Volume 228, Issue 1

This paper uses microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) to analyse the importance of precautionary saving under income uncertainty. In a cross-section of households, wealth in 2002 is regressed on alternative measures of income uncertainty. In addition to the usual controls, risk aversion is also taken into account. When using net financial wealth, precautionary saving is statistically significant and economically quite important. Precautionary net financial wealth is estimated to make up, on average, around 20% of total aggregate net financial wealth. Unlike net financial wealth, housing wealth is not used as a buffer stock against income uncertainty, the most likely reason being its illiquidity in Germany. Not controlling for risk aversion leads to an overestimation of precautionary wealth. This result contradicts the findings of Fuchs-Schündeln and Schündeln (2005) who suggest that, owing to self-selection, not controlling for risk aversion results in a significant reduction in aggregate precautionary wealth holdings.

This paper examines the distributional effects of public higher education financing in a lifetime perspective. The benefits that university graduates obtain in terms of their tertiary education are compared to the graduates’ education-related (tax) burden. To calculate the education-related tax burden, we resort to the proportionality approach and use data from the Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) as well as from the Sample Survey of Income and Expenditure (EVS). We show that graduates benefit from positive net effects of public higher education subsidies because they do not pay back the costs of their tertiary education by their corresponding tax payments. We observe especially high net effects for health professionals, and especially low net effects for university graduates in law, economics, and social sciences. Compared to earlier studies, the absolute net effects have even increased for graduates. Based on the observed net effects we compute a differentiated system of tuition fees that take into account the varying net effects for the various university types and fields of study.

This paper analyses price elasticities in the Austrian market for mobile telecommunications services using data on firm specific tariffs in the period between January 1998 and March 2002. As a novelty compared to existing studies dynamic panel data regressions are used to estimate short-run and long-run demand elasticities for business customers and for private consumers with both postpaid contracts and prepaid cards. We find that business customers have a higher elasticity of demand than private consumers, where postpaid customers tend to have a higher demand elasticity than prepaid customers. Also demand is as expected more elastic in the long run. In addition, the paper also provides estimates for firm-specific demand elasticities which range from -0.47 to -1.1.

Statements emphasizing the major contribution of the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) for net job creation are quite frequent. Concerning the current definition of SMEs provided by the European Commission (EC), this paper makes a first attempt to approximate SMEs’ contribution to net employment change based on the IAB-Establishment Panel Data over the years 1998 to 2005 for the whole private economy. Due to sufficient data, independent one-plant firms with less than 250 employees may approximate the group of SMEs according at best. Comparisons with the firm-level Amadeus database validate the suitability of the IAB-establishment panel data for calculation of the SMEs’ employment share, as long as one controls for the establishments’ independence status. The employment share lies about fifty percent. As a matter of fact, the employment share of affiliated SMEs increases over time. Furthermore, independent small plants do not show higher net employment change rates than neither affiliated plants nor middle-sized and large plants. The results reinforce once again the impression that empirical evidence for the assumed superiority of SMEs, is very weak. Further research should mention the role of ownership and firms venturing on the level of firm as well as for the economy at all in more detail.

This paper examines changes of the (West) German business cycle from 1958 to 2004. It starts with a multivariate linear discriminant analysis (LDA) based decomposition of the cycle into 4 phases (upswing, upper turning point, downswing, lower turning point). After examining inter-cyclical changes of the cycle, i.e. changes of the weights of the 12 macroeconomic variables employed for classification, the question of intra-cyclical changes is addressed. This is done by using DLDA, a new dynamic variant of LDA which exploits the time series character of the data used to analyse changes of the multivariate structure of the cycle. The DLDA results exemplify that the transition from one to the next phase is much smoother and more continuous than might be expected. Within the sample examined these movements vary as well as the weights attributed to the classifying variables. In a methodological perspective DLDA turns out to be a promising broadening of classification methods.

As a result of fundamental changes in marriage behaviour and the typical division of labour between married spouses, the traditional form of providing survivor benefits within public pension schemes could now be seen as inequitable. Since these non-contributory benefits usually substitute for individual pension entitlements based on the surviving spouse’s own contributions, they can also lead to incentive effects that appear to be far from optimal. In particular, they may weaken work incentives for married women with some degree of labour-force attachment. The present paper highlights this problem referring to institutional details and empirical results related to Germany and shows how it could be resolved by jointly annuitizing a given couple’s pension entitlements. Problems of transition, with the potential for a Pareto-improvement, are neglected.