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DIW Discussion Papers 1157 / 2011
This article critically examines the theoretical arguments that underlie the literature linking personality traits to economic outcomes and provides empirical evidence indicating that labour market outcomes influence personality outcomes. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we investigated the extent to which gender differences occur in the processes by which highly positive and negative ...
2011| Eileen Trzcinski, Elke Holst
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DIW Discussion Papers 1156 / 2011
Increasing utilization of renewable energy sources (RES) is a priority worldwide. Germany has been a forerunner in the deployment of RES and has ambitious goals for the future. The support and use of renewables affects the economy: It creates business opportunities in sectors producing renewable energy facilities, but also comes along with costs for supporting the deployment of renewables. This paper ...
2011| Jürgen Blazejczak, Frauke G. Braun, Dietmar Edler, Wolf-Peter Schill
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DIW Discussion Papers 1155 / 2011
Naval counter-piracy measures off Somalia have failed to change the incentives for pirates, raising calls for land-based approaches that may involve replacing piracy as a source of income. This paper evaluates the effects of piracy on the Somali economy to establish which (domestic) groups benefit from ransom monies. Given the paucity of economic data on Somalia, we evaluate province-level market data, ...
2011| Anja Shortland
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DIW Discussion Papers 1154 / 2011
Decarbonisation of energy and transport infrastructure requires significant private sector investments. The natural gas industry has demonstrated such large scale private sector infrastructure investment over the last decades, typically using long-term contractual arrangements. Are therefore institutional frameworks necessary that facilitate long-term contracting or provide regulation reassuring about ...
2011| Anne Neumann, Karsten Neuhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1153 / 2011
We suggest to use information from the state register of personal cars as an alternative indicator of economic inequality in countries with a large share of shadow economy. We illustrate our approach using the Latvian pool of personal cars. Our main finding is that the extent of household economic inequality in Latvia is much larger than officially assumed. The latest officially available estimate ...
2011| Vyacheslav Dombrovsky, Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Boriss Siliverstovs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1152 / 2011
This paper considers the question of whether changes in persistence have occurred during the long-run evolution of U.S. prices of the non-renewable energy resources crude oil, natural gas and bituminous coal. Our main contribution is to allow for a structural break when testing for a break in persistence, thus disentangling the effect of a deterministic break from that of a stochastic break and advancing ...
2011| Aleksandar Zaklan, Jan Abrell, Anne Neumann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1151 / 2011
The integration of China into the global economy is one of the most spectacular events in economic history. This paper investigates to what extent this process affects output growth and inflation in the advanced countries. A GVAR model is specified to explore interdependencies between business cycles in China and industrial countries, including the US, the euro area and Japan. For robustness, the results ...
2011| Christian Dreger, Yanqun Zhang
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DIW Discussion Papers 1150 / 2011
Using data for 14 OECD countries and 13 sectors for the period 1985-2004, this paper analyzes the significance of the linkage between channels of international knowledge spillovers and total factor productivity. We distinguish between domestic and international intra- and inter-sectoral spillover sources. Patent applications are exploited to estimate the contribution of technology transfer to industrial ...
2011| Petra Zloczysti
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DIW Discussion Papers 1149 / 2011
This paper challenges the common view that exports generally contribute more to GDP growth than a pure change in export volume, as the export-led growth hypothesis predicts. Applying panel cointegration techniques to a production function with non-export GDP as the dependent variable, we find for a sample of 45 developing countries that: (i) exports have a positive short-run effect on non-export GDP ...
2011| Christian Dreger, Dierk Herzer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1148 / 2011
This paper assesses the validity of the perception-based governance indicators used by the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) for aid allocation decisions. By conducting Explanatory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of data from 1996 to 2009, we find that although the MCA purports to measure seven distinct dimensions of governance, only two discrete underlying dimensions, the perceived 'participatory ...
2011| Martin Knoll, Petra Zloczysti
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DIW Discussion Papers 1147 / 2011
This paper provides empirical evidence on the party incumbency advantage in mayoral elections in Germany. Using a regression discontinuity design on a data set of about 25,000 elections, I estimate a causal incumbency effect of 38-40 percentage points in the probability of winning the next mayor election. The electoral advantage is larger for fulltime mayors, increasing in municipality size, independent ...
2011| Ronny Freier
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DIW Discussion Papers 1146 / 2011
Because of economic growth and a strong increase in global energy demand the demand for fossil fuels and therefore also greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, although climate policy should lead to the opposite effect. The coal market is of special relevance as coal is available in many countries and often their first choice to meet energy demand. In this paper we assess possible interactions between ...
2011| Clemens Haftendorn, Claudia Kemfert, Franziska Holz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1145 / 2011
We propose a merchant-regulatory framework to promote investment in the European natural gas network infrastructure based on a price cap over two-part tariffs. As suggested by Vogelsang (2001) and Hogan et al. (2010), a profit maximizing network operator facing this regulatory constraint will intertemporally rebalance the variable and fixed part of its two-part tariff so as to expand the congested ...
2011| Anne Neumann, Juan Rosellón, Hannes Weigt
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DIW Discussion Papers 1144 / 2011
This paper analyzes the welfare implications of buyer mergers, which are mergers between downstream firms from different markets. We focus on the interaction between the merger's effects on downstream efficiency and on buyer power in a setup where one manufacturer with a non-linear cost function sells to two locally competitive retail markets. We show that size discounts for the merged entity has no ...
2011| Özlem Bedre-Defolie, Stéphane Caprice
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DIW Discussion Papers 1143 / 2011
The aim of this paper is to study the short and long-term fertility effects of mass violent conflict on different population sub-groups. The authors pool three nationally representative demographic and health surveys from before and after the genocide in Rwanda, identifying conflict exposure of the survivors in multiple ways. The analysis finds a robust effect of genocide on fertility, with a strong ...
2011| Kati Schindler, Tilman Brück
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DIW Discussion Papers 1142 / 2011
In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one that provides the highest concordance between these two techniques. In addition, we suggest an early warning ...
2011| Christian Dreger, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1141 / 2011
The Greek government budget situation plays a central role in the debt crisis in the euro area. The debt to GDP ratio is above 150 percent, while the deficit to GDP ratio exceeds 10 percent. To re-establish the Maastricht criteria, respectively, strong consolidation measures need to be implemented, with potential adverse effects on the Greek economy, and further credit requirements. Therefore, a debt ...
2011| Ansgar Belke, Christian Dreger
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DIW Discussion Papers 1140 / 2011
How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking individuals depend, inter alia, on life expectancy and the design of the public pension system. We calculate that, ...
2011| Peter Haan, Victoria Prowse
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DIW Discussion Papers 1139 / 2011
This paper proposes new metrics for the process of price discovery on the main electronic trading platform for euro-denominated government securities. Analysing price data on daily transactions for 107 bonds over a period of twenty-seven months, we find a greater degree of price leadership of the dominant market when our measures (as opposed to the traditional price discovery metrics) are used. We ...
2011| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Alessandro Girardi
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DIW Discussion Papers 1138 / 2011
In this paper we analyse the short- and long-run relationship between employment growth, inflation and output growth in Phillips' tradition. For this purpose we apply FMOLS, DOLS, PMGE, MGE, DFE, and VECM methods to a nonstationary heterogeneous dynamic panel including annual data for 119 countries over the period 1970-2010, and also carry out multivariate Granger causality tests. The empirical results ...
2011| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Marinko Skare