Empirical evidence indicates that high oil price volatility has a dampening effect on output in countries that import commodities. Many countries, however, gain important revenues from commodity exports. This paper investigates the output effects of commodity price volatility in commodity exporting countries accounting for both oil and non-oil commodities. To that aim, we construct country specific commodity price indices for a sample of oil and non-oil commodity exporters. We find a significant negative impact of price volatility on real output for oil exporters. Our results for exporters of other commodities, however, suggest that the volatility effect is a peculiar feature of oil and not generalizable to a broad basket of commodities.

Der Aufsatz setzt sich mit dem empirischen Befund auseinander, dass die unterschiedliche Behandlung der kleinen und der großen Gemeinden beim Zensus 2011 zu unterschiedlich hohen Differenzen zwischen Bevölkerungsfortschreibung und Zensus führt. Dabei weisen die großen Gemeinden mit mehr als 10.000 Einwohnern eine im Schnitt um 1.5 Prozentpunkte niedrigere Zensuszahl als in der Bevölkerungsfortschreibung aus. Dieser von Christensen et al. (2015) gezeigte Befund wird mit einem erweiterten nichtparametrischen Analyseinstrumentarium für jedes einzelne Bundesland separat re-analysiert. Hierbei zeigt sich in drei Bundesländern kein derartiger Methodeneffekt des ab 10.000 Einwohnern benutzten Stichprobenverfahrens. Der Aufsatz untersucht die Frage, warum ein scheinbar so allgemeiner Methodeneffekt sich in drei Bundesländern nicht zeigt. Es zeigt sich, dass plausible Argumente darauf hinweisen, dass die Einwohnermelderegister in diesen drei Bundesländern besser geführt werden als in den anderen Bundesländern. In dieser Sichtweise deckt das Stichprobenverfahren systematische Mängel der Einwohnermelderegister auf, während das formal kaum spezifizierte Klärungsverfahren, das bei den kleinen Gemeinden angewendet wird, diesen Mangel nicht aufdeckt. In diesem Sinne können sich die großen Gemeinden nicht über eine Benachteiligung bei der Schätzung ihrer amtlichen Einwohnerzahl beklagen, da der gezeigte Effekt einem unpräzisen Meldewesen zuzuschreiben ist. Allerdings kommen die kleinen Gemeinden bei dem "Klärungsverfahren" im Schnitt zu gut weg.

A growing literature stresses the importance of the “global financial cycle”, a common global movement in asset prices and credit conditions, for emerging market economies (EMEs). It is argued that one of the key drivers of this global cycle is monetary policy in the U.S., which is transmitted through international capital flows. In this paper, we add to this discussion and investigate empirically whether U.S. unconventional monetary policy (UMP) between 2008 and 2014 is related to financial conditions in EMEs, and, whether it is transmitted through portfolio flows. We find that a U.S. UMP shock significantly increases portfolio flows from the U.S. to EMEs for almost two quarters. The rise in inflows is accompanied by a persistent increase in several real and financial variables in EMEs. Moreover, we find that, on average, EMEs reacted with an easing of their own monetary policy stance in response to an expansionary U.S. shock.

Wir gehen der Frage nach, ob die gegenwärtige Vermögensungleichheit in Deutschland auf eine Dominanz von Erbschaften im oberen Bereich der Verteilung zurückzuführen ist. Auf Basis der PHF‐Daten finden wir, dass die Vermögen der Deutschen zu etwa zwei Dritteln auf Eigenleistung und zu etwa einem Drittel auf Erbschaft zurückgehen. Diese Proportion verändert sich entlang der Vermögensverteilung wenig. Insbesondere nimmt die relative Bedeutung von Erbschaften mit zunehmendem Privatvermögen nicht systematisch zu. Diese Ergebnisse sind robust hinsichtlich unterschiedlicher Altersgruppen, Vermögensdefinitionen und Kapitalisierungsmethoden für die unteren 99 %.

Drei Probleme der Risikobewertung bei ö¤entlichen Investitionen werden behandelt. Erstes Thema ist die Frage nach der richtigen Diskontrate bei unsicheremWirtschaftswach- stum. Zentrales Ergebnis ist, dass die übliche Ramsey-Gleichung bei Unsicherheit keine Gültigkeit mehr hat und einer bestimmten Korrektur bedarf. Die zweite Frage betri¤t die Bewertung riskanter Investitionsprojekte mittels Sicherheitsäquivalente. Sowohl für kleine als auch für große Risiken werden praktikable Ansätze für die Bestimmung der Sicherheit- säquivalente vorgestellt. Das dritte Problem ist die Ermittlung des optimalen Zeitpunkts einer ö¤entlichen Investition, wenn sich die Projektunsicherheit in Zeitverlauf ändert. Es zeigt sich, dass die traditionelle Entscheidungsregel der Kosten-Nutzen-Analyse - in- vestiere, wenn der Nettogegenwartswert positiv ist - in Situationen dieser Art irreführend ist. Eine Formel der optimalen Wartezeit für die Realisierung eines Investitionsvorhabens wird dann hergeleitet.

Prior literature documents the usefulness of the DuPont disaggregation for predicting firms’ future profitability, operating income, and stock market returns. In addition, research also emphasizes the importance of earnings quality information. However, there is a lack of research examining how earnings quality affects forecasts of profitability. This paper explores whether different earnings quality factors moderate the accuracy of profitability forecasts. This study contributes to the existing literature along three dimensions. First, contrary to financial statement analysis studies, I find that changes in profit margin provide incremental information for predicting changes in future return on assets. After controlling for earnings quality factors, the incremental usefulness of this accounting signal increases significantly. Second, this paper contributes to the earnings quality literature by providing an approach as how to include this information into forecasts of profitability. In doing so, I incorporate the main drivers of earnings quality (i.e. fundamental performance and the accounting system) into profitability forecasts. Last, the paper adds to the literature on how capital market participants perceive accounting information. I document that both analysts and investors appear to efficiently incorporate earnings quality information in their investment decisions.

What began as a financial crisis in the United States in 2007–2008 quickly evolved into a massive crisis of the global real economy. We investigate the importance of the bank lending and firm borrowing channel in the international transmission of bank distress to the real economy—in particular, to real investment and labor employment by nonfinancial firms. We analyze whether and to what extent firms are able to compensate for the shortage in loan supply by switching banks and by using other types of financing. The analysis is based on a unique matched data set for Germany that contains firm-level financial statements for the 2004–2010 period together with the financial statements of each firm’s relationship bank(s). We use instrumental variable estimations in first differences to eliminate firm- and bankspecific effects. The first stage results show that banks that suffered losses due to proprietary trading activities at the onset of the financial crisis reduced their lending more strongly than non-affected banks. In the second stage, we find that firms whose relationship banks reduce credit supply downsize their real investment and labor employment significantly. This effect is larger for firms that are unable to provide much collateral. We document that firms partially offset reduced credit supply by establishing new bank relationships, using internal funds, and issuing new equity.

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme is almost distributionally neutral when looking at standard inequality measures. This is due to two offsetting effects: a progressive one stemming from the subsidy schedule and a regressive one from voluntary participation. Regressions of the participation decision suggest that a high level of household wealth significantly increases the probability of benefiting from the Riester scheme.

This paper provides new empirical insights on the elasticity of taxable income for Germany. Using a rich panel of German income tax return data, the tax reforms of 2004 and 2005 are exploited implementing a new dynamic income model. Showing and discussing potential estimation problems of the most prominent model in the literature by Gruber and Saez (2002), this dynamic model delivers significant smaller estimates of the elasticity of taxable income. The overall estimate is 0.36 and robust against a number of sensitivity checks including non linear income controls. Elasticities differ between married and single assessed taxpayers with an elasticity of 0.17 for single and 0.44 for married taxpayers. These elasticities are similar to recent German results and considerablly smaller than recent results for the US from Weber(2014).

This paper addresses the question of how firms react to tax incentives in a formula apportionment (FA) tax regime. Under FA, profits of all consolidated entities of a business group are summed and then allocated according to a formula based on FA factors. We hypothesize that firms may change the allocation of real production factors and/or manipulate the FA factor through tax avoidance strategies. Analyzing FA tax effects of the German local business tax with payroll expense as the exclusive FA factor, we find empirical evidence consistent with both hypotheses. Regarding the allocation of production factors, we observe significant tax effects on labor input at the intensive margin but not on labor input at the extensive margin. In addition, we find evidence of an indirect FA spillover effect on capital investment. Our findings on tax avoidance proxies are consistent with tax- induced manipulations of payroll expense as FA factor in order to save tax payments.

This study analyzes how risk attitudes change when individuals become parents using longitudinal data for a large and representative sample of individuals. The results show that men and women experience a considerable increase in risk aversion which already starts as early as two years before becoming a parent, is largest shortly after giving birth and disappears when the child becomes older. These findings show that parenthood leads to considerable changes in individual risk attitudes over time. Thus, analyses using risk preferences as the explanatory variable for economic outcomes should be careful in interpreting the findings as causal effects.

We study road congestion as a mechanism design problem. In our basic model we analyze the allocation of a set of drivers among two roads, one of which may be congested. An additional driver on the congestible road imposes an externality on the other drivers by increasing their travel time. Each driver is privately informed about her value of time and asked to report that value to the mechanism designer, who assigns drivers to roads. With a finite number of drivers, there is aggregate uncertainty and the efficient allocation is ex ante unknown. Setting a single Pigouvian price is then not optimal. However, the efficient allocation is implementable by a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves price schedule that lets each driver pay the externality she imposes on other drivers. This allows drivers to pay to have other drivers use the slow road instead of the congestible road. As the number of drivers becomes large, there is a single optimal Pigouvian price that leads to an efficient allocation. However, finding this price requires the mechanism designer to either know the precise distribution of the value of time or the use of our mechanism. We analyze some extensions and apply our model to various congestion problems arising in other contexts.

This paper evaluates the effects of a high school curriculum reform that was introduced in one German state on high school dropout. The reform increased the standards of the curriculum by reducing the freedom of choice in course selection (amongst other things) resulting in an increase in the level and the weekly teaching hours in the subjects German, a foreign language, mathematics and natural sciences. Using a quasi-experimental evaluation design exploiting variation across time and states, we identify the reform effect on students’ probability to graduate from high school. The results show that high school dropout rates have increased for males and females alike. However, the effect for males vanishes two years after reform implementation, while it remains persistent for females even after three years.

Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert das Zusammentreffen von Progressionsvorbehalt und Besteuerung von außerordentlichen Einkünften. Bei dieser Fallkonstellation greifen mehrere Tarifvorschriften ineinander, so dass die Berechnung der gesamten tariflichen Einkommensteuer nicht trivial erscheint. In dem vorliegenden Beitrag wird theoretisch und empirisch analysiert, ob in der beschriebenen Konstellation Tarifverwerfungen identifiziert werden können. Diese werden angenommen, wenn die Grenzsteuersätze negativ sind oder über 100% liegen. Die theoretische Analyse verdeutlicht, dass derartige arbiträre Grenzsteuersatzverläufe existieren. Anhand der empirischen Auswertung der Einkommensteuerstatistik kann gezeigt werden, dass die theoretischen Überlegungen auch in der Realität vorzufinden sind. Ferner belegt die empirische Analyse, dass das Zusammentreffen von Progressionsvorbehalt und Besteuerung von außerordentlichen Einkünften im Veranlagungsverfahren keineswegs exotisch ist. Vielmehr werden hier wohl Fälle angesprochen, in denen ein Arbeitnehmer mit Zahlung einer Abfindung aus der Berufstätigkeit ausscheidet und danach für eine gewisse Zeit noch Lohnersatzleistungen bezieht. Bei dieser Fallkonstellation muss dann aber konstatiert werden, dass sich nicht gewollte Tarifeffekte einstellen können.

Previous research argues that law expresses social values and could, therefore, influence individual behavior independently of enforcement and penalization. Using three laboratory experiments on tax avoidance and evasion, we study how legality affects individuals’ decisions. We find that, without any risk of negative financial consequences, the qualification of tax minimization as illegal versus legal reduces tax minimization considerably. Legislators can thus, in principle, affect subjects’ decisions by defining the borderline between legality and illegality. However, once we introduce potential negative financial consequences, legality does not affect tax minimization. Only if we use moral priming to increase subjects’ moral cost do we again find a legality effect on tax minimization. Overall, this demonstrates the limitations of the expressive function of law. Legality appears to be an important determinant of behavior only if we consider activities with no or low risk of negative financial consequences or if subjects are morally primed.

Health-related quality of life assessment is important in the clinical evaluation of patients with metastatic disease that may offer useful information in understanding the clinical effectiveness of a treatment. To assess if a set of explicative variables impacts on the health-related quality of life, regression models are routinely adopted. However, the interest of researchers may be focussed on modelling other parts (e.g. quantiles) of this conditional distribution. In this paper we present an approach based on M-quantile regression to achieve this goal. We applied the proposed methodology to a prospective, randomized, multi-centre clinical trial. In order to take into account the hierarchical nature of the data we extended the M-quantile regression model to a three-level random effects specification and estimated it by maximum likelihood.

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period 1993- 2010 we find that recent reforms in Germany increased work incentives at the extensive margin measured by the Participation Tax Rate (PTR), particularly for low- income individuals. Work incentives are even higher if the time horizon is extended to more than one year, pointing at an overestimation of the disincentives by standard measures. Regression analysis reveals that a decrease in the PTR increases the likelihood of taking up work significantly.

In self-reported data usually a phenomenon called `heaping' occurs, i.e. survey participants round the values of their income, weight or height to some degree. Additionally, respondents may be more prone to round off or up due to social desirability. By ignoring the heaping process a severe bias in terms of spikes and bumps is introduced when applying kernel density methods naively to the rounded data. A generalized Stochastic Expectation Maximization (SEM) approach accounting for heaping with potentially asymmetric rounding behaviour in univariate kernel density estimation is presented in this work. The introduced methods are applied to survey data of the German Socio-Economic Panel and exhibit very good performance simulations.

Nach der Einführung der Zinsschrankenregelung in 2008 ist ein EBITDA-Vortrag eingeführt worden, durch den das nicht genutzte Zinsabzugsvolumen in die folgenden fünf Wirtschaftsjahre vorgetragen wird. Durch diesen Vortrag soll die Wirkung der Zinsschranke gemildert oder vollständig vermieden werden. Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert die Wirkung dieses Vortrags auf die Steuerbelastung der Unternehmen seit seiner Implementierung unter Ausnutzung der Panelstruktur handelsrechtlicher Jahresabschlussinformationen. Auf Basis einer Mikrosimulation wird untersucht, ob der EBITDA-Vortrag eine Entlastung darstellt und die „richtigen“ Unternehmen entlastet werden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass aus fiskalischer Sicht der EBITDA-Vortrag eine Entlastung für die Unternehmen bietet. Auch aus unternehmensindividueller Sichtweise entlastet der EBITDA-Vortrag überwiegend zielgenau nach abgeleiteten Kriterien aus der Gesetzesbegründung. Unter Verwendung eines Maßstabs zur Berechnung der Steuerersparnis durch Zinsabzug wird allerdings deutlich, dass weitgehend die „falschen“ Unternehmen von der aktuell geltenden Zinsschranke getroffen werden. Der EBITDA-Vortrag hingegen entlastet tendenziell die „Richtigen“, kann jedoch entstandene Kollateralschäden nicht kompensieren.

Modern systems of official statistics require the estimation and publication of business statistics for disaggregated domains, for example, industry domains and geographical regions. Outlier robust methods have proven to be useful for small area estimation. Recently proposed outlier robust modelbased small area methods assume, however, uncorrelated random effects. Spatial dependencies, resulting from similar industry domains or geographic regions, often occur. In this paper we propose outlier robust small area methodology that allows for the presence of spatial correlation in the data. In particular, we present a robust predictive methodology that incorporates the potential spatial impact from other areas (domains) on the small area (domain) of interest. We further propose two parametric bootstrap methods for estimating the mean-squared error. Simulations indicate that the proposed methodology may lead to efficiency gains. The paper concludes with an illustrative application by using business data for estimating average labour costs in Italian provinces.