Der Aufbau des Textes folgt dem Fragebogen der Monopolkommission vom 28.1.2025. Dieser ist gegliedert in die Abteilungen: I) Allgemeine Entwicklung der Wettbewerbsbedingungen II) DB InfraGO AG III) Entwicklungen der Trassenentgelte IV) Sonstiges Die 23 Fragen der Monopolkommission sind...

Deliberative decision-making is often proposed as a mechanism to mitigate polarization in democratic processes. However, empirical evidence remains mixed, with some studies suggesting that deliberation among like-minded individuals can drive preference shifts toward extremes. We use a...

Using a new consumer survey dataset, we study the role of macroeconomic preferences for expectations and economic decisions. While household expectations are inversely related to preferences, households with the same in ation expectations can differently assess whether the level of expected in...

Policy announcements by central banks affect financial markets, but their effect on consumer beliefs is limited. This paper studies the implications of using different communication channels: established media outlets versus social media. Information on the news sources comes from our original...

This paper uses firm level data from the World Bank Enterprise surveys conducted in 2019 and from the COVID-19 follow-up surveys conducted in 2020 in ten European countries to investigate the link between having a website before the pandemic and firm survival until 2020 .The estimated effect of...

To investigate the role of gender norms in household specialisation choices, I conduct a lab experiment with real hetero-sexual couples playing a battle of the sexes game. The salience of gender norms varies across treatments: the Norm group chooses between strategies labelled as a family...

This paper uses firm level data from the World Bank Enterprise surveys conducted in 2019 in 18 European countries to investigate the link between having a website and firm characteristics. We find that firms which are present in the web are larger, older, more productive, and more often...

This paper investigates whether non-base compensation contributes to the gender pay gap. In wage decompositions, we find that lower bonus payments to women explain about 10% of the gap at the mean and at different quantiles of the unconditional wage distribution whereas the lower prevalence of...

This paper analyses the concrete post-school decision of school students whether to study or to enter the German VET system. It focuses on the investigation of individual risk preferences and the social background of individuals, and the effect on the ultimate decision to enrol in university or...

We introduce a new microsimulation model built on household transport data to study the distributional effects of carbon-based fuel taxation of private road transport in Germany. Our data includes annual mileage at the car-level, the distinction between fuel types, as well as car-specific fuel...