an Fachärzten und Pflegekräften, (medizinischer/informations-) technologischer Fortschritt) geeignet begegnen zu können, besteht ein zunehmender Bedarf, die Auswirkungen von Governancestrukturen und –mechansimen auf die Versorgung zu verstehen. In dem Diskussionsbeitrag beschreiben und analysieren wir sowohl die derzeitige Versorgungssituation mit getrennten Versorgungssektoren als auch drei Vertragsmodelle eines zukünftig möglichen intersektoral- integrierten, IT-unterstützten Versorgungskonzepts für langzeitbeatmete Patienten in Deutschland.

We analyze the long-run growth effects of automation in the canonical overlapping generations framework. While automation implies constant returns to capital within this model class (even in the absence of technological progress), we show that it does not have the potential to lead to positive long-growth. The reason is that automation suppresses wages, which are the only source of investment because of the demographic structure of the overlapping generations model. This result stands in sharp contrast to the effects of automation in the representative agent setting, where positive long-run growth is feasible because agents can invest out of their wage income and out of their asset income. We also analyze the effects of a robot tax that has featured prominently in the policy debate on automation and show that it could raise the capital stock and per capita output at the steady state. However, the robot tax cannot induce a takeoff toward positive long-run growth.

How can we assess the welfare of a society, its evolution over time and predict its change due to particular policy interventions? One way is to use survey-based welfare indicators such as the OECD Better Life Index. It invites people to weight a variety of quality of life indicators according to their individual preferences. 11 broad dimensions aggregate these indicators. Our experiment shows that people do not provide consistent ratings across differently labelled dimensions that embed the same indicators. They also do not adjust the rating of equally named dimensions changing sets of indicators. These results show that survey-based measures might suffer from strong embedding effects and, as a result, may fail to measure citizens’ true preferences for the indicators.

While recurring and regular variations of weather conditions are implicitly addressed by standard seasonal adjustment procedures of economic time series, extraordinary weather outcomes are not. We propose a way of measuring aggregate abnormal weather conditions based on available local measurements and a straightforward regression-based framework to analyze their impact on German monthly total industrial and construction-sector production data, and find noticeable effects. In the historical –and seasonally adjusted– construction sector growth data the extra explanatory power of the weather regressors over a benchmark univariate autoregressive model even exceeds 50% of the variation. The estimated effects of weather deviations can be subtracted from the already seasonally adjusted data to obtain (seasonally as well as) weather adjusted series, which might capture economic developments better. The estimated adjustments are quantitatively relevant also for aggregate output (GDP).

Among a variety of small area estimation methods, one popular approach for the estimation of linear and non-linear indicators is the empirical best predictor. However, parameter estimation using standard maximum likelihood methods is not possible, when the dependent variable of the underlying nested error regression model, is censored to specific intervals. This is often the case for income variables. Therefore, this work proposes an estimation method, which enables the estimation of the regression parameters of the nested error regression model using interval censored data. The introduced method is based on the stochastic expectation maximization algorithm. Since the stochastic expectation maximization method relies on the Gaussian assumptions of the error terms, transformations are incorporated into the algorithm to handle departures from normality. The estimation of the mean squared error of the empirical best predictors is facilitated by a parametric bootstrap which captures the additional uncertainty coming from the interval censored dependent variable. The validity of the proposed method is validated by extensive model-based simulations.

Auf den Daten einer systematischen Literaturrecherche und des Forschungsverbundprojekts „Beatmungspflege@Zuhause (Bea@Home)“ als qualitative Fallstudie basierend, untersuchen wir die Auswirkungen von derzeitig erkennbaren sowie zukünftig möglichen Governancestrukturen und –mechanismen auf verschiedene Versorgungssituationen und die beteiligten Akteure. Im Fokus steht dabei das im Rahmen des Forschungsverbundprojekts „Bea@Home“ entwickelte, prototypisch umgesetzte und evaluierte integrierte, IT- unterstützte Versorgungskonzept für langzeitbeatmete Patienten in Deutschland. Da die Diffusion von integrierten, IT-unterstützten Versorgungsmodellen immer wichtiger wird, um den aktuellen Herausforderungen des deutschen Gesundheitswesens (demographischer Wandel, steigende Anzahl chronischer Krankheiten und multimorbider Patienten, zunehmender Fachkräftemangel an Fachärzten und Pflegekräften, (medizinischer/informations-) technologischer Fortschritt) geeignet begegnen zu können, besteht ein zunehmender Bedarf, die Auswirkungen von Governancestrukturen und –mechansimen auf die Versorgung zu verstehen. In dem Diskussionsbeitrag beschreiben und analysieren wir sowohl die derzeitige Versorgungssituation mit getrennten Versorgungssektoren als auch drei Vertragsmodelle eines zukünftig möglichen intersektoral- integrierten, IT-unterstützten Versorgungskonzepts für langzeitbeatmete Patienten in Deutschland.