Diskussionspapiere

Redaktion und HerausgeberInnen

Die WissenschaftlerInnen des DIW Berlin veröffentlichen ihre Forschungsergebnisse üblicherweise in Fachzeitschriften. Dieser Prozess kann unter Umständen mehrere Monate dauern - deshalb gibt das DIW Berlin seit 1989 die Diskussionspapiere heraus, in denen wir die Forschungsergebnisse vorab veröffentlichen. So gelangen aktuelle Forschungsergebnisse auch in die aktuelle Diskussion.

Hinweise für AutorInnen

Zur Veröffentlichung in der Reihe der DIW-Diskussionspapiere eingereicht werden können: Papiere von DIW-MitarbeiterInnen, DIW-ForschungsdirektorInnen, DIW-Research Affiliates und GastwissenschaftlerInnen, die mindestens eine Woche am DIW Berlin verbracht haben und in der Dankesfußnote dem DIW Berlin danken.
Das eingereichte Papier wird dem/der zuständigen AbteilungsleiterIn im DIW Berlin in elektronischer Form zugeschickt. Durch ein internes Referee-Verfahren wird geprüft, ob das Papier sehr gute Chancen für eine Veröffentlichung in einer referierten Zeitschrift hat. Auf der Basis eines Refereereports wird dann über die Veröffentlichung entschieden. Hat ein Papier bereits eine Veröffentlichungszusage einer referierten SSCI-Zeitschrift oder eine Einladung zu einer Re-Submission in einem sehr guten Journal, erscheint das Papier sofort ohne ein Referee-Verfahren.

1911 Ergebnisse, ab 1
Diskussionspapiere 1908 / 2020

Firm Financing and the Relative for Labor and Capital

During both the 2008 and the COVID crises, aggregate employment in Europe and the US fell despite continuing growth in the aggregate capital stock. Using more than one million firm-year observations of small and medium European firms between 2003 and 2018, this paper introduces new stylized facts on how firms’ relative demand for labor and capital evolved as their capital structure adjusted to the ...

2020| Khalid ElFayoumi
Diskussionspapiere 1907 / 2020

Better off without the Euro? A Structural VAR Assessment of European Monetary Policy

Modern OCA theory has developed different conclusions on when forming a currency union is beneficial. An important pragmatic question in this context is: Did delegating monetary policy to the ECB increase stress in the individual euro area countries? An SVAR analysis reveals that monetary stress has declined more in the euro area than in the euro areas’ doppelganger. The synthetic doppelganger is composed ...

2020| Jan Philipp Fritsche, Patrick Christian Harms
Diskussionspapiere 1906 / 2020

Exchange Rates and the Information Channel of Monetary Policy

We disentangle the effects of monetary policy announcements on real economic variables into an interest rate shock component and a central bank information shock component. We identify both components using changes in interest rate futures and in exchange rates around monetary policy announcements. While the volatility of interest rate surprises declines around the Great Recession, the volatility of ...

2020| Oliver Holtemöller, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Boreum Kwak
Diskussionspapiere 1905 / 2020

A Simple Instrument for Proxy Vector Autoregressive Analysis

A major challenge for proxy vector autoregressive analysis is the construction of a suitable instrument variable for identifying a shock of interest. We propose a simple proxy that can be constructed whenever the dating and sign of particular shocks are known. It is shown that the proxy can lead to impulse response estimates of the impact effects of the shock of interest that are nearly as efficient ...

2020| Lukas Boer, Helmut Lütkepohl
Diskussionspapiere 1904 / 2020

Local Power Markets

In current power markets, the bulk of electricity is sold wholesale and transported to consumers via long-distance transmission lines. Recently, decentralized local power markets have evolved, often as isolated networks based on solar generation. We analyze strategic pricing, investment, and welfare in local power markets. We show that local power markets with peer-to-peer trading are competitive and ...

2020| Pio Baake, Sebastian Schwenen, Christian von Hirschhausen
Diskussionspapiere 1903 / 2020

COVID-19: A Crisis of the Female Self-Employed

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the government-mandated measures to contain its spread, affected the self-employed relative to employed individuals in Germany and, secondly, to what extent the female self-employed were more strongly hit than their male counterparts. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data where respondents are asked about ...

2020| Daniel Graeber, Alexander S. Kritikos, Johannes Seebauer
Diskussionspapiere 1902 / 2020

Health of Elderly Parents, Their Children's Labor Supply, and the Role of Migrant Care Workers

We estimate the impact of parental health on adult children’s labor market outcomes. We focus on health shocks which increase care dependency abruptly. Our estimation strategy exploits the variation in the timing of shocks across treated families. Empirical results based on Austrian administrative data show a significant negative impact on labor market activities of children. This effect is more pronounced ...

2020| Wolfgang Frimmel, Martin Halla, Jörg Paetzold, Julia Schmieder
Diskussionspapiere 1901 / 2020

Government Spending Multipliers in (Un)certain Times

We estimate the dynamic effects of government spending shocks, using time-varying volatility in US data modeled through a Markov switching process. We find that the average government spending multiplier is significantly and persistently above one, driven by a crowding-in of private consumption and non-residential investment. We rationalize the results empirically through a contemporaneously countercyclical ...

2020| Jan Philipp Fritsche, Mathias Klein, Malte Rieth
Diskussionspapiere 1900 / 2020

Tuition Fees and Educational Attainment

Following a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court in 2005, more than half of Germany’s universities started charging tuition fees, which also applied to incumbent students. We exploit this unusual lack of grandfathering together with register data covering the universe of students to show that tuition fees increased degree completion among incumbent students. Investigating mechanisms, we do not ...

2020| Jan Bietenbeck, Jan Marcus, Felix Weinhardt
Diskussionspapiere 1899 / 2020

Crisis Impact on the Diversity of Financial Portfolios - Evidence from European Citizens

Since the 2008 Lehman bankruptcy, it is clearly shown that global economic and financial crises present major challenges to private households, requiring from them, a high level of shock absorption capacity. According to the old adage, “Do not put all the eggs in one basket”, resilience depends, to a large extent on financial diversification. So far, especially for Europe, little is known about whether ...

2020| Dorothea Schäfer, Michael Stöckel, Henriette Weser
Diskussionspapiere 1898 / 2020

A Duration Approach for Estimating the Marginal Renewal Cost at German Motorways

We estimate the marginal costs of road renewals as part of a social marginal cost scheme for road user charging. Within an analytical approach that mirrors the relationship between road deterioration, traffic load and road renewal, we use an accelerated failure time model for road pavement with the purpose to derive the effect from traffic increase on the length of road renewal cycles. Based on a comprehensive ...

2020| Neil Murray, Heike Link
Diskussionspapiere 1897 / 2020

Center-Based Care and Parenting Activities

We estimate effects of center-based care on parenting activities using time use data for Germany. Our estimates imply that center-based care reduces the overall time that parents spend with the enrolled child, but has only small negative effects on time spent doing activities together. Correspondingly, center-based care increases activities as a share of the time spent together with the child. The ...

2020| Jonas Jessen, C. Katharina Spieß, Sevrin Waights
Diskussionspapiere 1896 / 2020

The Impact of the Length of Schooling on the Timing of Family Formation

Individuals typically traverse several life phases before forming a family. We analyse whether changing the duration of one of these phases, the education phase, affects the timing of marriage and childbearing. For this purpose, we exploit the introduction of short school years in Germany in 1966-67, which compressed the education phase without affecting the curriculum. Based on difference-in-differences ...

2020| Josefine Koebe, Jan Marcus
Diskussionspapiere 1895 / 2020

The Effectiveness of FX Interventions: A Meta-Analysis

There is ample empirical literature centering on the effectiveness of foreign exchange intervention (FXI). Given the mix of objectives and country-heterogeneity, the general lack of consensus thus far is no surprise. We shed light on this debate by conducting the first comprehensive meta-analysis in the FXI literature, with 279 reported effects that stem from 74 distinct empirical studies. We cover ...

2020| Lucía Arango-Lozano, Lukas Menkhoff, Daniela Rodríguez-Novoa, Mauricio Villamizar-Villegas
Diskussionspapiere 1894 / 2020

Learning from Data and Network Effects: The Example of Internet Search

The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is surprisingly scarce. In this paper we document that data as an input into machine learning tasks display features that support the claim of data being a source of market power. We study how data on keywords improve the search result quality ...

2020| Maximilian Schäfer, Geza Sapi
Diskussionspapiere 1893 / 2020

Who Are the Essential and Frontline Workers?

Identifying essential and frontline workers and understanding their characteristics is useful for policymakers and researchers in targeting social insurance and safety net policies in response to the COVID-19 crisis. We develop a working definition that may inform additional research and policy discussion and provide data on the demographic and labor market composition of these workers. In a three-step ...

2020| Francine D. Blau, Josefine Koebe, Pamela A. Meyerhofer
Diskussionspapiere 1892 / 2020

Fossil Natural Gas Exit – A New Narrative for the European Energy Transformation towards Decarbonization

This paper discusses the potential role of fossil natural gas (and other gases) in the process of the energy transformation in Europe on its way to complete decarbonization. Mainstream conventional wisdom has it that natural gas, perhaps in combination with other gases, should maintain an important role in the energy mix, first, as a “bridge fuel”, and then through a gradual transition toward decarbonized ...

2020| Christian von Hirschhausen, Claudia Kemfert, Fabian Praeger
Diskussionspapiere 1891 / 2020

Inform Me When It Matters: Cost Salience, Energy Consumption, and Efficiency Investments

Effective attention to information may play a prominent role in consumer choice for energy-intensive services and it may simply be a function of receiving timely information when consumption takes place. This paper investigates whether and why the timing of utility bills leads to salience bias in heat energy consumption. In Germany, the 12-month billing period varies across buildings with a significant ...

2020| Puja Singhal
Diskussionspapiere 1890 / 2020

Airbnb and Rents: Evidence from Berlin

Cities worldwide have regulated peer-to-peer short-term rental platforms claiming that those platforms remove apartments from the long-term housing market, causing an in- crease in rents. Establishing and quantifying such a causal link is, however, challenging. We investigate two policy changes in Berlin to first assess how effective they were in regulating Airbnb, the largest online peer-to-peer short-term ...

2020| Tomaso Duso, Claus Michelsen, Maximilian Schäfer, Kevin Ducbao Tran
Diskussionspapiere 1889 / 2020

Airbnb, Hotels, and Localized Competition

The rise of online platforms has disrupted numerous traditional industries. A prime example is the short-term accommodation platform Airbnb and how it affects the hotel industry. On the one hand, consumers can profit from Airbnb due to an increased number of choices and lower prices. On the other hand, critics of the platform argue that it allows professional hosts to operate de facto hotels while ...

2020| Maximilian Schäfer, Kevin Ducbao Tran
1911 Ergebnisse, ab 1