We exploit the 1996 reform of the German child benefit program to identify the causal effect of child benefits on fertility. Generally, the reform increased child benefits. However, the exact amount of the increase varied by household income and sibship size. We use this heterogeneity of the...

Law makers increasingly try to capitalize on individuals having acquired knowledge of corporate crimes or other misconduct by inducing them to blow the whistle. In a laboratory experiment we measure the effectiveness of incentives on the willingness to report such misconduct to a sanctioning...

This paper analyzes the effects of different wage cyclicalities on labor market flow dynamics at the establishment level. We derive a model that allows for heterogeneous wage cyclicalities across firms over the business cycle and confront the theoretical results with the new AWFP dataset, which...

We investigate, if it pays off for a company to invest into complex swing option algorithms. We first introduce least squares Monte Carlo as a complex valuation algorithm and explain in detail how it works. Using a simulation study and two backtest scenarios we compare the output of this method...

Law makers increasingly try to capitalize on individuals having acquired knowledge of corporate crimes or other misconduct by inducing them to blow the whistle. In a laboratory experiment we measure the effectiveness of incentives on the willingness to report such misconduct to a sanctioning...

Partial cointegration is a weakening of cointegration that allows for the "cointegrating" process to contain a random walk and a mean-reverting component. We derive its representation in state space, provide a maximum likelihood based estimation routine, and a suitable likelihood ratio test....

Law makers increasingly try to capitalize on individuals having acquired knowledge of corporate crimes or other misconduct by inducing them to blow the whistle. In a laboratory experiment we measure the effectiveness of incentives on the willingness to report such misconduct to a sanctioning...

We develop a multivariate statistical arbitrage strategy based on vine copulas - a highly flexible instrument for linear and nonlinear multivariate dependence modeling. In an empirical application on the S&P 500, we find statistically and economically significant returns of 9.25 percent p.a. and...

This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate the macroeconomic effects of the Hartz IV reform in Germany, which reduced the generosity of long-term unemployment benefits. We use a model with different unemployment durations, where the reform initiates both a partial effect and an equilibrium...

This study investigates the interplay between personality traits, cognitive ability, marriage and the gender wage gap for West Germany by using data from the GSOEP. The findings indicate that personality traits in the form of the five factors of personality account for 11% of the total gender...