Dear authors
I agree with the reviewers that this is an interesting and well written paper that constitutes a significant contribution to the field. I appreciate your exhaustive reponses to the reviews.

Having said this I do think that reviewer 2 has a point in requesting a more quantitative evaluation of the correlations. You have addressed this to some extent in your response, but I was not fully convinced. Among other things I was not clear what the "product moment correlation coefficient (Maddy and Brew, 1995)" is - is this just Pearson or something else? Importantly, are you applying this to the orginal or filtered data? Filtering may indeed lead to spurious correlations and bias significance levels. Perhaps adding scatter plots between the variables that show the most important correlations (without filtering) may help the reader appreciate the plausibility of the findings.

Please change the manuscript along the lines of your responses and consider my comments above.

Dear authors,
many thanks for comprehensively addressing the review comments.
I am happy to accept the paper as it is.
Best wishes
Günter Blöschl