In industries like health care, public transport or call centers a shift-based system ensures permanent availability of employees for covering needed services. The resource allocation problem – assigning employees to shifts – is known as personnel scheduling in literature and often aims at minimizing staffing costs. Working in shifts, though, impacts employees’ private lives which adds to the problem of increasing staff shortage in recent years. Therefore, more and more effort is spent on incorporating fairness into scheduling approaches in order to increase employees’ satisfaction. This paper presents a literature review of approaches for personnel scheduling considering fairness aspects. Since fairness is not a quantitative objective, but can be evaluated from different point of views, a large number of fairness measurements exists in the literature. Furthermore, perspective (group vs individual fairness) or time horizon (short-term vs long-term fairness) are often considered very differently. To conclude, we show that a uniform definition and approach for considering fairness in personnel scheduling is challenging and point out gaps for future research.

Ein moderner und nachhaltiger Sozialstaat braucht eine gesunde Mischung aus staatlicher Fürsorge und Eigenverantwortung. Die Hartz-Reformen versuchten, die richtige Mischung mit dem Prinzip des Förderns und Forderns in der Grundsicherung herzustellen. Zahlreiche Menschen sind seither nicht mehr länger auf staatliche Fürsorge angewiesen, sondern können wieder für sich selbst zu sorgen. Doch zeigen sich zunehmend auch Schwächen eines in die Jahre gekommenen Grundsicherungssystems, insbesondere an den Schnittstellen zwischen seinen unterschiedlichen Instrumenten. In dieser Arbeit wird eine neue Grundsicherungsarchitektur entwickelt, die das vorhandene Instrumentarium der Sozialpolitik besser nutzt und aufeinander abstimmt. Sie setzt dabei an einer ursachenorientierten Existenzsicherung an. Drei Eckpunkte charakterisieren das neue System. (1) Eine zu versteuernde Kindergrundsicherung, die Familien stärker als bislang unterstützt, (2) eine Wohnbedarfssicherung und (3) eine Regelbedarfssicherung für Erwerbsfähige. Die neuen Grundsicherungsleistungen sind so miteinander verzahnt, dass die Schnittstellenprobleme nicht mehr auftreten und zugleich der Anreiz zur Selbsthilfe gegenüber dem jetzigen System deutlich gestärkt wird.

The resource curse literature’s main lesson is that developing and natural resourcerich countries should save most of their oil windfalls in foreign currency. Moreover, the political cycle literature’s recent contributions predict stronger cycles in these countries. This paper investigates how political cycles might explain low oil windfall savings. Using Venezuela’s case, the paper argues that power concentration during periods of oil price explosiveness leads to increased public investment in prestige projects aimed at increasing the incumbent’s – or his party’s – re-election probabilities. The article backs the argument analyzing the Chavista democratic period of 1999- 2016. It also identifies parallels with Venezuela’s 1970-1988 period.

We evaluate the role played by loan supply shocks in the decline of investment and industrial production during the Great Depression in Germany from 1927 to 1932. We identify loan supply shocks in the context of a time varying parameter vector autoregression with stochastic volatility. Our results indicate that credit constraints were a significant driver of industrial production between 1927 and 1932, supporting the view that a structurally weak banking sector was an important contributor to the German Great Depression. We find further that loan supply shocks were an important driver of investment in the early phase of the depression, between 1927 and 1929, but not between 1930 and 1932. We suggest possible explanations for this puzzle and directions for future research.

Data revisions to national accounts pose a serious challenge to policy decision making. Well-behaved revisions should be unbiased, small and unpredictable. This paper shows that revisions to German national accounts are biased, large and predictable. Moreover, using filtering techniques designed to process data subject to revisions, the real-time forecasting performance of initial releases can be increased by up to 17%. For total real GDP growth, however, the initial release is an optimal forecast. Yet, given the results for disaggregated variables, the averaging-out of biases and inefficiencies at the aggregate GDP level appears to be good luck rather than good forecasting.

Was the collapse of world trade between 1928 and 1937 caused by higher transport costs, increased protectionism or the collapse of the gold standard? Using recent advances in the estimation of gravity equations, I examine the partial and general equilibrium effects of bilateral distance, international borders, and the payment system on trade. My results suggest that had average tariff and non-tariff trade barriers remained at their 1928 level, total international trade would have been 64.6% higher in 1937. Had the gold standard not collapsed in 1931 and had the British Empire not departed to establish its own currency and trade blocs, international trade would have been 3% larger. Finally, had transport costs remained at their 1928 level, global trade would not have been significantly different nine years on. These results are supported by over 6,000 new hand-collected observations of ad-valorem ocean freight rates for cotton, which show an average increase of only 1.2 percentage points between 1928 and 1936. When expressed as an index, the movement of freight rates mirrors the evolution of the elasticity of trade to distance over the period.

We introduce a Divisia monetary aggregate for the euro area that accounts for the heterogeneity across member countries both, in terms of interest rates and the decomposition of monetary assets. In most of the euro area countries, the difference between the growth rates of the country-specific Divisia aggregate and its simple sum counterpart is particularly pronounced before recessions. The results obtained from a panel probit model confirm that the divergence between the Divisia and the simple sum aggregate has a significant predictive content for recessions in euro area countries.

Using information on desired and actual hours of work, we formulate a discrete choice model of constrained labor supply. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and the microsimulation model STSM, we find that hours and participation elasticities are substantially smaller than those in the conventional model. We evaluate two reforms for Germany. Both redistribute to the working poor. The first reform is financed through an increase in the effective marginal tax rate for welfare recipients, the second through an increase in taxes. The first reform is desirable with equal weights, the second if the social planner has substantial redistributive taste.

Do sanctions strengthen the targeted regime? I analyze the 2014 imposition of Western sanctions on Russia and its impact on voting. The US and the EU introduced targeted measures against Russian entities and individuals related to Putin’s regime. Using polling station-level data I investigate whether Putin gained relatively more support among those local constituencies which were geographically close to a sanctioned firm. I find a significant effect of targeted sanction imposition on the vote share in presidential elections between 2012 and 2018. Putin gained 1.54 percentage points at those polling stations that had a sanctioned firm in immediate vicinity. Targeted sanctions imposition also affected voter turnout. The effect on voting can be explained as rally-around-the-flag in the face of sanctions, as long as voters did not endure economic losses through a decline in some sanctioned firms’ economic performance.

In this paper, we argue that the ECB’s unconventional monetary policy announcements have generated significant spillover effects in Russia and Eastern Europe. The hypothesis is tested using OLS estimations of event-based regressions on monetary policy event dummies and seven financial variables in eleven East European countries including Russia. Overall, the empirical results associate the ECB’s unconventional policy announcements with the appreciation of East European currencies, rising stock market indices as well as falling long-term government bond yields and lower sovereign CDS spreads in Eastern Europe and Russia. Notably, bilateral integration with the eurozone is a key determinant of the strength of spillovers, with spillovers strongest in non-euro EU countries and weakest in non-EU East European countries. Interestingly, we find differentiated strength of spillovers to Russia compared to other non-EU East European countries, which we attribute to its fixed exchange rate regime. Lastly, we test for the presence of the portfolio rebalancing and confidence transmission channels.

A comprehensive empirical study is performed to measure the performance of a Blockchain-based Certi cation Storage System in Hyperledger Fabric. This work is based on a proof of concept in the aviation industry and fol- lows a Technical Risk & E cacy evaluation strategy to determine the utility derived from the use of the artefact. Relevant tuning parameters for per- formance and scalability as well as bottlenecks are identi ed. The impact of con guration parameters such as blocksize, transaction arrival rate and number of concurrent users on the systems performance is investigated. Ob- servations show that demands at throughput above system limits lead to transaction failures. Contributed are a repeatable process to performance sensitivity analysis and recommendations for con guring a Blockchain-based Certi cation Storage System for stable but high performance. The results can be used as a basis for optimizing the performance of similar systems.

Seit der Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland haben verschiedene Megatrends die Entwicklungen auf dem deutschen Arbeitsmarkt maßgeblich beeinflusst. Insbesondere die voranschreitende Globalisierung hat zur weiteren Öffnung der deutschen Volkwirtschaft geführt und den sektoralen Strukturwandel, das heißt den Wandel von der Industrie- zur Dienstleistungsgesellschaft beschleunigt. Gleichzeitig hat das durchschnittliche Wirtschaftswachstum seit den 1950er-Jahren bedeutend nachgelassen. Auf dem Arbeitsmarkt wurden zudem schon Jahrzehnte vor der Einführung der Hartz-Reformen Flexibilisierungsmaßnahmen durchgesetzt, um einem Anstieg der Arbeitslosigkeit entgegenzuwirken. Insgesamt unterlag der Arbeitsmarkt in den vergangenen 60 Jahren einem starken Wandel. Wir identifizieren Gewinner und Verlierer dieser Entwicklung in einer multidimensionalen Betrachtung der Entwicklung in den Bereichen Bildung, Arbeitsmarkbeteiligung, Qualifikationsniveau der Beschäftigung und Einkommensentwicklung. Die Analyse wird mit harmonisierten Mikrodaten (Mikrozensus 1962-2013) auf Individualebene und auf dem Haushaltslevel durchgeführt.

Whether couples pool their resources and behave like a unit or spend their income individually is crucial for social and tax policy. In this paper, I provide a test of the income pooling hypothesis using administrative cross-sectional survey data on expenditures and individual incomes of couple households in Germany. The test is performed within the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS) framework, which allows for an endogenous expenditure budget and endogenous individual income contribution shares in an instrumental variables approach. Although the hypothesis is broadly rejected, there are significant differences regarding the marital status, the presence of at least one child in the household and whether the household is located in a former West or East German federal state. Married couples and couples with children are closer to the acceptance of the hypothesis than unmarried couples without children.

The previous literature has shown that children who enter school at a more advanced age outperform their younger classmates on competency tests taken between kindergarten and Grade 10. This study analyzes whether these effects of school starting age continue into adulthood. Based on data on math and language test scores for adults in Germany, the identification of the long-term causal effects exploits state and year variation in school entry regulations. The results show that there are no effects of school starting age (SSA) on competencies in math and

Evidence suggests that people evaluate outcomes relative to expectations. I analyze this expectation-based loss aversion [Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2009)] in the context of dynamic and static auctions, where the reference point is given by the (endogenous) equilibrium outcome. If agents update their reference point during the auction, the arrival of information crucially affects equilibrium behavior. Consequently, I show that- even with independent private values|the Vickrey auction yields strictly higher revenue than the English auction, violating the well known revenue equivalence. Thus, dynamic loss aversion o ers a novel explanation for empirically observed differences between these auction formats.