In this paper we show that findings of an apparently instable popularity function of U.S. presidents, as reported in the previous literature, are likely the consequence of the common use of linear estimation techniques. Employing Penalized Spline Smoothing in the context of Additive Mixed Models...

One of the major challenges of empirical tax research is the identification and calculation of appropriate tax data. While there is consensus that average marginal tax rates are most suitable for studying the effects of tax policy on economic growth, due to data limitations the calculation of...

This paper provides new evidence on the outmigration behaviour of foreign-born immigrants. Our analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel covering the period 1984 to 2010. A unique feature of our paper is the use of new data from panel-drop out studies, which allows us to...

This paper makes use of data from the German socio-economic panel to gain new insights into the determinants of unemployment duration in Germany. Due to substantial differences with respect to labour market outcomes we follow a stratified approach with respect to gender and ethnicity. To analyze...

The paper investigates female wage profiles in West-Germany between 1984 and 2008 using data from the German Socio Economic Panel. The empirical study focuses on the short-run wageloss due to childcare and the long-run wage-profile in post-birth employment, respectivly. This is compared with...

Modern monetary economists argue that institutional aspects such as central bank independence and central bank conservatism play an important role for the performance of an economy. In order to be able to compare the effects of different institutions it is necessary to measure both central bank...

Most empirical studies found that monetary policy has a significant effect on house prices while stock markets remain unaffected by interest rate shocks. In this paper we conduct a more detailed analysis by studying various sub-segments of the real estate market. Em-ploying a new dataset for...

This article focuses on the role of unionized members in parliament. Unions have not been successful in increasing their monopoly power during the last decades in the US. Similarly, a recent study for Germany comes to the result that union members in the Bundestag cannot be seen as the...