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The Effect of Social Comparison on Debt Taking: Experimental Evidence

A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we disentangle two mechanisms by performing a lab experiment designed to study the effects of social image concerns and peer information on consumption choices financed through debt taking. We find that ...

Unsupervised Methods: Clustering Methods

The Effects of Shortening Potential Benefit Duration: Evidence from Regional Cut-offs and a Policy Reform

We quantify labour market effects of changes in the potential benefit duration (PBD) in Poland. Individual workers' PBD depends on the county unemployment rate relative to the national average---12 months of PBD above a cut-off of 125 per cent and 6 months below. This cut-off shifted from 125 to 150 per cent in a 2009 reform. We utilize (i) the natural experiment of the reform and (ii) the...

The Implication of the Paris Targets for the Middle East through Different Cooperation Options

The core of the 36th round of the Energy Modeling Forum project shows that it is more likely that major fossil-fuel exporters, such as the Middle East, are highly affected because of the decrease in fossil-fuel extractions required for the worldwide fulfillment of the Paris agreement. We employ a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model of global trade and energy to examine the ...

How Can Solar Geoengineering and Mitigation Be Combined under Climate Targets?

So far, scientific analyses have mainly focused on the pros and cons of solar geoengineering or solar radiation management (SRM) as a climate policy option in mere isolation. Here, we put SRM into the context of mitigation by a strictly temperature-target-based approach. As the main innovation, we present a scheme that extends the applicability regime of temperature targets from mitigation-only to ...

A Scheme for Jointly Trading off Costs and Risks of Solar Radiation Management and Mitigation under Long-Tailed Climate Sensitivity Probability Density Distributions

Side effects of “solar-radiation management” (SRM) might be perceived as an important metric when society decides on implementing SRM as a climate policy option to alleviate anthropogenic global warming. We generalize cost-risk analysis that originally trades off expected welfare loss from climate policy costs and risks from transgressing climate targets to also include risks from applying SRM. In ...

Face Masks Increase Compliance with Physical Distancing Recommendations during the COVID‑19 Pandemic

Governments across the world have implemented restrictive policies to slow the spread of COVID-19. Recommended face mask use has been a controversially discussed policy, among others, due to potential adverse effects on physical distancing. Using a randomized field experiment (N = 300), we show that individuals kept a significantly larger distance from someone wearing a face mask than from an unmasked ...

The Assessment of Substitution through Event Studies: An Application to Supply-Side Substitution in Berlin’s Rental Market

Chimpanzee and human risk preferences show key similarities

Risk preference impacts how people make key life decisions related to health, wealth, and wellbeing. Yet the evolutionary roots of human risk taking behavior remain poorly understood. I will present two studies on risk preferences in chimpanzees, one of our closest living relatives.In the first study, we investigated whether chimpanzees (N=13) differentiate between social...

Destination-Language Acquisition of Recently Arrived Immigrants: Do Refugees Differ from Other Immigrants?

Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden Muster des Spracherwerbs von Neuzuwanderern beschrieben, welche in jüngerer Zeit nach Deutschland gekommen sind. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Vergleich syrischer Geflüchteter mit Migranten aus Italien, Polen und der Türkei, die als Arbeitsmigranten, im Zuge der Familienzusammenführung oder für Bildungszwecke eingewandert sind. Die theoretischen Überlegungen beruhen auf ...