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Diskussionspapiere 2098 / 2024
We provide novel evidence about the incentive and welfare effects of an increase in the generosity of disability benefits. Importantly, a unique policy variation in Germany allows us to isolate the income effect of a change in benefit generosity. We leverage this quasi-experimental policy variation using an RD design to estimate the effect of increasing disability benefits on employment, earnings, ...
2024| Sebastian Becker, Annica Gehlen, Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan
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Diskussionspapiere 2097 / 2024
Theory suggests that corporate and sovereign bonds are fundamentally different, also because sovereign debt has no bankruptcy mechanism and is hard to enforce. We show empirically that the two assets are more similar than you think, at least when it comes to high-yield bonds over the past 20 years. Based on rich new data we compare risky US corporate bonds (“junk” bonds) to risky emerging market sovereign ...
2024| Gita Gopinath, Josefin Meyer, Carmen Reinhart, Christoph Trebesch
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Diskussionspapiere 2096 / 2024
The price for institutional long-term care is a central determinant of the demand for formal and informal long-term care. In this paper, we show how macroeconomic conditions affect these prices. The analysis is based on administrative data that contains rich information on the universe of nursing homes and ambulatory care services and about all recipients of long-term care benefits in Germany. For ...
2024| Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Mia Teschner
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Diskussionspapiere 2095 / 2024
The shocks in structural vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis are typically assumed to be instantaneously uncorrelated. This condition may easily be violated in proxy VAR models if more than one shock is identified by a proxy variable. Correlated shocks may be obtained even if the proxies are uncorrelated and satisfy the usual relevance and exogeneity conditions individually. Examples from the recent ...
2024| Martin Bruns, Helmut Lütkepohl, James McNeil
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Diskussionspapiere 2094 / 2024
Urban areas confront a chronic shortage of housing, especially in the low-rent segment. This precarious situation is further exacerbated by major challenges, like the destruction of housing by wars and natural catastrophes, rapid increase of demand, or pandemics cutting incomes. In response, the authorities implement rent control that slows rent increases or even freezes rents. Rent control is ubiquitous, ...
2024| Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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Diskussionspapiere 2093 / 2024
This paper investigates the perspectives of stakeholder groups in the plastic and steel value chains on transitioning toward a circular economy (CE). Through semistructured interviews with 31 business stakeholders, we analyze business strategies, key factors, challenges and opportunities, as well as coordination and regulatory needs for a successful industry-wide CE transition. Our findings highlight ...
2024| Xi Sun, Sophie M. Behr, Merve Kücük
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Diskussionspapiere 2092 / 2024
Public support systems and private investments in renewable energy are increasingly existing side-by-side and are both emphasized in policy proposals on the European and national levels. This paper assesses the interaction between the two approaches with respect to cream-skimming, i.e., the potential for low-cost projects to sign private contracts that increase the costs of publicly supported renewable ...
2024| Mats Kröger
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Diskussionspapiere 2091 / 2024
Tracking online user behavior is essential for targeted advertising and is at the heart of the business model of major online platforms. We analyze tracker-specific web browsing data to show how the prediction quality of consumer profiles varies with data size and scope. We find decreasing returns to the number of observed users and tracked websites. However, prediction quality increases considerably ...
2024| Hannes Ullrich, Jonas Hannane, Christian Peukert, Luis Aguiar, Tomaso Duso
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Diskussionspapiere 2090 / 2024
We discuss the main Theories of Harm in EU merger control and their evolution since the 1990s. We present stylised facts and trends using data extracted from EU merger decisions by natural language processing tools. EU merger policy has adapted over time, both in terms of legislation and theories of harm, as well as in terms of the investigative tools and evidence used. The introduction of the new ...
2024| Tomaso Duso, Lea Bernhardt, Joanna Piechucka
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Diskussionspapiere 2089 / 2024
This paper first shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the European Central Bank (ECB) can influence global energy prices. Second, through Lucas critique-robust counterfactual analysis, we uncover that the ECB’s ability to affect fast-moving energy prices plays an important role in the transmission of monetary policy. Third, we empirically document that, to optimally fulfill its primary mandate, ...
2024| Gökhan Ider, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Frederik Kurcz, Ben Schumann
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Diskussionspapiere 2088 / 2024
This paper analyzes a merger of large manufacturers with divestiture in the French coffee market. In contrast to previous approaches used to study the effects of upstream divestitures on prices and welfare, we model the vertical market structure. First, our results show that the standard policy recommendation to require divestiture to small recipient firms may not hold when asymmetric bargaining power ...
2024| Yann Delaprez, Morgane Guignard
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Diskussionspapiere 2087 / 2024
Freelancers face cold-start problems in online labor markets: getting hired is very difficult without ratings, while obtaining a rating is impossible unless already having been hired. According to economic theory and empirical evidence, advertising can serve as a signal of product quality for experience goods. As such, advertising might help skilled new freelancers without reputation on a platform ...
2024| Jonas Hannane
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Diskussionspapiere 2086 / 2024
This paper analyses the pass-through rates and their determinants of the temporary German fuel discount in 2022 at its start and its termination. Based on a unique dataset of fuel station characteristics and prices, we employ a Regression Discontinuity in Time (RDiT) methodology to estimate heterogeneous pass-through rates. Our main contribution is to identify the impact of horizontal and vertical ...
2024| Frederik von Waldow, Heike Link
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Diskussionspapiere 2085 / 2024
This paper investigates the heterogeneous responses of exporters to policy reforms undertaken by the People’s Bank of China to internationalize the Renminbi (RMB). Using detailed customs data from France for the initial years of these reforms (2011-2017), it documents several novel stylized facts on RMB adoption, highlighting both the growth and extreme skewness in RMB’s uptake across firms and varieties. ...
2024| Sonali Chowdhry
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Diskussionspapiere 2084 / 2024
Exploiting the heteroscedasticity of the changes in short-term and long-term interest rates and exchange rates around the FOMC announcement, we identify three structural monetary policy shocks. We eliminate the predictable part of the shocks and study their effects on financial variables and macro variables. The first shock resembles a conventional monetary policy shock, and the second resembles an ...
2024| Oliver Holtemöller, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Boreum Kwak
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Diskussionspapiere 2083 / 2024
A plethora of sustainable finance taxonomies are emerging worldwide to support shifting trillions for climate action. Employing a qualitative research approach, we use document analysis to assess 26 sustainable finance taxonomy frameworks worldwide that are in the developing phase or have been published and/or adopted. Based on literature and data we build a transition score (TS) to evaluate the framework’s ...
2024| Catherine Marchewitz, Fernanda Ballesteros, Franziska Schütze, Nesrine Hadj Arab
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Diskussionspapiere 2082 / 2024
The transition of the steel sector to carbon neutrality requires significant investment. In this study, we aim to better understand the scale of investment required for a transition to hydrogen-based steelmaking and the ability of listed steelmakers to finance this investment. First, we analyze how capital expenditures are estimated in the academic literature and compare them with reported investment ...
2024| Alexandra Hüttel, Judith Lehner
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Diskussionspapiere 2081 / 2024
We consider structural vector autoregressions identified through stochastic volatility. Our focus is on whether a particular structural shock is identified by heteroskedasticity without the need to impose any sign or exclusion restrictions. Three contributions emerge from our exercise: (i) a set of conditions under which the matrix containing structural parameters is partially or globally unique; (ii) ...
2024| Helmut Lütkepohl, Fei Shang, Luis Uzeda, Tomasz Woźniak
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Diskussionspapiere 2080 / 2024
Business cycle models often abstract from persistent household heterogeneity, despite its potentially significant implications for macroeconomic fluctuations and policy. We show empirically that the likelihood of being persistently financially constrained decreases with cognitive skills and increases with overconfidence thereon. Guided by this and other micro evidence, we add persistent heterogeneity ...
2024| Oliver Pfäuti, Fabian Seyrich, Jonathan Zinman
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Diskussionspapiere 2079 / 2024
We examine how the gender of business-owners is related to the wages paid to female relative to male employees working in their firms. Using Finnish register data and employing firm fixed effects, we find that the gender pay gap is – starting from a gender pay gap of 11 to 12 percent - two to three percentage-points lower for hourly wages in female-owned firms than in maleowned firms. Results are robust ...
2024| Alexander S. Kritikos, Mika Maliranta, Veera Nippala, Satu Nurmi