We quantify the private and fiscal lifetime returns to higher education in Germany accounting for the redistribution through the tax-and-transfer system, cohort effects, and the effect of income pooling within households. For this purpose we build a dynamic microsimulation model that simulates individual life cycles of a young German cohort in terms of several key variables, such as employment, earnings, and household formation. To estimate the returns to higher education, we link our dynamic microsimulation model to a tax-benefit simulator that allows converting gross wages into disposable incomes. On average, we find private and fiscal returns that are substantially higher than current market interest rates. However, analyzing the distribution of returns we also find that there is a considerable share of young adults for whom we forecast vocational training, the alternative to higher education, to be financially more rewarding. We demonstrate how the taxtransfer system and income pooling within couple households affect private returns and decompose the fiscal returns into its major components.

In railway transportation, each train needs to have a timetable that specifies which track at which time will be occupied by it. This task can be addressed by automatization techniques both in generating a timetable and in optimizing an existing one. In this paper, we give an overview on the state of the art of these techniques. We study the computation of a technically valid slot for a train that guarantees a (short) spatial and temporal way through the network. Furthermore, the construction of a cyclic timetable where trains operate e.g. every 60 minutes, and the simultaneous construction of timetables for multiple trains are considered in this paper. Finally, timetables also need to be robust against minor delays. We will review the state of the art in the literature for these aspects of railway timetabling with respect to models, solution algorithms, complexity results and applications in practice.

This paper empirically investigates the role of long-term inflation expectations for the monetary transmission mechanism. In contrast to earlier studies, we confirm that U.S. long-term inflation expectations respond significantly to a monetary policy shock. In line with a re-anchoring channel of monetary policy, we find that long-term inflation expectations play an important role for the transmission of monetary policy shocks to the rate of inflation. Our results are robust with respect to the identification strategy and alternative monetary policy indicators applied during the zero lower bound period.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has adopted a mixture of conventional and unconventional tools in order to achieve its mandate of price stability in the current low-inflation, low-interest-rate scenario. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a taxonomy of the ECB’s policy toolkit and by evaluating its implications on price stability and the anchoring of inflation expectations. I carry out my analysis based on a high-frequency identification and the estimation of a large Bayesian Vector Autoregression. I find evidence of re-anchored expectations as response to quantitative easing and forward guidance, i.e. forecasters revise their long-run expectations upwards. Consequently, inflation increases, which stresses the crucial role of expectations for the transmission of monetary policy.

This paper develops a two-step inference procedure to test for a local one-for-one relation of contemporaneous jumps in high-frequency financial data corrupted by market microstructure noise. The first step develops a new bivariate Lee-Mykland jump test for pre-averaged, intra-day returns. If a jump is detected in at least one of the two assets, then the second step tests for equal jump sizes. We apply the test procedure to pairs of nominal and inflationindexed government bond yields at monetary policy announcements in the U.S., U.K., and Euro Area. The analysis provides new high-frequency evidence about the anchoring of inflation expectations and central banks’ ability to push a measure of inflation expectations towards their inflation target.

The Vehicle Scheduling Problem (VSP) is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem arising for bus companies in public transport. The objective is to cover a given set of timetabled trips by a set of buses at minimum costs. The Electric Vehicle Scheduling Problem (E-VSP) complicates traditional bus scheduling by considering electric buses with limited driving ranges. To compensate these limitations, detours to charging stations become necessary for charging the vehicle batteries during operations. To save costs, the charging stations must be located within the road network in such a way that required deadhead trips are as short as possible or even redundant. For solving the traditional VSP, a variety of solution approaches exist capable of solving even real-world instances with large networks and timetables to optimality. In contrast, the problem complexity increases significantly when considering limited ranges and chargings of the batteries. For this reason, there mainly exist solution approaches for the E-VSP which are based von heuristic procedures as exact methods do not provide solutions within a reasonable time. In this paper, we present a literature review of solution approaches for scheduling electric vehicles in public transport and location planning of charging stations. Since existing work differ in addition to the solution methodology also in the mapping of electric vehicles' technical aspects, we pay particular attention to these characteristics. To conclude, we provide a perspective for potential further research.

Temporary employees rank lower than permanent employees on various measures of mental and physical health, including well-being. In parallel, much research has shown that the relationship between age and well-being traces an approximate U-shape, with a nadir in midlife. Temporary employment may well have different associations with well-being across the lifespan, likely harming people in midlife more than at the start of their working lives. Using over twenty years of the German Socio-economic panel (SOEP), this investigation considers the relationship between temporary employment, age and well-being. In doing so, it both sheds new light on the relationship between temporary employment and well-being, and explores a reason for the oft-found U-shaped relationship between age and well-being. The results show that temporary employment deepens the U-shape in midlife, and that this result holds when many socioeconomic factors as well as the industry, region, cohort, personality, employment security and job worries are taken into account. Furthermore, the investigation considers transitions between permanent and temporary employment and uses these to assess causation and selection.

This paper examines the role of life satisfaction in the labor market behavior of workers receiving welfare benefits while working. Welfare stigma and other hard-to-observe factors may affect outcomes as on-the-job search and the duration until leaving welfare status. We utilize life satisfaction to track such factors. The German PASS-ADIAB dataset combines administrative process data with individual survey data offering a rich database that allows conditioning on changes in household income, time-stable individual traits, employment biographies and local labor market effects. Given a broad set of further covariates, we find that life satisfaction of in-work benefit recipients is negatively associated with job search, whereas the duration until the exit from welfare is hardly affected. Focusing on heterogeneity among workers suggests that life satisfactions’ role for choice depends on the institutional setting, rendering marginally employed workers specifically prone to life satisfaction.

This discussion paper reports and reflects on the reception of our article “Organizational path dependence: Opening the black box”, which was published in 2009 in the Academy of Management Review and granted the AMR Decade Award in 2019. While we were invited by the editor of the journal to discuss the criticism evoked by that paper, to re-examine our original propositions in the light of advanced insights and to outline new avenues for future research on organizational path dependence, in this discussion paper we report in some detail and comment on the citation landscape of our original AMR piece.

This paper introduces a new transmission channel of banking crises where sizable cross-border bank claims on foreign countries with high domestic crisis risk enable contagion to the home economy. This asset-side channel opposes traditional views that see banking crises originating from either domestic credit booms or from cross-border borrowing. I propose a combined model that predicts banking crises using both domestic and foreign factors. For developed economies, the channel is predictive of crises irrespective of other types of capital flows, while it is entirely inactive for emerging economies. I show that policy makers can significantly enhance current early warning models by incorporating exposure-based risk from cross-border lending.

Evidence on the credibility of a central bank’s inflation target typically refers to the anchoring of survey-based measures of inflation expectations. However, both the survey question and the anchoring criteria are only loosely connected to the actual inflation target used in monetary policy practice. By using the exact wording of the ECB’s definition of price-stability, we started a representative online survey of German citizens in January 2019 that is designed to measure the time-varying credibility of the inflation target. Our results indicate that credibility has significantly decreased in our sample period, particularly in the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Interestingly, even though inflation rates in Germany have been clearly below 2% for several years, credibility has declined mainly because Germans increasingly expect that inflation will be much higher than 2% over the medium term.

One reason often put forward for South Korea’s rapid economic growth has been the rising level of educational attainment of its workforce. Correspondingly, the proportion of Koreans who complete tertiary education has also rapidly increased (and is also considerably higher than the OECD average). Such increases raise the possibility of overeducation if the amount of jobs which require such education do not increase at a similar pace. Among the consequences of overeducation are reduced life satisfaction and underutilised human capital. Given that Korean females are better educated than males, and they also face more discrimination in the labour market, the consequences of overeducation are likely to differ by gender. Using Korean panel data and both a subjective and objective measure of overeducation, the results are consistent with females having lower aspirations despite their high levels of education, and indicate that a more female friendly labour market could address the country’s currently underutilised human capital, for the benefit of the females themselves, as well as males, and the Korean economy.

This paper explores the impact of antiquity on capitalism through the finance-growth nexus. We define antiquity as the length of established statehood (i.e., state history) and agricultural years. We argue that extractive institutions and deeply entrenched interest groups may prevail in societies with ancient roots. The paper offers an in-depth analysis of one particular channel through which extractive institutions may impair economic growth: the finance-growth channel. We propose that in countries with ancient statehood, the financial sector might be captured by powerful economic and political elites leading to a distorted finance-growth relationship. We build a model in which the equilibrium relationship between companies and banks depends on the entrenchment of the economic elites and the length of established statehood. To validate our argument empirically, we run panel-threshold regressions on a global sample between 1970 and 2014. The regression results are supportive and show that financial development – measured by the outstanding amount of credit – is negative for growth in states with ancient institutional origins, while it is positive in relatively younger ones.

In this paper, we examine the economic and political effects of the breakup of East Prussia into what is today Poland, Russia and Lithuania. We explore the dissolution of imperial regions into the boundaries of modern states, adding new insights to the research on the imperial legacies. We expect that German imperial legacies in the form of advanced economic institutions, and specifically East Prussian legacies of nationalistic and conservative political preferences, persist in the territories of former East Prussia in Poland, Russia and Lithuania compared to neighboring regions in their respective countries. We find no pattern of persistence in former East Prussian territories of contemporary Poland, whereas East Prussian persistence appears to be robust in Lithuania. We find strong evidence for the comparative persistence of political preferences in the Kaliningrad region, whereas we observe no economic spillovers. Drawing evidence from West German electoral data in the aftermath of World War II, we find that the presence of East Prussian refugees is conducive to conservative and nationalist support in the FRG. Hence, the East Prussian legacy relates primarily to the persistence of political preferences and migrating agents.

In this paper, we examine the gender specific impact of discriminatory taxation on fairness perception and individual labor supply decisions. Using the controlled environment of an experimental laboratory, we manipulate both distributional as well as procedural justice of taxation between subjects. We violate distributional fairness through the random application of tax rates, while procedural justice is broken by levying discriminatory tax rates based on taxpayer gender. For both inequality in outcome as well as discrimination, we find strong differences in reactions between male and female participants. Male participants perceived gender discriminatory taxation as unfair in and of itself. Female participants perceived random taxation as well as gender discriminatory taxation to be unfair, as long as they ended up with the higher tax rate. The perceived fairness strongly drove (did not affect) male (female) participants’ labor supply. Taken both subgroups together, while mere outcome inequality did not influence labor supply decisions significantly, we find evidence of a negative effect of gender-based discrimination on labor supply.

Ungleichheitsstudien basieren in der Regel auf Daten zu Jahres- oder Monatseinkommen, um die Verteilung ökonomischer Ressourcen zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt im Querschnitt einer Bevölkerung zu bestimmen. Analysen auf Jahres- oder Monatsquerschnitten können jedoch ein unvollständiges Bild liefern, da sie oft nur erwerbstätige Individuen betrachten und sich die individuellen Positionen in der Einkommensverteilung über das Erwerbsleben einer Person ändern. Ein umfassenderes Bild bieten Lebenserwerbseinkommen. Die Analyse von Lebenserwerbseinkommen setzen Informationen über vollständige Erwerbsbiografien voraus. Informationen, die wenn überhaupt nur für spezielle Bevölkerungsgruppen in Form von administrativen Daten der Sozialversicherung vorliegen. Um eine geeignete Datengrundlage zur Analyse von Lebenserwerbseinkommen der gesamten Bevölkerung zu schaffen, nutzen wir eine dynamische Mikrosimulation auf Basis des Sozioökonomischen Panels um vollständige Erwerbsbiografien für die Kohorten 1964 bis 1985 bis ins Jahr 2045 zu konstruieren. Wir können zeigen, dass sich der Unterschied zwischen den Lebenserwerbseinkommen Gering- und Hochqualifizierter Männer in Preisen von 2015 auf über eine Million Euro beläuft, Geringqualifizierte verdiene im Lauf ihres Lebens nur knapp 40 Prozent des Erwerbseinkommens eines Hochqualifizierten. Gleichzeitig finden wir, dass zwischen 1981 und 1985 geborene Frauen im Durchschnitt über den Lebensverlauf hinweg nur rund 55 Prozent der Erwerbseinkommen der Männer verdienen.

This paper seeks to explain the collapse of the market for bankers’ acceptances between 1931 and 1932 by tracing the doctrinal foundations of Federal Reserve policy and regulations back to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. I argue that a determinant of the collapse of the market was Carter Glass’ and Henry P. Willis’ insistence on one specific interpretation of the “real bills doctrine”, the idea that the financial system should be organized around commercial bills. The Glass- Willis doctrine, which stressed non-intervention and the self-liquidating nature of real bills, created doubts about the eligibility of frozen acceptances for purchase and rediscount at the Reserve Banks and caused accepting banks to curtail their supply to the market. The Glass-Willis doctrine is embedded in a broader historical narrative that links Woodrow Wilson’s approach to foreign policy with the collapse of the international order in 1931.

This paper studies how information control affects incentives for collusion and optimal organizational structures in principal-supervisor-agent relationships. I consider a model in which the principal designs the supervisor's signal on the productive agent's private information and the supervisor and agent may collude. I show that the principal optimally delegates the interaction with the agent to the supervisor if either the supervisor's budget is large or the value of production is small. The principal prefers direct communication with the supervisor and agent if the supervisor's budget is sufficiently small and the value of production is high.

This paper studies the welfare effects of wholesale price discrimination between downstream firms operating under different regulatory systems. I model a monopolistic intermediate good market in which production cost differences between downstream firms may be due to regulatory or technological asymmetries. Price discrimination reduces regulatory distortions but may lower productive efficiency. Therefore, price discrimination increases welfare if regulation is the dominant source of cost differences. This provides a novel welfare rationale for exempting wholesale markets from the recent ban on geo-blocking in the EU.