TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Wolff, Guntram B. T1 - Fiscal institutions, fiscal policy and sovereign risk premia in EMU JF - Public Choice N2 - We investigate the effect of fiscal institutions such as the strength of the finance minister in the budget process and deficits on interest rate spreads of Eurozone countries. Deficits significantly increase risk premia measured by relative swap spreads. The effect of deficits is significantly lower under EMU. This effect partly results from neglecting the role of fiscal institutions. After controlling for institutional changes, fiscal policy remains a significant determinant of risk premia in EMU. Better institutions are connected with lower risk premia. Furthermore deficits matter less for risk premia in countries with better institutions. Markets acknowledge that better institutions reduce fiscal difficulties rendering the monitoring of annual developments less important. KW - Budget institutions KW - Fiscal rules KW - Sovereign risk premia KW - EMU KW - Fiscal policy Y1 - 2008 VL - 136 IS - 3-4 SP - 379 EP - 396 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Yläoutinen, Sami T1 - Political Power, Fiscal Institutions and Budgetary Outcomes in Central and Eastern Europe JF - Journal of Public Policy N2 - This paper considers the effects of fiscal governance in Central and East European countries 1998-2008. The first part makes predictions about which form of fiscal governance fits which form of government. Under multi-party coalition governments, fiscal contracts where governments make political commitments to multi-annual fiscal plans work well. In countries where two political blocks face off against one another, delegation based around a strong finance ministry should be most effective. The second part examines electoral and party systems, which affect the form of government in place. The third part documents norms, rules, and institutions in place. The final section considers the joint effects of fiscal governance on fiscal outcomes. On balance, the underlying political climate is crucial for determining what types of fiscal norms, institutions, and rules function best. The more countries diverge from their expected form of fiscal governance, the greater the increase in a country’s debt burden. KW - Budgetary procedures KW - Fiscal rules KW - Public finances Y1 - 2010 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X09990213 SN - 0143-814X N1 - Available as ejournal in your Hertie Library. Als elektronische Zeitschrift in der Hertie Bibliothek verfügbar. VL - 30 IS - 1 SP - 45 EP - 62 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Marinova, Dani M. T1 - When government fails us: trust in post-socialist civil organizations JF - Democratization N2 - The research for this article was motivated by a noticeable discrepancy between levels of participation and trust in post-socialist civil organizations. While civic participation in Central and Eastern Europe is almost nonexistent, levels of trust in post-socialist civil organizations compare favourably to those in Western Europe. The first aim of this article is to understand why citizens place relatively high trust in post-socialist civil organizations. The political context, within which civil organizations operate, reveals one explanation for the high levels of trust in civil organizations: government corruption dissuades citizens from relying on state institutions and creates a void that is filled by informal networks of association and civil organizations. Empirical evidence demonstrates that trust in civil organizations focused on socioeconomic and political development is higher among citizens who express concern about corruption in their country. The second aim of this article is to understand the discrepancy between levels of trust and civic participation. A novel interpretation of past findings suggests that civil organizations' effectiveness, professionalization, transactional capacity and orientation toward service provision may garner citizens' trust while parallel neglect of grassroots mobilization leaves civil organizations short of capitalizing on that trust. Civil organizations' limited focus on interest aggregation, mobilization and representation raises doubts as to whether observers of civil society in the region should look to these organizations as its core component. KW - Civil society KW - Nongovernmental organizations KW - Trust KW - Organizational membership KW - Post-socialist Europe Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2011.532623 SN - 1351-0347 VL - 18 IS - 1 SP - 160 EP - 183 PB - Routledge CY - London [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hofmann, Barbara A1 - Kreyenfeld, Michaela A1 - Uhlendorff, Arne T1 - Job Displacement and First Birth Over the Business Cycle JF - Demography N2 - In this article, we investigate the impact of job displacement on women’s first-birth rates as well as the variation in this effect over the business cycle. We use mass layoffs to estimate the causal effects of involuntary job loss on fertility in the short and medium term, up to five years after displacement. Our analysis is based on rich administrative data from Germany, with an observation period spanning more than 20 years. We apply inverse probability weighting (IPW) to flexibly control for the observed differences between women who were and were not displaced. To account for the differences in the composition of the women who were displaced in a downturn and the women who were displaced in an upswing, we use a double weighting estimator. Results show that the extent to which job displacement has adverse effects on fertility depends on the business cycle. The first-birth rates were much lower for women who were displaced in an economic downturn than for those who lost a job in an economic upturn. This result cannot be explained by changes in the observed characteristics of the displaced women over the business cycle. Y1 - 2017 UR - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-23234 SN - 1533-7790 SN - 0070-3370 VL - 54 IS - 3 SP - 933 EP - 959 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Anheier, Helmut K. A1 - Haber, Matthias A1 - Kayser, Mark A. ED - Anheier, Helmut K. ED - Haber, Matthias ED - Kayser, Mark A. T1 - Governance Indicators: Approaches, Progress, Promise N2 - As difficult as it might seem to define governance, it appears to be that much more difficult to measure it. Since the World Bank Institute launched the Worldwide Governance Indicators in the late 1990s, the governance indicators field has flourished and experienced significant advances in terms of methodology, data coverage and quality, and policy relevance. Other major initiatives have added to a momentum that propelled research on governance indicators seen in few other academic fields in the economic and social sciences. Given these developments and the prominence and policy relevance the field of governance indicator research has achieved, the time is ripe to take stock and ask what has been accomplished, what the shortcomings and potentials might be, and what steps present themselves as a way forward. This volume—the fifth edition in an annual series tackling different aspects of governance around the world—assesses what has been achieved, identifies strengths and weaknesses of current work, and points to issues that need to be tackled in order to advance the field, both in its academic importance as well as in its policy relevance. In short, the contributions to this volume explore the scope of existing governance indices and indicator frameworks, elaborate on current challenges in measuring and analysing governance, and consider how to overcome them. Y1 - 2018 SN - 9780198817062 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198817062.001.0001 PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kayser, Mark A. A1 - Leininger, Arndt T1 - Vintage errors: do real-time economic data improve election forecasts? JF - Research and Politics N2 - Economic performance is a key component of most election forecasts. When fitting models, however, most forecasters unwittingly assume that the actual state of the economy, a state best estimated by the multiple periodic revisions to official macroeconomic statistics, drives voter behavior. The difference in macroeconomic estimates between revised and original data vintages can be substantial, commonly over 100% (two-fold) for economic growth estimates, making the choice of which data release to use important for the predictive validity of a model. We systematically compare the predictions of four forecasting models for numerous US presidential elections using real-time and vintage data. We find that newer data are not better data for election forecasting: forecasting error increases with data revisions. This result suggests that voter perceptions of economic growth are influenced more by media reports about the economy, which are based on initial economic estimates, than by the actual state of the economy. KW - Forecasting KW - Elections KW - Economic vote KW - Real-time data KW - Media Y1 - 2015 UR - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-16321 SN - 2053-1680 VL - 2 IS - 3 SP - 1 EP - 11 PB - Sage CY - London [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Westermaier, Franz A1 - Mühlenweg, Andrea M. A1 - Morefield, Brant T1 - Parental Health and Child Behavior: Evidence from Parental Health Shocks JF - Review of Economics of the Household N2 - This study examines the importance of parental health in the development of child behavior during early childhood. Our analysis is based on child psychometric measures from a longitudinal German dataset, which tracks mothers and their newborns up to age six. We identify major changes in parental health (shocks) and control for a variety of initial characteristics of the child including prenatal conditions. The results are robust to placebo regressions of health shocks that occur after the outcomes are measured. Our findings point to negative effects of maternal health shocks on children’s emotional symptoms, conduct problems and hyperactivity. We estimate that maternal health shocks worsen outcomes by as much as 0.9 standard deviations. In contrast, paternal health seems to be less relevant to children’s behavioral skills. KW - Human capital KW - Health KW - Non-cognitive skills Y1 - 2015 SN - 1569-5239 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-015-9284-y VL - 14 IS - 3 SP - 577 EP - 598 PB - Springer US CY - Berlin [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Reuben, Ernesto A1 - Traxler, Christian A1 - van Winden, Frans T1 - Advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty JF - European Economic Review N2 - We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters׳ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections. In the advocacy treatments, voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences. We find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group. In fact, we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups, which convey new information, and uninformative advocacy groups, which do not. Overall, advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter. However, advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation. KW - Advocacy groups KW - Information transmission KW - Political convergence KW - Voting KW - Median voter Y1 - 2015 UR - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-19681 N1 - This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in European Economic Review. The final authenticated version is available online at: DOI 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2015.07.003 VL - 78 SP - 16 EP - 36 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Altmann, Steffen A1 - Traxler, Christian T1 - Nudges at the Dentist JF - European Economic Review N2 - We implement a randomized field experiment to study the impact of reminders on dental health prevention. Patients who are due for a check-up receive no reminder, a neutral reminder postcard, or reminders including additional information on the benefits of prevention. Our results document a strong impact of reminders. Within one month after receiving a reminder, the fraction of patients who make a check-up appointment more than doubles. The effect declines slightly over time, but remains economically and statistically significant. Including additional information in the reminders does not increase response rates. In fact, the neutral reminder has the strongest impact for the overall population as well as for important subgroups of patients. Finally, we document that being exposed to reminders repeatedly does neither strengthen nor weaken their effectiveness. KW - field experiments KW - reminders KW - nudges KW - memory limitations KW - prevention Y1 - 2014 UR - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-19694 N1 - This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in European Economic Review. The final authenticated version is available online at: DOI 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2014.07.007 VL - 72 SP - 19 EP - 38 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fellner, Gerlinde A1 - Sausgruber, Rupert A1 - Traxler, Christian T1 - Testing Enforcement Strategies in the Field: Threat, Moral Appeal and Social Information JF - Journal of the European Economic Association N2 - We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in compliance. Among different mailings, a threat treatment which makes a high detection risk salient has a significant deterrent effect. Neither appealing to morals nor imparting information about others’ behavior enhances compliance on aggregate. However, the information condition has a weak positive effect in municipalities where evasion is believed to be common. KW - field experiments KW - enforcement strategies KW - compliance KW - perceptions Y1 - 2013 UR - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-19704 N1 - This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of the European Economic Association. The final authenticated version is available online at: DOI 10.1111/jeea.12013| VL - 11 IS - 3 SP - 634 EP - 660 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Glöckner, Andreas A1 - Towfigh, Emanuel A1 - Traxler, Christian T1 - Development of legal expertise JF - Instructional Science N2 - In a comprehensive empirical investigation (N = 71,405) we analyzed the development of legal expertise in a critical 1-year period of academic legal training in which advanced law students start practicing to solve complex cases. We were particularly interested in the functional form of the learning curve and inter-individual differences in learning. Performance increases monotonically with the number of practice exams following a slightly concave learning curve without any considerable kinks. Considering the performance development over time, however, the curve is not monotonic and shows intermediate drops in performance. We provide evidence which suggests that these drops are due to cyclic drops in motivation. There are about equally sized marginal effects of practicing law exams in general and practicing exams in the specific area of law. However, students with high (vs. low) initial performance profit more from practicing exams within a specific area of law whereas students with low initial performance profit more from practicing exams in general. The concave increase in performance with the number of practicing exams is mainly driven by individuals with low initial performance. Those with high initial performance mainly display a linear learning trend. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for academic legal training. KW - Expertise KW - Legal decision making KW - Training KW - Learning curves Y1 - 2013 VL - 41 IS - 6 SP - 989 EP - 1007 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Towfigh, Emanuel A1 - Traxler, Christian ED - Kemmerer, et al., Alexandra T1 - Nudges polarize! T2 - Choice Architecture in Democracies: Exploring the Legitimacy of Nudging KW - Nudging Y1 - 2016 SN - 978-3-8487-2288-4 SN - 978-3-8452-6393-9 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5771/9783845263939-321 SP - 321 EP - 328 PB - Hart/Nomos ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Traxler, Christian T1 - Deterrence of economic crimes: Tax evasion T2 - Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice KW - Tax evasion KW - Economic crimes Y1 - 2014 SP - 1005 EP - 1014 PB - Springer ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Scholz, Rembrandt A1 - Kreyenfeld, Michaela T1 - The register-based census in Germany : Historical context and relevance for population research JF - Comparative Population Studies N2 - In 2011, Germany carried out its first census after a 20-year break. In light of the United Nations’ recommendations that countries initiate a population census at least every 10 years, the census was long overdue. Moreover, demographers had for some time been demanding a new enumeration that would enable them to place the calculation of demographic indicators on a reliable basis. With the 2011 census, Germany not only met the demand for a current population census, but also broke new ground by using a register-based approach. Unlike the Scandinavian countries, which have a long tradition of performing register-based data analyses, the linking of administrative data in Germany is restricted by the country’s legal framework. Thus, the 2011 census was an ambitious project. After contextualising the 2011 census historically, we discuss in this contribution the census’ relevance for generating central demographic data. Specifically, we compare the updated population estimates of the 1987 census to the results of the 2011 census in order to identify possible systematic sources of error that distort demographic indicators and analyses. KW - Demographic indicators KW - Register data KW - Census Y1 - 2016 UR - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-21340 SN - 1869-8999 VL - 41 IS - 2 SP - 175 EP - 204 ER -