infonet-economy

A core element of economic theory is the assumption of stable preferences. We test this assumption in public goods games by repeatedly eliciting cooperation preferences in a fixed subject pool over a period of five months. We find that cooperation preferences are very stable at the aggregate level, and, to a smaller degree, at the individual level, allowing us to predict future…

We investigate whether the distance between the next sports facilities and children's homes matter for their sports activities inside and outside of sports clubs. Our analysis is based on a large and informative cross-section of individual data on children and their families, the so-called German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents data. We use a…

We investigate active labor market programs in Austria. We find only small effects, if any, for most of the programs. However, the programs may have unintended consequences for women. In particular for younger women, a key effect of the programs and one reason for the male-female effect differential that is observed in the literature is to reduce or postpone pregnancies and to…

Using exceptionally rich linked administrative and survey information on German welfare recipients we investigate the health effects of transitions from welfare to employment and of assignments to welfare-to-work programmes. Applying semi-parametric propensity score matching estimators we find that employment substantially increases (mental) health. The positive effects are mainly…

This paper uses a sample of German commercial and residential property returns to estimate parameters for stable distribution functions. A quantile-based estimation methodology is used to examine distributions of income, capital growth, and total returns. There are controls for the effects of property characteristics and for possible differences between appraisal-based and…

Consistency of propensity score matching estimators hinges on the propensity score's ability to balance the distributions of covariates in the pools of treated and nontreated units. Conventional balance tests merely check for differences in covariates' means, but cannot account for differences in higher moments. For this reason, this paper proposes balance tests which test…