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.

1922 Ergebnisse, ab 1
Diskussionspapiere 1919 / 2020

Savings Goal Calendars as Soft Commitment Devices: Evidence from Small Business Owners in Uganda

This study examines the effect of a soft commitment device in the form of a savings goal calendar on savings for small business owners in Kampala, Uganda. We run a randomized controlled trial (RCT) under which the treatment group receives a calendar designed to set savings goals and to make a plan to reach this goal. The control group is given a plain calendar. We find no average effect on savings, ...

2020| Antonia Grohmann, Tabea Lakemann, Helke Seitz
Diskussionspapiere 1918 / 2020

Common Ownership in the US Pharmaceutical Industry: A Network Analysis

We investigate patterns in common ownership networks between firms that are active in the US pharmaceutical industry for the period 2004-2014. Our main findings are that “brand firms” — i.e. firms that have R&D capabilities and launch new drugs — exhibit relatively dense common ownership networks with each other that further increase significantly in density over time, whereas the network of “generic ...

2020| Albert Banal-Estanol, Melissa Newham, Jo Seldeslachts
Diskussionspapiere 1917 / 2020

Corruption and Cheating: Evidence from Rural Thailand

This study tests the prediction that perceived corruption reduces ethical behavior. Integrating a standard “cheating” experiment into a broad household survey in rural Thailand, we find clear support for this prediction: respondents who perceive corruption in state affairs are more likely to cheat and, thus, to fortify the negative consequences of corruption. Interestingly, there is a small group of ...

2020| Olaf Hübler, Melanie Koch, Lukas Menkhoff, Ulrich Schmidt
Diskussionspapiere 1916 / 2020

Pipes, Taps and Vendors: An Integrated Water Management Approach

This paper applies a microeconomic-based stylized model to identify the optimal modal split of water supply infrastructure in regions of the Global South against the background of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No. 6. We assume a linear city, with some plausible assumptions on income and willingness-to-pay, and then calculate the optimal tap density, leading in turn to an optimal modal split ...

2020| Georg Meran, Markus Siehlow, Christian von Hirschhausen
Diskussionspapiere 1915 / 2020

Foreign Exchange Intervention: A New Database

We construct a novel database of monthly foreign exchange interventions for 49 countries over up to 22 years. We build on a text classification approach that extracts information about interventions from news articles and calibrate our procedure to data about actual interventions. Our new dataset allows us to document stylized facts about the use of foreign exchange interventions for countries that ...

2020| Marcel Fratzscher, Tobias Heidland, Lukas Menkhoff, Lucio Sarno, Maik Schmeling
Diskussionspapiere 1914 / 2020

The Relationship between Financial Literacy and Financial Inclusion

About two billion people in the world do not own a financial account and there are many more who use financial services only occasionally. In the past, initiatives which address these problems of financial exclusion focused on the supply side of financial markets, in particular by increasing the branch network of banks and by offering cheap bank products. While this had the desired effect, recent ...

2020| Antonia Grohmann, Lukas Menkhoff
Diskussionspapiere 1913 / 2020

An Alternative Bootstrap for Proxy Vector Autoregressions

We propose a new bootstrap for inference for impulse responses in structural vector autoregressive models identified with an external proxy variable. Simulations show that the new bootstrap provides confidence intervals for impulse responses which often have more precise coverage than and similar length as the competing moving-block bootstrap intervals. An empirical example shows how the new bootstrap ...

2020| Martin Bruns, Helmut Lütkepohl
Diskussionspapiere 1912 / 2020

Financial Literacy and Intertemporal Arbitrage

We study the role of financial literacy for inter-temporal decision-making using an adapted version of the Convex Time Budget Protocol (Andreoni and Sprenger 2012). While we find no evidence of dynamically inconsistent preferences in the aggregate, we document substantial heterogeneity in choice-patterns and estimated parameters at the individual-level: We find that subjects with higher levels of financial ...

2020| Luis Oberrauch, Tim Kaiser
Diskussionspapiere 1911 / 2020

Machine Predictions and Human Decisions with Variation in Payoffs and Skills

Human decision-making differs due to variation in both incentives and available information. This generates substantial challenges for the evaluation of whether and how machine learning predictions can improve decision outcomes. We propose a framework that incorporates machine learning on large-scale administrative data into a choice model featuring heterogeneity in decision maker payoff functions ...

2020| Michael Allan Ribers, Hannes Ullrich
Diskussionspapiere 1910 / 2020

Transition Risks and Opportunities in Residential Mortgages

A range of studies has analysed how climate-related risks can impact financial markets, focusing on equity and corporate bond holdings. This article takes a closer look at transition risks and opportunities in residential mortgages. Mortgage loans are important from a financial perspective due to their large share in banks’ assets and their long credit lifetime, and from a climate perspective due to ...

2020| Franziska Schütze
Diskussionspapiere 1909 / 2020

Kurzarbeit and Natural Disasters: How Effective Are Short-Time Working Allowances in Avoiding Unemployment?

There is substantial evidence on the effectiveness of short-time work on reducing unemployment. However, no study looks at its role during natural disasters. This article exploits the exogenous nature of the 2013 European floods to assess if the impact depends on the quality of the short-time work mechanism across affected counties. We use regression discontinuity designs to show that unemployment ...

2020| Julio G. Fournier Gabela, Luis Sarmiento
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
1922 Ergebnisse, ab 1