With the closure of the final six nuclear power plants, the commercial use of nuclear energy for electricity generation in Germany will come to an end in 2022. Due to the German power system's sufficient capacities—in 2020, the sector exported 20 terawatt hours (TWh), or about four percent of its electricity production—and its integration into the European electricity system, there is no reason to ...
2021| Mario Kendziorski, Claudia Kemfert, Fabian Präger, Christian von Hirschhausen, Robin Sogalla, Björn Steigerwald, Ben Wealer, Richard Weinhold, Christoph Weyhing
This study is the first to investigate the interdependence of income inequality and business cycles in Germany over the past 40 years. These fluctuations in income inequality are important because they are decisive for designing effective and targeted structural redistributive and stabilization measures. The results of this study show that income inequality in Germany fluctuates with the business cycle ...
2021| Geraldine Dany-Knedlik, Alexander Kriwoluzky
The poor have a significantly shorter life expectancy than the wealthy. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel, this Weekly Report shows that poorer people become in need of care earlier in life and more often. In addition, blue-collar workers have a higher risk of requiring care than civil servants, as do people with high job strain compared to those with low job strain. The risk of dependence on ...
2021| Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Hannes Kröger, Maximilian Schaller
To reach the climate targets, the course towards a climate-neutral society must be set now. However, the current monitoring instruments in the Climate Change Act do not provide sufficient information to policymakers and society on the effectiveness of policy instruments and programs, as they focus exclusively on greenhouse gas reduction targets, which are subject to uncertainty. Moreover, they only ...
Headline inflation in the euro area jumped to more than three percent in the summer after years of relatively low inflation rates well below the target of close to but below two percent set by the ECB until July 2021. One of the main reasons for the rise in inflation is the increase in energy prices since the beginning of 2021. However, there are further indications that inflation in the euro area ...
Introduced 20 years ago as a part of the 2001 pension reform, the Riester pension is meant to function as an essential component of the German pension system with the aim of compensating for decreasing public pensions. However, data collected by the SOEP show that this objective has not yet been achieved. For ten years, use of the Riester pension plan has been stagnating at around 25 percent of the ...
2021| Johannes Geyer, Markus M. Grabka, Peter Haan
Mallorca is the most popular foreign travel destination for German tourists, with almost five million flying to the Balearic island every year. However, the coronavirus pandemic brought passenger air traffic to a virtual standstill in March 2020. Flights to Mallorca resumed in June 2020, but the seat offerings were only between ten and 86 percent of the 2019 level depending on the week. This Weekly ...
2021| Albert Banal Estañol, Wolfgang Grimme, Sven Maertens, Jo Seldeslachts, Christina Stadler
The OECD recommends its member countries implement national strategies for financial education. Many other countries, such as China and India, also have such strategies, whereas Germany does not. The strongest reason for rejecting such a strategy is the supposition that financial education interventions are ineffective. Using all available randomized experimental studies, this study investigates and ...
The German economy is taking longer than expected to overcome the pandemic: It is likely to increase by only 2.1 percent in 2021 and capacities remain markedly underutilized. In addition, global supply bottlenecks are affecting German industry, resulting in stalled domestic production despite high demand. Following a profitable summer due to low case numbers and progress in the vaccination campaign, ...
2021| Marius Clemens, Simon Junker, Laura Pagenhardt
Recently, the coronavirus pandemic has caused economic developments in major economies to drift apart: While infection rates were declining and production was experiencing strong growth in places such as Europe and the United States in the second quarter of 2021, emerging economies were experiencing strict economic restrictions due to high case numbers. In some of these countries, the economy declined. ...
2021| Guido Baldi, Geraldine Dany-Knedlik, Hella Engerer, Frederik Kurcz
The mandate of the European Central Bank’s monetary policy is to ensure price stability. Interest rate changes by the ECB affect labor costs and the value added of firms. If both dimensions are not equally affected, monetary policy has a distributive effect between workers and shareholders. Balance sheet data from over two million companies in the euro area show that the labor costs in labor-intensive ...