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DIW Discussion Papers 1117 / 2011
Exploiting Tangshan 1976 - the deadliest earthquake in the 20th century - as a source of exogenous variation, we estimate the long-run effect of a historical shock on contemporary socio-economic outcomes. Cohorts born after the earthquake were not only larger, but exhibit lower school completion rates, particularly among the female today. Despite lower schooling levels, there is no evidence for adverse ...
2011| Guo Xu
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DIW Discussion Papers 1116 / 2011
This paper examines several US monthly financial time series data using fractional integration and cointegration techniques. The univariate analysis based on fractional integration aims to determine whether the series are I(1) (in which case markets might be efficient) or alternatively I(d) with d < 1, which implies mean reversion. The multivariate framework exploiting recent developments in fractional ...
2011| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1115 / 2011
This paper is the first study that analyzes the drivers of political protest using longitudinal data from a critical revolution that changed -at least temporarily- the political landscape in a transition country. We make use of a rich dataset consisting of panel data collected before and after the so called "Orange" revolution in Ukraine. Our empirical approach tackles two different -and equally interesting- ...
2011| Carlos Bozzoli, Tilman Brück
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DIW Discussion Papers 1114 / 2011
By estimating a staggered price model over the period 1980q1-2010q2, this paper documents that, after the euro changeover, Italian retailers have increased the number of price adjustments, which has translated into a higher inflation rate, with a detrimental effect on the competitiveness of the Italian economy.
2011| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Alessandro Girardi, Marco Ventura
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DIW Discussion Papers 1113 / 2011
This paper systematically investigates whether different kinds of personality characteristics influence entrepreneurial development. On the basis of a large, representative household panel survey, we examine the extent to which the Big Five traits and further personality characteristics, which are more specifically related to entrepreneurial tasks, influence entry into self-employment and survival ...
2011| Marco Caliendo, Frank M. Fossen, Alexander S. Kritikos
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DIW Discussion Papers 1112 / 2011
We use a large micro-dataset to assess the importance of intangible capital - organisation, R&D and ICT capital - for the economic performance of establishments and regions in Germany. In 2003 self-produced intangible capital accounted for more than one fifth of the total capital stock of estab-lishments. More than half of the intangible capital is R&D capital. This high proportion is mainly due to ...
2011| Kurt Geppert, Anne Neumann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1111 / 2011
The very first minimum wage in Germany was introduced in 1997 for blue-collar workers in sub-sectors of the construction industry. In the setting of a natural experiment blue-collar workers in neighboring 4-digit-industries and white-collar workers are used as control groups for differences-in-differences-in-differences estimation based on linked employer-employee data. Estimation results reveal a ...
2011| Pia Rattenhuber
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DIW Discussion Papers 1110 / 2011
Storage devices and demand control may constitute beneficial tools to optimize electricity generation with a large share of intermittent resources through inter-temporal substitution of load. We quantify the related cost reductions in a simulation model of a simplified stylized medium-voltage grid (10kV) under uncertain demand and wind output. Benders Decomposition Method is applied to create a two-stage ...
2011| Andreas Schröder, Jan Siegmeier, Murk Creusen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1109 / 2011
We study the performance of different regulatory approaches for the expansion of electricity transmission networks in the light of realistic demand patterns and fluctuating wind power. In particular, we are interested in the relative performance of a combined merchant-regulatory mechanism compared to a cost-based and a merchant-like approach. In contrast to earlier research, we explicitly include both ...
2011| Wolf-Peter Schill, Juan Rosellón, Jonas Egerer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1108 / 2011
No previous study has attempted to estimate the effect of intrauterine exposure to armed conflict, a potential source of stress, on pregnancy outcomes. Drawing on data from the 2004 Palestinian Demographic and Health Survey, we examine the relationship between fatalities caused by Israeli security forces (a measure of conflict intensity) and birth weight. Our estimates suggest that first-trimester ...
2011| Hani Mansour, Daniel I. Rees
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DIW Discussion Papers 1107 / 2011
This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However, financial time series exhibit certain stylized features such as volatility clustering. But very few studies dealing ...
2011| Ansgar Belke, Christian Gokus
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DIW Discussion Papers 1106 / 2011
In the debate on global imbalances, the euro area countries did not receive much attention so far. While the current account is on balance for the entire area, divergences between individual member states have increased since the introduction of the common currency. In this paper, the imbalances are traced to catching up and competitiveness factors using paneleconometric techniques. In line with the ...
2011| Ansgar Belke, Christian Dreger
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DIW Discussion Papers 1105 / 2011
This paper analyses the impact of violent conflict on economic growth using micro-level data from Indonesia. We compile a panel dataset at district level for the period 2002-2008, and disentangle the overall negative economic effect of violent conflict into its sectoral components. Our results reveal substantial differences across sectors, with the most detrimental impact evident in manufacturing industries ...
2011| Marc Vothknecht, Sudarno Sumarto
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DIW Discussion Papers 1104 / 2011
Good decision-making often requires people to perceive and handle a myriad of statistical correlations. Notably, optimal portfolio theory depends upon a sophisticated understanding of the correlation among financial assets. In this paper, we examine people's understanding of correlation using a sequence of portfolio-allocation problems and find it to be strongly imperfect. Our experiment uses pairs ...
2011| Erik Eyster, Georg Weizsäcker
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DIW Discussion Papers 1103 / 2011
We use a neoclassical production function to analyze the effects of knowledge spillovers via entrepreneurship on economic performance of 337 German districts. To take the spatial dependence structure of the data into account, we estimate a spatial Durbin model. We highlight the importance of the choice of the appropriate weight matrix. We find positive knowledge spillover effects via entrepreneurship ...
2011| Katharina Pijnenburg, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1102 / 2011
We construct a new, direct measure of female autonomy in household decision-making by creating an index from the principal components of a variety of household variables on which mother of a child takes decision. We then examine its impacts on her child's secondary education in Mexico and find that the children of Mexican mothers with greater autonomy in domestic decision making have higher enrolment ...
2011| Tanika Chakraborty, Prabal K. De
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DIW Discussion Papers 1101 / 2011
The study analyses the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions in Germany based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the years 2001-2008. It focuses in particular on gender segregation in the labor market, that is, on the unequal distribution of women and men across different occupations and on the effects of this inequality on earnings levels and gender wage ...
2011| Anne Busch, Elke Holst
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DIW Discussion Papers 1100 / 2011
A personal bankruptcy law that allows for a "fresh start" after bankruptcy reduces the individual risk involved in entrepreneurial activity. On the other hand, as risk shifts to creditors who recover less of their credit after a debtor's bankruptcy, lenders may charge higher interest rates or ration credit supply, which can hamper entrepreneurship. Both aspects of a more forgiving personal bankruptcy ...
2011| Frank M. Fossen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1099 / 2011
In this paper, we focus on network- and gender-specific determinants of remittances, which are often explained theoretically by way of intra-family contracts. We develop a basic formal concept that includes aspects of the transnational network and derive hypotheses from it. For our empirical investigation, we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the years 2001-2006. Our findings ...
2011| Elke Holst, Andrea Schäfer, Mechthild Schrooten
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DIW Discussion Papers 1098 / 2011
Many Colombians are confronted with the ongoing conflict that influences their decision making in everyday life, including their behavior in labor markets. This study focuses on the impact of violent conflict on self-employment, enlarging the usual determinants with a set of conflict variables. In order to estimate the effect of conflict on self-employment, we employ fixed effects estimation. Three ...
2011| Carlos Bozzoli, Tilman Brück, Nina Wald