TOBIAS KLEIN

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
TILBURG UNIVERSITY

click here for CV

 

 

 

 

 

CONTACT

Email: T.J.Klein at uvt.nl
phone: +31 13 466-8233
fax: +31 13 466-3280

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VISITORS

Room K620
Warandelaan 2
5037 AB Tilburg
The Netherlands

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

POST

Tilburg University
Department of Econometrics and OR
PO Box 90153
5000 LE Tilburg
The Netherlands

 

 

PUBLICATIONS

Filistrucchi, L., T.J. Klein, and T.O. Michielsen (forthcoming): Assessing Unilateral Merger Effects in a Two-Sided Market: An Application to the Dutch Daily Newspaper Market, Journal of Competition Law and Economics.

A shorter and less technical version with a slightly different focus will appear as: Filistrucchi, L., T.J. Klein, and T.O. Michielsen (forthcoming): Assessing Unilateral Merger Effects in the Daily Newspaper Market, in: J. Harrington, Y. Katsoulakos, and P. Regibeau (eds.): Advances in the Analysis of Competition Policy and Regulation, Edward Elgar Publishing.

Klein, T.J. (forthcoming): College Education and Wages in the U.K.: Estimating Conditional Average Structural Functions in Nonadditive Models with Binary Endogenous Variables, Empirical Economics.

Amann, R. and T.J. Klein (2012): Returns to Type or Tenure?, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 175(1), pp. 153-166.

Hullegie, P. and T.J. Klein (2011): “The effect of private health insurance on doctor visits, hospital nights and self-assessed health: Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel,” Schmollers Jahrbuch, 131(2), pp. 395-407.

Hullegie, P. and T.J. Klein (2010): The Effect of Private Health Insurance on Medical Care Utilization and Self-Assessed Health in Germany, Health Economics, 19(9), pp. 1048-1062.

Klein, T.J. (2010): Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: Instrumental Variables without Monotonicity?, Journal of Econometrics, 155(2), pp. 99-116.

Klein, T.J., C. Lambertz, G. Spagnolo, and K.O. Stahl (2009): The Actual Structure of eBays Feedback Mechanism and Early Evidence on the Effect of Recent Changes, International Journal of Electronic Business, 7(3), pp. 301-320.

 

SELECTED WORKING PAPERS

(See also http://ideas.repec.org/e/pkl28.html and my vita for work in progress.)

Nudges and Impatience: Evidence from a Large Scale Experiment
joint with Eline van der Heijden, Wieland Müller and Jan Potters
Netspar Discussion Paper 09/2011-081

We elicit time preferences of a representative sample of 1,102 Dutch individuals and also confront them with a series of incentivized investment decisions. There are two treatments which differ by the frequency at which individuals decide about the invested amount. The low frequency treatment provides a nudge by stimulating decision makers to frame a sequence of risky decisions broadly rather than narrowly. We find that impatient individuals are more “nudgeable” than patient ones as the effect of the treatment on investment levels is significantly larger within the group of high discounters than within the group of low discounters. This result is robust to controlling for various economic and demographic variables and cognitive ability. This finding is interesting from a policy perspective because impatient individuals are often the target group of nudges as impatience is associated with problematic behaviors such as low savings, little equity holdings, low investments in human capital, and an unhealthy lifestyle.

 

Ownership and Control in a Competitive Industry
joint with Heiko Karle and Konrad O. Stahl
TILEC Discussion Paper No. 2011-013

We study a differentiated product market in which an investor initially owns a controlling stake in one of two competing firms and may acquire a non-controlling or a controlling stake in a competitor, either directly using her own assets, or indirectly via the controlled firm. While industry profits are maximized within a symmetric two product monopoly, the investor attains this only in exceptional cases. Instead, she sometimes acquires a non-controlling stake. Or she invests asymmetrically rather than pursuing a full takeover if she acquires a controlling one. Generally, she invests indirectly if she only wants to affect the product market outcome, and directly if acquiring shares is profitable per se.

 

Merger Simulation in a Two-Sided Market: The Case of the Dutch Daily Newspapers
joint with Lapo Filistrucchi and Thomas Michielsen

NET Institute Working Paper 10-15

We develop a structural econometric framework that allows us to simulate the effects of mergers among two-sided platforms selling differentiated products. We apply the proposed methodology to the Dutch newspaper industry. Our structural model encompasses demands for differentiated products on both sides of the market and profit maximization by competing oligopolistic publishers who choose subscription and advertising prices, while taking the interactions between the two-sides of the market into account. We measure the sign and size of the indirect network effects between the two sides of the market and simulate the effects of a hypothetical merger on prices and welfare.

 

Retirement and Subjective Well-Being

joint with Eric Bonsang
Netspar Discussion Paper 04/2010-012

We provide an explanation for the common finding that the effect of retirement on life satisfaction is negligible. For this we use subjective well-being measures for life and domains of life satisfaction that are available in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and show that the effect of voluntary retirement on satisfaction with current household income is negative, while the effect on satisfaction with leisure is positive. At the same time, the effect on health satisfaction is positive but small. Following the life domain approach we then argue that these effects offset each other for an average individual and that therefore the overall effect is negligible. Furthermore, we show that it is important to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary retirement. The effect of involuntary retirement is negative because the adverse effect on satisfaction with household income is bigger, the favorable effect on satisfaction with leisure is smaller, and the effect on satisfaction with health is negative rather than positive. These results turn out to be robust to using different identification strategies such as fixed effects and first differences estimation, as well as instrumental variables estimation using eligibility ages and plant closures as instruments for voluntary and involuntary retirement, respectively.

 

MISC

Structural Econometrics Group in Tilburg

 

 

© Tobias Klein 2011