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.

1889 Ergebnisse, ab 1
Diskussionspapiere 1886 / 2020

Is Substitutability the New Efficiency? Endogenous Investment in the Elasticity of Substitution between Clean and Dirty Energy

When analyzing potential ways to counter climate change, standard models of green growth abstract from investment in substitutability between “clean” and “dirty” energy inputs. Instead, they rely on the assumption that efficiency with respect to fossil fuels can be increased perpetually. However, this is not in line with observed firm investment behavior and the limits to efficiency imposed by thermodynamic ...

2020| Fabian Stöckl
Diskussionspapiere 1885 / 2020

Substituting Clean for Dirty Energy: A Bottom-Up Ananlysis

We fit CES and VES production functions to data from a numerical bottom-up optimization model of electricity supply with clean and dirty inputs. This approach allows for studying high shares of clean energy not observable today and for isolating mechanisms that impact the elasticity of substitution between clean and dirty energy. Central results show that (i) dirty inputs are not essential for production. ...

2020| Fabian Stöckl, Alexander Zerrahn
Diskussionspapiere 1884 / 2020

Repayment under Flexible Loan Contracts: Evidence from Tanzania

We study repayment and delinquency in an innovative loan contract that offers borrowers a wide range of flexibility. Using a large administrative dataset, we perform unsupervised pattern analysis to study how borrowers repay within the framework of this loan. We identify eight clusters that can be grouped into three distinct repayment types. We show that borrowers with fluctuating incomes and limited ...

2020| Antonia Grohmann, Steffen Herbold, Friederike Lenel
Diskussionspapiere 1883 / 2020

Nuclear Power as a System Good: Organizational Models for Production along the Value-Added Chain

Due to its technical complexity, the co-production of electricity generation and nuclear weapons, and its high fixed costs, nuclear power is a particularly complex commodity, which poses unusual challenges for state economic (or industrial, defense, innovation etc.) policy. As in other sectors, the question arises here, too, of an adequate division of private and public responsibilities, in other words ...

2020| Ben Wealer, Christian von Hirschhausen
Diskussionspapiere 1882 / 2020

Fertility as a Driver of Maternal Employment

Based on findings from high-income countries, typically economists hypothesize that having more children unambiguously decreases the time mothers spend in the labor mar- ket. Few studies on lower-income countries, in which low household wealth, informal child care, and informal employment opportunities prevail, find mixed results. Using Mexican census data, I find a positive effect of an instrument-induced ...

2020| Julia Schmieder
Diskussionspapiere 1881 / 2020

Sin Taxes and Self-Control

“Sin taxes” are high on the political agenda in the global fight against obesity. Ac- cording to theory, they are welfare improving if consumers with low self-control are at least as price responsive as consumers with high self-control, even in the absence of ex- ternalities. In this paper, we investigate if consumers with low and high self-control react differently to sin tax variation. For identification, ...

2020| Renke Schmacker, Sinne Smed
Diskussionspapiere 1880 / 2020

The U.S. Coal Sector between Shale Gas and Renewables: Last Resort Coal Exports?

Coal consumption and production have sharply declined in recent years in the U.S., despite political support. Reasons are mostly unfavorable economic conditions for coal, including competition from natural gas and renewables in the power sector, as well as an aging coal- fired power plant fleet. The U.S. Energy Information Administration as well as most models of North American energy markets depict ...

2020| Christian Hauenstein, Franziska Holz
Diskussionspapiere 1879 / 2020

I Am Innocent: Hourly Variations in Air Pollution and Crime Behavior

I posit that hourly changes in air pollution affect criminality through two distinct pathways, via physiological effects on the criminal and by changes in the tightness of the market for criminal activities. To disentangle individual from market effects, I develop a behavioral model of the individual decision to transgress and a model of search-and-matching frictions between criminals and crime opportunities. ...

2020| Luis Sarmiento
Diskussionspapiere 1878 / 2020

Waiting for My Sentence: Air Pollution and the Productivity of Court Rulings

I assert that air pollution from nitrogen oxides affects the productivity of employees in Mexican court hearings. This is the first article analyzing this connection and the first to disentangle work-breaks from the productivity of white-collar workers. I merge hourly pollution with granular hearing data under the assumption that the length of the hearing approximates productivity and identify causality ...

2020| Luis Sarmiento
Diskussionspapiere 1877 / 2020

Make Sure the Kids are OK: Indirect Effects of Ground-Level Ozone on Well-Being

This paper uses a panel of German individuals and highly granular pollution data to test if air pollution affects adults’ well-being indirectly through the health of their children. Results show that ozone decreases the well-being of individuals with children while not affecting persons without kids. We confirm the same effect for fine particulate matter and sulfur dioxide. Concerning the mechanism, ...

2020| Julia Rechlitz, Luis Sarmiento, Aleksandar Zaklan
Diskussionspapiere 1876 / 2020

Heteroskedastic Proxy Vector Autoregressions

In proxy vector autoregressive models, the structural shocks of interest are identified by an instrument. Although heteroskedasticity is occasionally allowed for, it is typically taken for granted that the impact effects of the structural shocks are time-invariant despite the change in their variances. We develop a test for this implicit assumption and present evidence that the assumption of time-invariant ...

2020| Helmut Lütkepohl, Thore Schlaak
Diskussionspapiere 1875 / 2020

The Impact of Carbon Disclosure Mandates on Emissions and Financial Operating Performance

We examine whether a disclosure mandate for greenhouse gas emissions creates stakeholder pressure for firms to subsequently reduce their emissions. For UK-incorporated listed firms such a mandate was adopted in 2013. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that firms affected by the mandate reduced their emissions – depending on the specification – by an incremental 14-18% relative to a control ...

2020| Benedikt Downar, Jürgen Ernstberger, Stefan Reichelstein, Sebastian Schwenen, Aleksandar Zaklan
Diskussionspapiere 1874 / 2020

Distributional Effects of the COVID-19 Lockdown

A two-sector incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents can be used to study the distributional effects of the COVID-19 lockdown. While negative aggregate welfare effects of the lockdown are unavoidable, the size of aggregate welfare effects as well as the distribution of the welfare effects across agents turn out to depend on the specific economic environment of the affected economy as well ...

2020| Marius Clemens, Maik Heinemann
Diskussionspapiere 1873 / 2020

The Macroeconomic Effects of a European Deposit (Re-) Insurance Scheme

While the first two pillars of the European Banking Union have been implemented, a European deposit insurance scheme (EDIS) is still not in place. To facilitate its introduction, recent proposals argue in favor of a reinsurance scheme. In this paper, we use a regime-switching open-economy DSGE model with bank default and bank-government linkages to assess the relative efficiency of such a scheme. We ...

2020| Marius Clemens, Stefan Gebauer, Tobias König
Diskussionspapiere 1872 / 2020

Active, or Passive? Revisiting the Role of Fiscal Policy in the Great Inflation

We reexamine whether pre-Volcker U.S. fiscal policy was active or passive. To do so, we estimate a DSGE model with monetary and fiscal policy interactions employing a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm (SMC) for posterior evaluation. Unlike existing studies, we do not have to treat each policy regime as distinct, separately estimated, models. Rather, SMC enables us to estimate the DSGE model over its entire ...

2020| Stephanie Ettmeier, Alexander Kriwoluzky
Diskussionspapiere 1871 / 2020

Structural Vector Autoregressive Models with more Shocks than Variables Identified via Heteroskedasticity

In conventional structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models it is assumed that there are at most as many structural shocks as there are variables in the model. It is pointed out that heteroskedasticity can be used to identify more shocks than variables. However, even if there is heteroskedasticity, the number of shocks that can be identified is limited. A number of results are provided that allow ...

2020| Helmut Lütkepohl
Diskussionspapiere 1870 / 2020

Difference-in-Differences to Identify Causal Effects of COVID-19 Policies

Policymakers have implemented a wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions to fight the spread of COVID-19. Variation in policies across jurisdictions and over time strongly suggests a difference-in-differences (DD) research design to estimate causal effects of counter-COVID measures. We discuss threats to the validity of these DD designs and make recommendations about how researchers can avoid ...

2020| Andrew Goodman-Bacon, Jan Marcus
Diskussionspapiere 1869 / 2020

Institutional Diversity in Domestic Banking Sectors and Bank Stability: A Cross-Country Study

This paper analyzes the causal relationship between institutional diversity in domestic banking sectors and bank stability. We use a large bank- and country-level unbalanced panel data set covering the EU member states’ banking sectors between 1998 and 2014. Constructing two distinct indicators for measuring institutional diversity, we find that a high degree of institutional diversity in the domestic ...

2020| Christopher F. Baum, Caterina Forti Grazzini, Dorothea Schäfer
Diskussionspapiere 1868 / 2020

Knowledge-Based Capital and Productivity Divergence

Understanding the causes of the slowdown in aggregate productivity growth is key to maintaining the competitiveness of advanced economies and ensuring long-term economic prosperity. This paper is the first to provide evidence that investment in Knowledge-Based Capital (KBC), despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the ...

2020| Marie Le Mouel, Alexander Schiersch
Diskussionspapiere 1867 / 2020

Way Off: The Effect of Minimum Distance Regulation on the Deployment of Wind Power

Several countries and regions have introduced mandatory minimum distances of wind turbines to nearby residential areas, in order to increase public acceptance of wind power. Germany’s largest federal state Bavaria introduced such separation distances of ten times the height of new wind turbines in 2014. Here, we provide a novel monthly district-level dataset of construction permits for wind turbines ...

2020| Jan Stede, Nils May
1889 Ergebnisse, ab 1