This paper analyses the determinants of participation in higher education in West Germany. In particular, the role of social origin as well as of expectations regarding the labour market outcome of a higher education degree and of public educational policy are examined. The estimations are based...

In the current paper, we quantify the effect that fuel prices have on vehicle prices' responsiveness to fuel economy. We apply a hedonic price model to the German automobile market by using data on detailed technical specifications of high-sales vehicles of three sequential model years. In the...

In this paper, we first recover the individual valuation of expected future fuel costs at the time of a car purchase and then explore how various factors relate to the recovered consumer undervaluation of fuel savings (on average, consumers' willingness-to-pay for a AC1 reduction in fuel costs...

This paper investigates empirically the consumer demand of environmentally relevant goods for Germany, as well as their relationship to the demand for leisure. Higher prices for energy goods like gas, electricity or fuel oil due to higher indirect taxation amongst others may have serious welfare...

The life-cycle hypothesis implies that consumption would not decline at retirement. However, several studies found relevant declines in food consumption after retirement for the United States. Others concluded that this contradiction of the life-cycle hypothesis is solved by allowing for broader...

A central motivating factor for studying price markups is their effect on consumer welfare. Reported estimates of (firm-level) price markups in the literature, however, are often focused on industry or cross-country comparisons. These treat different industries equally rather than based on how...

We assess the transmission of monetary policy shocks on oil prices using a VAR model. We identify monetary policy and financial activity shocks disentangled from demand and oil supply shocks using sign restrictions. We obtain the following main findings. (i) Monetary policy and financial...